If your point is that both parties are bought, that’s close to the truth, but at least three of the leading candidates on the Dem side are funded by small repeat donations.

Regulation of banks? The Glass-Steagall Act was a pretty good regulation of banks that served us well from the New Deal to when it was repealed just before the Great Recession. Coincidence?

The other major New Deal innovation in bank regulation was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which in spite of the title is funded by assessments on the banks and contains capital reserve requirements. That works fine for commercial banks — investment banks, not so much. So the repeal of Glass-Steagall allowed the re-emergence of cascading bank failures but depositors were still protected by the FDIC.

You speak of bank regulation as if the fight is over and the people lost. Selling that narrative is likely to result in it coming true.

I won’t bore you with the theory that Congress effectively “declares” some wars lawful by ratification of treaties that allow or require war under specified circumstances — it’s controversial and the SCOTUS loves to declare treaties “non-self-executing” — but the only thing that keeps Congress from controlling use of military force is the cowardice of Congress. It’s not that they don’t want to vote this way or that way — they don’t want to vote at all, because of the political pitfalls.

Structural flaws can’t be corrected by the voters — cowardice can.

I think you mistake imperialism as an economic/governmental theory for capture of the government by corporate interests. That could be fixed by solving the Citizens United problem, a fix that would not be available if the US was imperialist in the classic sense.

The only institutions that have staved off a Trump autocracy are a free press and an independent judiciary — and Trump has attacked both. I’m not sure how joining Trump’s attack on the press helps.