[American biased post, because that’s what I know and where I am]
Been screaming that capitalism is not the problem you are experiencing. Monopolies, or more to the point, cartels, have exploded in scope over the past 40-years. Think of a company you hate, a company that’s fucking you over, a company that’s fucking us ALL over. Bet they fit the bill.
Hate your job at Lowe’s? Go to Home Depot! wait… There’s a great family-owned, local hardware store, but I can’t afford to shop there.
Walgreens piss you off? Just go to CVS! well damn… New local pharmacy chain is really nice! They can’t take my insurance.
If you’re under 40, or maybe even under 50, I cannot relate how alien this all is, the words fail me. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, it’s easy to think it was always like this. Oh hell no it was not.
Along with allowing corporations unlimited political “speech”, i.e. campaign contributions, the proliferation of cartels will go down in history as America’s failing point. (Basically the same thing?)
News like the current entertainment mergers didn’t fucking happen. And here on lemmy we’re talking, with a straight face, about the ups and downs of the Netflix/Warner Bros./HBO merger. And if you’ll remember, Warner Bros./Time Warner/AOL was the largest merger in US history!
Depends on your definition of funneling money to the top. You need a decentralized economic system designed not to behave like late stage capitalism.
One example of this is Parecon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
Honestly though, most of our problems are not driven by our economic system so much as our culture. You have to face that just about everyone worships greed whether they like to admit it or not.
In the US it is extremely pronounced and we even have idolized phrases about it like “fuck you money”. Where you have enough money that you can do whatever you want and you no longer have to follow the rules.
There is obvious a problem with our culture, but it is not just the US. Fascism is pretty much everywhere and even the most progressive countries still have huge wealth gaps that are always slowly widening.
Democracies cannot exist with large wealth gaps unless the wealth is aggressively kept out of politics. This is extremely hard and that is why the majority of all policies in all governments all over the world are driven by corporations.