I instinctively want to agree with you here and bemoan the state and directions of the world. But if I really think about it, it's been happening my entire life. I'm mid 30's now. I assume someone older than me would have had the same experience of it happening their entire life.

You're right though, it's crappy and merits a lot of geopolitical reflection. But I suspect it goes back millenia and is a manifestation of basic evolutionary biology with the business world, rather than anything that can be solved/fixed.

And we've gone full circle about the balance of working for/against humanity in the name of progress.

The EPA is only two decades older than you, and it enforced a bunch of brand new regulation on all the existing companies. There used to be a willingness to actually govern rather than cede everything to corporate interest.

I'm a bit older now, and while there has always been corporate meddling in public decision-making (which is unavoidable and also somewhat needed to help steer the boat a bit in some situations), the economic effort a company has to invest rectify wrongdoing mainly shaped the amount of spending for legal counseling and lobbying, but it didn't directly shape a ruling.

Today, environmental/privacy/safety laws are suddenly not that strict anymore, because now we naturally need to also take economic interests of the violating company into account.

So you might end up in a situation where an official body will officially rule that the harmed party may be right, but needs to be pragmatic about its needs just because of the increased inconvenience it would create for the opposing party if THEY would have to change their way.

In my experience, this was not the case 15 years ago.