You're missing the /sarcasm tag. Doing good for corporations has, since Reagan, eviscerated the living standards of the American people.
Plus you're ignorant of how people in this country are actually employed. For example, a number of the wealthiest individuals in this country, and most of the top 5%, actually work for or own partnerships (in the form of LPs, LLPs, or LLCs), none of which are corporate entities. This doesn't include those employed by the government agencies or armed forces at the state or federal or local levels.
And last I checked, every major invention of the past century was funded in whole or in part by the government--there are no major discoveries wholly funded by corporate dollars.
The only way to keep the general populace from getting trampled as far as they will allow is to push back against all this.
I've said elsewhere, vote out every incumbent Congressperson. Once the current paid members are gone, if the new set appears to be voting by donor status, vote them out too.
Keep voting them out until we find a few decent souls who realize that we the people are serious about being represented, not sold.
I would use campaign contribution reports as a "who should be first out the door" list... individual personal donations of fixed maximum size only, everything else counts against.
The more a central authority takes and dictates, the more lobbying and money will be the influence that runs them. When you have a powerbase of politicians that can make or break conpanies, industries, and entire regions with a law or regulation, you will naturally have players interested in that space working for their own interests above all else.
When existing government gets hijacked by power brokers, that's where we the people should step up and say no by voting out the worst offenders. Tha's our check and balance, and where I despair of getting people to understand and care.
Power abhors a vacuum. If government cedes power somewhere, who do you think is going to pick it up?
You can suggest that certain uses of these tools are improper and that the agents who effect these uses should be restrained, punished, or otherwise legally addressed, but you don't phrase that as a punishment against the tool -- it is rather a punishment against the agents who manipulated the tool improperly.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole "corporation v people" thing is a propaganda tool intended to misdirect public anger off the robber barons themselves and instead put it onto a formless legal abstraction that can't be held accountable.
Using another example. Indentured servitude used to be a completely valid legal contract that benefited both sides. The reason it went away was because those writing the contracts started treating it like legal slavery.
The reason people go after corporations is because they are the ones in control of the government and what exactly will going after the people who own the corporations do? They often have private armies, write their own laws, and essentially function as royalty.
This is a flat out lie that has been disproven time and time again. More often than not, what's good for the company is bad for everyone else.
