The corporations have been running the country since it was a nation.

I wonder if DOW Chemical and P&G were backing the Federalists in the 1700s or not...

Maybe not corporations, but the wealthy were definitely kicking up a storm over British taxes and import restrictions, and then later driving a lot of the pro-slavery arguments.

I think private banks were...

No, but powerful slaveholding interests were a major factor in the design of our government. It's the reasons our voting system favors low-population states--because slaves only counted as 3/5 of a person and the slaveholders were worried this would mean less representation in government and the danger that owning slaves would be outlawed.

The 3/5ths compromise was about giving less representation to slaveholder states, and was not a moral judgment on the value of slaves.

Slaveholder states would have been perfectly happy for representation to be 1:1 for slaves vs. non-slaves.

Right, they had less representation so they needed to make up for the loss of power with the Electoral College system.

Right, the Electoral College and the Senate benefitted slaveholders by granting them more political power, not the 3/5ths compromise.

That's really not true. US political and economic thought heavily centered around individual proprietors and farmers before the civil war, and was deeply suspicious of large corporations. In some states you could only form a joint stock company for time & scope limited things, such as building a canal.

It's only after the Civil War and into the Gilded Age do we see the rise and acceptance of large scale corporations, but not without conflict. Modern readers will be surprised to know that Marx was relatively popular among Americans in the west during his lifetime (among those that read, naturally), certainly in part due to the increasingly corporate focus that the American economic system was taking at the time.

Another thing worth noting is the push back against the inequality and corruption of the Gilded Age. This time period is when we had our anti-trust laws and improvements to them [1].

The narrative that the government was always broken or in the control of corporate interests takes away agency and responsibility from individual citizens. It may be mostly true, but there's enough glimpses of when citizens were able to corral these interests that it's worth not giving up on.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act

Do you have a source for this? I'd love to read more.

David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, a Theory, around page 524 or so.

> The mechanics and tradesmen who became the foot soldiers of the American War of Independence represented themselves as producers of the wealth that they saw the British crown as looting, and after the Revolution, many turned the same language against would-be capitalists.

> When US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, for instance, he included the following lines, which, radical though they seem to a contemporary ear, where really just a reflection of the common sense of the time:[189] “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

> In 1880 a Protestant “home missionary” who had spent some years traveling along the Western frontier reported that: “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx”

Your comment is funny, but you should be aware this is a state issue, not a federal one.

Unless you are implying every state is down too :)

Interstate commerce, which this most certainly is, is a federal issue?

What makes this a state issue?

Every state has the right to pass laws that apply within it's borders.

The state approach is more fine-grained so a negative outcome is localized, and if the outcome is positive people in other states can enact similar laws if they want.

Couldn't the same logic be applied to every issue? How different is your argument from the one advanced by "states rights" segregationists in the 1960s and earlier?