Americans have a very weird individualistic idea of what's acceptable when it comes to reining in Companies Behaving Badly:

- Individual action is acceptable (vote with your wallet)

- Government action is totally unacceptable (interference with the holy free market!)

- But, coordinated, collective individual action is also unacceptable (unions bad! organized boycotts bad!)

Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals. You can imagine how often that's successful. The only time it actually has a chance of working is when it's secretly organized (astroturfing). So, we Americans continue to run around individually complaining about bad corporate behavior, but are powerless to do anything about it because we've made all the effective mitigations taboo!

Do you think it's the same people making the rules and feeling powerless because of the rules? Your writing gives that impression, but maybe I'm reading it incorrectly.

I honestly don’t know where it comes from. The Cold War with the Soviet Union didn’t help. We had decades of being told anything collective = bad, worker power/ownership = bad, government planning = bad. Society needs to be limited to “individuals acting independently.” The Soviet Union is gone, but our fear is still strong of everything that even remotely looks like communism. The Red Scare was a huge beneficial windfall for corporate power.

I saw a "conspiracy theory" that the only reason we saw quality of life improve in the west after ww2 and until a bit after the fall of the iron curtain is that western oligarchs feared the population would turn east and there would be red revolutions everywhere otherwise. The only way to beat the USSR was to improve quality of life in the west. Now that this threat is gone, there's no reason to keep a foot on the brake of welfare-capitalism. The population pays for the cockups (quantitative easing), while the shareholders take all the profits. This is the source of the growing economic inequality.

> Consequently, the only way to punish companies that's acceptable to Americans is totally spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots actions by individuals.

And don't forget the caveat that if it's the wrong grassroots unorganized action, it's clearly a product of George Soro's money paying people to do things, and not their actual action.