Enormous multi-national corporations should not function as an extension of our Government. This is the separation of church and state debate all over again.
Sure, the US needs a separation of state and economy for the same exact reason and state and church - any mingling generates intense, dangerous corruption. You'll never see that separation however, because 2/3+ of the political class are heavy statists that like to accumulate perpetually greater amounts of power - and to accumulate power, you must have control over the economy.
I think you've got it backwards. For the last 200 years, the government has mostly functioned as an extension of wealthy people/corporations. Heck, the revolutionaries of the Boston Tea Party were upset that legally imported British tea was cheaper than the colonists' smuggled Dutch tea. The USA was founded by merchants trying to avoid competition.
"Enormous multi-national corporations should not function as an extension of our Government"
You've demonstrated you're completely historically illiterate. It has always been thus, you're just becoming aware of it.
From war is a racket:
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]
"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]
"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]
General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.
I'm not sure how you came to conclude that I wasn't aware of the long history of corporate and government collusion. My point is very clear, it shouldn't be legal.
The problem you're not seeing is that no law will ever be passed that goes against it because the rich people that have been ruling you for the past 200+ years don't want it.
You don't seem to be historically literate at all. I suggest chomsky. And the book by the trilateral commission.
