Let's just go roughly backward from around the 1950s. A grab-bag of events that brought us to the contemporary period: US's role in post-WW2 reconstruction of

Let's just go roughly backward from around the 1950s. A grab-bag of events that brought us to the contemporary period: US's role in post-WW2 reconstruction of West Germany & anti-soviet programs. Taft-Hartley Act. WW2 internment camps. OSS. US's complicity in doing nothing about the German work/death camps, despite knowing about them by 1942. Banana republics. The Gilded Age. America's excessively and government-sponsored anti-labor business history. The Pinkertons. Jim Crow. Plessy v. Ferguson. Dred Scott v. Sanford. Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction. The Civil War. The Missouri Compromise. Property clauses in the Constitution. Pre-revolutionary colonial America. A similar grab-bag of landmark cases one should understand if anyone is going to even speak about power of the private sector (because that power is a recent invention (in history, recent doesn't mean last decade)): U.S. v. Martin Linen. Buckley v. Valeo. Ross v. Bernhard. Wheeling Steel v. Glander. Hague v. CIO. Grosjean v. American Press Co Ligget v. Lee. Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon. Dodge v. Ford Motor Armour Packing v. US. Hale v. Henkel. Lochner v. New York. Noble v. Union River Logging. Minneapolis & St. Lous Railroad v. Beckwith. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Railroad Tax Cases. Munn v. Illinois. Slaughterhouse Cases. Paul v. Virginia. McCulloch v. Maryland. Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Fletcher v. Peck. Marbury v. Madison. The OP has an inaccurate and myopic view of how we arrived at our present state. For example, his comments on the private sector--President Bush isn't a drop in the bucket on that. He's over a century after the damage was done (two, depending on when you start counting). Even Citizens United is but a great-grandchild of earlier 'power grabs' (see Buckley v. Valeo). Case in point--After passing the 14th Amendment, would you care to guess at who brought the most cases to SCOTUS to have their legal rights as persons recognized under the Amendment? Corporations. At a ratio over 15:1. There were 19 cases that dealt with African Americans' legal rights as citizens. There were 288 cases brought by corporations asking to be recognized as persons intended by the language of the Amendment between 1890-1920. A 30-year program by American business to be recognized as having the rights of natural citizens using the most important Amendment in the fight against holding people as property at the cost of ~600K lives--all to pervert the national mind into holding property as people. It's been a long and winding road.