The Corporate Age

Many people would point to any one individual participating in the Occupy movement and use it to decry the entire thing, which makes about as much sense as basing your entire view of America's political system on your first impression of a single citizen. Since the Occupy movement began, it's become a bandwagon for all manner of political figures attempting to promote their own agendas. Every movement has its crazies; this is nothing new. Corporations and capitalism aren't going away, and socialism and communism (hopefully) aren't taking their place.

Cronyism

Many people would also shun the idea that corporations have any fault in this situation and instead argue that the government is the entire cause of the problem. This belief is inherently flawed: without corporations, there would be nothing to diminish the people's influence on their government, and without the government, corporations would have nothing over which to exert their influence.

This a symbiotic relationship commonly known as cronyism: corporations provide the funding that helps representatives get elected, representatives pass legislation in the interest of those corporations. Rinse, repeat. This is one reason why there's little substantial difference in the quality of elected representatives between administrations: the same corporations are influencing their policy-making.

The front-runners for the 2012 presidential election are incumbent Democrat Barack Obama and former Massachusetts governor GOP Mitt Romney. One of the top campaign contributors for both candidates is Goldman Sachs, a Wall Street investment bank that profited on the subprime mortgage crisis. This isn't their first political conflict of interest, either.

While there may be others solutions, those that come to mind involve either capping or preventing corporate campaign donations and potentially applying similar restrictions on individual donations to keep the influence of the upper class comparable to that of the middle and lower classes.

The Bailout Fallout

The 2008 bailout was intended to prevent the financial failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies that were claimed to be "too large to fail" because the alleged impact on the American economy would be too devastating.

The federal money to fund this bailout came from American taxpayers and added to the federal deficit. Part of the rationale for the bailout was that the economy would worsen if avenues of funding provided to small businesses by these types of organizations was curtailed.

The problem is that banks aren't keeping up their end of the bargain: we bailed them out, but they're lending substantially less anyway. To add insult to injury, despite having to be bailed out, these institutions still found plenty to give out in corporate bonuses.

Less lending, fewer businesses, fewer jobs. This is likely a large contributing factor to the present 9% unemployment rate. Wages as a percentage of the economy have dropped roughly 7% in the last 50 years, leaving individuals lucky enough to have a job to pay taxes while some corporations are paying none or are even receiving tax benefits.

The current tax code that caters to corporate interests needs to be reformed. By the same token, business regulations also need to be reexamined to increase incentive for corporations to hire domestically rather than sending jobs overseas.

Conclusion

Corporations aren't inherently evil and they can do good things. This blog post is published on Blogger, a service owned and offered for free by Google that enables its users to easily publish their works and opinions. This is just one example of the beneficial effects that corporations can have on America.

However, as this post also establishes, Americans have several reasons to dislike corporations and the relationship they have with the government at the moment.