Between them and Walmart... enough to make you sad.

I totally see your point on the seeming chicken-eggishness of holding a party responsible, but only one group has a clear "duty" to serve citizens, i.e., elected officials. I see this much like like the housing crisis. You have a trained banker bound by fiduciary duty (Congress) on one side and a euphoric prospective homeowner (Corporations) on the other. We could blame the home owner, but he is just doing what he can within the framework provided by the banker. Same goes for Congress and corporations. Congress can fix so many ills with a stroke of a pen. I totally agree that citizens are to blame as well. We are ultimately responsible via our votes to elect Congress, our apathy on corporate ownership, and our unwillingness to threaten/revoke charters of corporations who are gross violators of our rights/values.

It is an amazingly interesting topic and one which a person gets a more tempered view as they gain ownership of shares of stock and can see the true nature of Capitalism. I think it is simple actually. Brutally simple. Much like how animals operate in nature, business operates in the environment we as societies provide. While we wax poetic, business doesn't quibble about pesticide this or clear-cutting that within the environment. Things change and business struggles for survival available at any cost. At some point of advancement, like ants, bees, and humans, business starts to ruthlessly modify its environment to better suit it. Usually at the direct expense of competitors or less advanced entities existing in the ecosystem.

I think we as a species have to take ownership for creating this "ecosystem" and do our best to create the balanced sustainable system which will carry us into the future. If we don't? We may wake up to find ourselves surrounding by the business equivalent of roaches, rats, sparrow, and the occasional stray cat or dog.

We have just been so disconnected from realizing we are the masters of our fate by numerous iterations of bureaucracy and "free market" propaganda, I don't know if we or the world even knows that what exists as a market is only what we allow to exist. We ARE the market. I really don't know if people even consciously understand their interests anymore.