Behind current hot-button controversies there is a common, usually unmentioned, thread: the dominant role of mega-corporations and their impact on our freedom under a rule of law.  Three current examples should prove the point:
The current Supreme Court case of Hillary, the Movie, in which corporations seek exemption from campaign finance regulation as violations of their First Amendment rights of free speech.  Their claim rests on specious interpretation of an 1886 case in which the court struck down a California effort to regulate the Pacific Railroad and on the later Valeo decision that equated personal political contributions with free speech.
The same issue looms in the pending re-regulation of Wall Street.  As corporate seats replaced partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, global consortia and interlocking directorates have generated legal persons of gargantuan size, overwhelming the states that chartered them. As regulators were removed or co-opted by the regulated, competition shifted the system’s wealth and profits to those least regulated, inflating a self-destructive bubble that jeopardized the entire global economy. According to the BBC, governments poured $11 trillion into bailouts to save it, but those Wall Street firms that received government capital still reject regulation.  Alan Greenspan, their idol, categorically denies its ability to avert or reduce future catastrophe, even though surviving remnants of the New Deal certainly mitigated the impact of the most recent meltdown.  Is Wall Street free to bring the rest of us down?
Health care insurance reform produces similar conflicts. Maximum protection against epidemics depends upon public health, a division of government.  Experience with basic health care delivery abroad indicates the necessity of taking the profit motive out of basic health care insurance.  But the for-profit health insurance corporations in the United States are flexing their political power to get universal for-profit basic health care insurance.  The mere threat of competition from a “public option” incites their street minions to cry  ”socialism” and  “socialized medicine.”  But the “private” insurers welcome government coercion to bring millions into their client list.
To define government simplemindedly as the problem, not part of the solution, may have some ideological appeal, but does not contribute to finding the urgently needed equitable solutions.
Allen Dirrim