^{Originally published by Bloomberg}

America today is very different from the country that fought the Revolutionary War and framed the Constitution. Then, it was a nation of farmers; today, it’s a nation of corporations. Most Americans now work for corporations, the largest of which command resources and money on a scale beyond that of many nations.

Yet when it comes to public issues like jobs, the distribution of wealth or even plain old politics, we still talk as we did 200 years ago. Remarkably, too few citizens discuss the effects of corporate behavior on jobs, health care and the economy, even though corporations affect all of these through their influence on elections and the actions of government.

As President Theodore Roosevelt noted in his first annual message to Congress:

Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with those institutions.

The key to doing this is to hold corporations accountable by ensuring that their activities are made visible.

From the end of World War II until about 1980 -- even through the economic travail of the ’70s, as the U.S. faced the Arab oil embargo, rampant inflation, significant growth in foreign competition and the aftermath of the Vietnam War -- it was generally considered normal for large corporations to acknowledge all of their constituencies.

Originally published on The Agonist

The US economy is on the road to recovery, right? That’s what all the economists and financial analysts say. Unemployment has dropped down to 8.3%, unemployment claims are now at a level last seen in 2008 before the economy fell off a cliff, almost all the TBTF banks have just passed the recent Fed stress tests and are now allowed to use their excess capital to pay dividends and buy back their stocks, inflation is tame if you go by official government statistics (especially core inflation that the Fed loves to look at because it removes the effects of food and oil price increases), and finally all major economic indicators are flashing green lights.

So why is Ben Bernanke saying that zero interest rates and his endless stream of quantitative easing programs are still essential? You would think the Fed would grab at any opportunity to pare back its balance sheet and restore interest rates to a more normal level. Several Fed officials have asked that same question. When Ben Bernanke was giving his speech yesterday in defense of his policies, Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser was giving an entirely different speech arguing that central banks should not have unlimited authority to expand their balance sheets, because all that does is enable their governments to rack up larger deficits. Another Fed President, Richard Fisher of Dallas, has said QE3 is unnecessary and is simply not going to happen, no matter what Wall Street wants.