MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO

What the candidates all shared was an outdated vision of corporate America. They grew up in an economy ruled by big corporations like General Motors, General Electric and IBM, which provided careers and the financial security that defines middle class... GM was the nation's largest employer, and the new benefits spread quickly among companies. Big corporations, not government, would provide the safety net that enabled a new middle class to greet the future as confident consumers... The corporation had been a legal entity just right to serve the world's first mass market, the United States, in the early 1900s. It owned itself, but could raise huge sums by selling stock. It could invest in giant projects like steel mills and car factories because it could live forever. The corporation thrived on efficiency of scale. It rewarded size. By 1930, the economist Gerald Davis writes in "The Vanishing American Corporation," just 200 companies held half of all corporate assets. By 1970, just..