When I tell people I work to limit corporate power, they often look at me as if I have two heads. I can sympathize. Prior to ten years ago, I might have reacted the same way.

At first blush, limiting corporate power seems so anti-American. In the United States, isn’t it our free markets, our unfettered cowboy capitalism, our rags-to-riches, anyone-can-go-from-the-garage-to-the-penthouse opportunism and yes, our resultant material wealth that makes us the most admired, most truly free, most competent – well, let’s just say it – best country on Earth?

Well, the U.S. is a model for much of the rest of the world. But this capitalism thing - well, that’s a bit more complicated. To look closer, let’s talk pharmaceuticals.

The largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world will do anything to sell you their drugs. They’ll buy off educators, run misleading ad campaigns, hide negative test results, expose developing countries to toxic waste, fight against regulation and even work to preserve our entire inept, overly expensive, underperforming health care system simply to ensure that they can create in you and your doctors a need for their products.

Supporters of big pharma say that’s just fine. They dredge up all the usual catch-phrases, including “modern medicine allows us to live longer, better lives” and “these companies need to make profits to stay in business” and “regulation just makes them have to charge more for medicine so that poor people can’t afford them.” You might even hear “my son works for Pfizer and he says everyone there is very nice” or “you’re a socialist, aren’t you?”

Well, supporters of big pharma largely miss (or wish to evade) the point, which is there is a middle ground that allows drug companies to make handsome profits while still delivering inexpensive drugs that don’t kill us while they’re trying to heal us. It’s that middle ground that regulation attempts to achieve.

The playing field was already far from level, but the last several decades have tilted it to such an extent that We the People - you and I - are simply rolling off like so many marbles. Corporations – and large pharmaceutical companies are wonderful examples – have far more power and influence than we do. In addition to virtually unlimited life spans and relatively unlimited resources, they have a singular, unified, over-riding goal: the pursuit of shareholder return, best accomplished by continually growing profitability.

It’s not a question of malevolence. Corporations and those who run them aren’t evil. They don’t want to kill us and foul the planet. After all, that kind of limits their market. They just believe they have to. If their leaders don’t do everything to maximize profit, they can’t keep up with their competitors and their shareholders can and will throw them out and replace them with other, more profit-minded executives. Trust me when I say there’s no shortage of profit-minded executives.

Need proof? There’s no better example of the hyper-focused, incessantly-driven nature of today’s corporate form than what’s happening right now with our financial corporations. Do you actually think they planned to throw themselves over a financial cliff, begging on the way down for alms from the government before they hit the ground in one cataclysmic puff of smoke, thereby ceasing to exist? I don’t think so. The decisions to sell and then approve time-bomb mortgages, securitize and then rate bundles of these lousy mortgages AAA and then insure these garbage assets results solely from the inexhaustible drive for shareholder return. They saw the next company doing it and making buckets of money, so they figured they had no choice but to jump into the pool just to compete. Now, of course, they’re all drowning together.

By their very nature, corporations will always try to get away with as much as they can. They hire armies of lawyers to pour over rules and regulations looking for that little edge, the loophole that might not be seen by competitors or government regulators. It’s built into their DNA just like it’s built into a shark’s DNA to kill in order to eat. You can’t stop it; your only recourse is to try to control it.

Regulation simply tries to give us a fighting chance. Contrary to what the naysayers would have you believe, regulation actually helps ensure that our market system functions correctly, without oligopolies and undue influence from special interests. It’s not even close to socialism. It’s not un-American; in fact, it’s distinctly American. It is precisely what our founders were trying to achieve.

It’s also what Adam Smith described as a healthy market-based system – one that has each of the following characteristics: 1. investment capital remaining within national borders, 2. complete information available to all participants, 3. small buyers and sellers so vendor size can’t influence price, 4. balanced trade between companies, 5. full cost internalization by the sellers, and 6. savings invested in production rather than speculation. We have to discard the idea that if it’s not whole-hog, steroid-enhanced, free-market capitalism, it’s socialism. There is a middle ground.

As the world collectively licks its wounds from severe economic hardship, it’s important to realize that there is no better opportunity for change than a collective catastrophe. In fact, some signs of change are tentatively emerging.

Recently, the Supreme Court all but admitted the regulatory industry has been so eviscerated and compromised by lack of funding and conflicts of interest that it can’t effectively protect us. It’s ruling in Wyeth v. Levine No. 06-1249 rejected limits on drug lawsuits. The Supremes actually decided that Wyeth should have provided better warnings on the label of its drug Phenergan, even if the FDA didn’t require it to. Wow. Well, it’s a start.