So, once again I am going to be writing about the
Legend-Prodigy-Champion series, by Marie Lu. This will be my third and final
post on the series. Apologies in advance for burdening you with reading about
this again. You can click away now, no one is going to blame you.
So, today I thought I would write a slightly more informal
blog post because I almost never do that (wink wink). I spent a lot of time on
this series because I really enjoyed the plot, the basic premise of the book,
the character arch and moreover, I love to read about the possibilities
for dystopic societies. The two dystopian governments
that Marie Lu describes are the Colonies, and the Republic which
are the remnants of a post cataclysmic flood USA. Each of these nations makes
up half of the modern day USA, and the two are at war.
The Republic is a totalitarian society run by an Elector
Primo, and is a generic fascist almost Hunger Games like government
set up, which didn't excite me all too much. On the other hand, I found
the Colonies to be very interesting. After the flood that sent the
USA into disarray splitting the country in two, the United States
Government declared bankruptcy. This triggered the largest companies in the
country to affectively buy the USA from the government’s broken bank. This
corporate takeover really interested me, and I found it to be an
allegory to what is happening with corporate America right
now.
If the world was the way that most CEOs on Wall Street
wanted it to be, the United States really would be the Colonies, a ruthless,
solely economically based country with no middle class. 99.9 %
of the country would be in poverty and .1 % would be extremely rich. Although
there are some CEOs that are socially responsible and aren’t greedy, most are
just the opposite. Due to this, Corporate America is always pushing for less
government regulation and intervention and the Colonies are an extreme version
of this wish. Right now, the top 1 percent owns 39% of the world’s wealth, and
granting this wish would only increase this wealth gap. The corporate
government run by businessmen in the Colonies was a more efficiently
run government than the totalitarian government in the Republic,
and was much, much more cutthroat and malevolent. If Wall Street got what
it wanted, the United States would be become the Colonies. We would live with
now safety rules, no environmental regulations, no personal rights and no
education. Lu is exploring a rendition of the US where corporate America gets
its wish fulfilled. The CEO of a Fortune 500 company makes 250 to 300 times more
than the wage of an average employee. Makes you wonder what is really happening
behind closed doors at companies like Apple and Microsoft, and makes you
question whether or not you should buy one of their stocks.
I don't know if any of this sounds intelligent, but I sort
of had an epiphany that the market is running incorrectly, and that these CEOs
shouldn’t be worth so much money.
