Corporate America

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.