All this political talk!

I keep posting all these blogs that have to do with politics, and I realize it is somewhat onesided, but that’s the culture I’m breathing right now. How can one not?

Here’s another item about politics. I read an essay by Emma Goldman, and I was struck by how much she focused on the economic aspect of her times. Her explanation for crime was that it was “misguided energy”: people were being forced to make ugly things, and they found no joy or pride in producing something beautiful. They were trapped inside a prison that made them go crazy.

I brought the topic up in my political science class, and I did a poor job of trying to phrase it into a question; it wasn’t really a question, I just wanted to talk about it more. What resulted from the discussion however was the notion that economic power feeds into state power. I had known that corporations and nation-state governments were extremely similar. But what if this was taken to its extreme?

The Pixar movie Wall-E indirectly addresses this. I watched it again last night, so it was fresh in my head, and this time I noticed that the person in charge is the CEO of Big N Large. He has a podium that looks very much like it came out of the White House… but there is no governmental presence in the movie– just a corporation.

Is that an accurate depiction of what this would look like at its extreme? Would we be any worse off if a corporation was running our country instead of a government? Sometimes its hard to tell the difference between the two anyway.