Sometimes governments treat desperate people with total disregard and are not held accountable. And sometimes fraudulent companies take good people for all they're worth, and are not stopped. Other times, governments are held accountable (usually in the form of a violent revolution), and many frauds do eventually have their crimes exposed in the daylight.
Some multinational corporations (I'll pick on Walmart because they're easy) don't have a people, people, people mantra, and are willing to blur the lines of social justice issues in order to feed their bottom line and pad their wallets. We have three grocery stores in my town, and one stands out above the rest. While they are a more expensive store, they are the kind of company that I resonate with because they treat people with value and dignity. They hire special needs individuals, give competitive wages, and can give a majority of their employees a decent living wage (this includes clerks and stock-jobs). For people who can't afford the store's prices though, there are no real options to support a quality grocery store in town. Many people are forced to shop at Walmart to save the bucks, or simply go without. This is more than some 'upper story' lifestyle choice: We, as investors and consumers, need to make conscious choices to support companies that demonstrate a kind of measured self-sacrifice that gives people most would consider 'the least of these' real options. Because in giving people options, it also gives us options. In giving ourselves away, we actually gain our true selves back.
I don't believe there are, nor am I advocating for, black and white answers to any world problem, including issues of social justice. And when it comes to government, a group of corporations could become just as corrupt as a government if given enough power and control. Power and control is, perhaps, part of the problem. With this, is the problem that money = power. From the Babylonians, to the Romans, to the Kingdoms of Europe, to the Empire state(s); human beings simply don't know how to wield power properly and justly. If someone claims to be able to, it raises suspicion. One look at nearly any popular American Televangelist makes this abundantly clear.
The looming question is "how much is enough?" 1 million? 10 million? 1 billion? 2 billion? 1 trillion? Equivalent ounces of gold or silver? We need nothing short of an inside-out transformation. Left to our own devices, the theory of our minds create realities filled with malice, greed, hate and violence.
I'm sorry: a blog isn't so conductive to go in-depth, but the crux (I think) is that both the liberal and conservative political approaches to running a country are hopelessly broken. Throwing money at everything will lead to too much debt, but cutting too much of everything will lead to a growing gap between the rich and poor. As the poor blame the rich for their problems and the rich blame the poor likewise, the hope of reconciling people to one another becomes much more arduous. Only as a people reconciled to one another can we truly progress, but if we are only reconciling ourselves to the people we already love, we are really just going to perpetuate (to some extent) the same cycles of the us/them dichotomy that seems to dominate American politics and lifestyle.
