To the point about inequality, it’s pretty clear that you can’t have political equality coexisting with dramatic economic inequality, because the mass of people would just vote themselves all the money until the discrepancy was eliminated. The measure of economic power of a group and the measure of their political power is always closely related.
Edit: ok downvoters, name me one example of any society ever in which political and economic power for some class of people was out of balance. Rome? No, the patricians has all the economic and political power. The ussr? No, the high ranking party members had all the economic and political power. China? No. The United States? No. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
So if the rule is that economic and political power tend towards equilibrium, then the corollary is that moments of disequilibrium are followed quickly by economic or political change. For example, the rising French business class in an environment where the aristocracy has all the power was followed by the French Revolution. And as the article points out, the emergence of a global economic elite is followed by that elite coopting all the governments of the world. On the other side, the rise of strong unions was quickly followed by a period where there was a lot of political empowerment by the masses.
So, if I might suggest a solution, the answer to a situation where corporate power is transnational is a transnational union movement; something like an international congress of unions or maybe like the IWW.
You can get close to that if you have a limited government, so that the mass of people can't just vote themselves all the money. (Though, if it's enough of the masses, they can vote a change in the limits on government...)
I don’t understand- are you saying that if you had a limited government, you could have a situation where the people with the power and the people with the money were different people? Because I feel like that’s not what you’d get. If Emma Goldman and others are correct though, you might get a situation where the both power and money were distributed fairly equally. But they’d still be in the same hands.
Let's start with the assumption that you have people with money. Let's even suppose that they're probably the people who end up in power. If you have a limited government, they don't have much power.
If you have a federal government with the power that the US government had before 1930, you don't have as much money being spent on campaigning and lobbying, because the influence isn't worth as much, because the government can't do as much.
Back to your comment that I was replying to. What I meant was, with a limited government, if the bottom 90% of the people want to take all that the top 10% have, if "taking all that the rich have" isn't one of the things that the government is allowed to do, then the 90% can't do that. ("Allowed" in the previous sentence means "allowed by the constitution", not "allowed by the people in charge".) In a country actually ruled by law, there are genuine restrictions on what the government can do...
... until there aren't. The US Constitution can be amended. It was amended to allow for income tax, for example. If the 90% wanted it badly enough, they could probably get it, but it would take more than just yelling at their representatives. They'd have to actually go through the process.
Then there's the problem that you seem to be talking about in your reply, that the representatives tend to be from among the rich. That puts another obstacle on the peoples' ability to just take what the rich have...
... until the people get tired of it all, take over the streets, and just burn it all down.
You are too stuck in the present time with the present form of government- look at this like you were an alien from outer space. To an alien there’s no hard dividing line between a corporation and a government. And throughout human history a myriad of political forms, permanent and temporary, have existed, and all of them wield political power in one sense or another.
In the example you just gave, with the government just standing by, political power devolves to the major corporations acting in the area. Early US corporations historically had their own police forces and armies (the pinkertons). In the late 1800s strikers fought many gun battles with private security hired by barons such as Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller, using in some cases artillery and machine guns. Does that not count as political power?
Edit: ok downvoters, name me one example of any society ever in which political and economic power for some class of people was out of balance. Rome? No, the patricians has all the economic and political power. The ussr? No, the high ranking party members had all the economic and political power. China? No. The United States? No. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...