On political will:

If “savage” was the magic word for colonialists, “political will” is the fairy dust of today’s democracy. When change fails to happen, it is for want of “political will,” a sort of magic powder that stirs the powerful to action (even if that action ends up being merely “rinse and repeat”). What contemporary ideas of “political will” betray, more than anything, is our own ambivalence about government. The public at large have more than enough political will for health care, for education, for reduced spending on weapons, or for the environment. It’s just that, all too often, the abundant will of government representatives is shaped by a corporate agenda, rather than a popular one.

Or, perhaps, the popular will has been perverted towards other ends:

Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are finding themselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best prospects for us all, we pursue short-term advantages over seemingly fixed resources through which we can compete more effectively against one another. In short, instead of acting like people, we act like corporations. When faced with a local mugging, the community of Park Slope first thought to protect its brand instead of its people.

Perhaps when we extended the rights of people to corporations we were really just internalizing the corporate ethos within ourselves; in other words, corporations didn’t become people—we became corporations.