Corporate power. It’s not a buzzword, but a system that shapes our daily lives.
When people talk about “the economy,” they’re often describing outcomes without naming the structures that produce them. We are going to name them: Rising costs, falling wages, precarity, environmental damage, and instability that feels constant, and—let’s be honest—personal. These are not isolated failures. They are predictable results of an economic system that is solely designed around extraction.
What Corporate Power Actually Is
Here is the thing about corporate power that I really need to drive home. Corporate power does not require elections. These may sound counterintuitive due to the fact that corporate money floods our elections. But let me explain: corporate power exists when private entities exert more influence over policy, regulation, and outcomes than we the people do.
Through legal frameworks, lobbying access, consolidation, and control over essential services, corporations have the ability to shape the conditions we all live under, and often without visibility or direct accountability—or any accountability for that matter. This isn’t about individual corporations behaving badly. It’s about the design of our system.
Extraction: How Value Moves Upward
Extraction is not simply “making money.” In economic terms, extraction is the transfer of value upward without equivalent return. Keep in mind the number of subsidies and bailouts put on the backs of working-class Americans.
Extraction occurs when:
- workers produce more but earn less
- communities absorb risk while profits are privatized
- public resources are used for private gain
- long-term stability is sacrificed for short-term returns
Profit does not always indicate productivity, but it often indicates leverage for the corporation.
Why Everything Feels More Expensive All at Once
When markets consolidate, competition disappears quietly. Look at our current state. It seems like it happened quickly, but it’s been a quiet, systemic push for decades through prices on everything rising together, declining quality, stagnant wages, and declining options. This isn’t always the result of explicit collusion to rip off the American people. It’s what happens when power concentrates. When 85 percent of products are owned by 10 companies (as is our reality), the system no longer self-corrects, it self-protects.
How Language Obscures Harm
Corporate power rarely presents itself honestly. Some would argue that it never does. Monopolies are rebranded as “innovative.” Layoffs are framed as “strategic decisions.” Gig work apps are branded as “disruptive.” Efficiency becomes synonymous with cutting labor and obligations. This type of language softens harm and delays or removes accountability all together. When the human cost of these decisions is hidden behind spin, extraction becomes easier to normalize.
Private Equity and Short-Term Control
Private equity plays a central role in modern extraction, and unapologetically so. Its model prioritizes short-term returns by: stripping assets, transferring risk, loading companies with massive debt, and externalizing damage to workers and communities.
Communities fall prey to this and are forced to absorb the fallout. It’s only the investors that capture the upside. Let’s be clear here: this is not a failure of execution. It is the business model.
Why Labor Is Always the First Target
In corporate systems, labor is flexible while profit expectations are not. When pressures mount, this is when wages are cut, jobs are eliminated, and benefits are reduced—all while returns are protected.
This is why “efficiency” so often translates into worker instability. People are not treated as human. They are treated as adjustable costs while returns are treated as fixed.
Control Without Accountability
Corporations influence regulation through lobbying, revolving doors between industry and government, regulatory capture, narrative shaping (spin), and a deliberate misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment when it comes to corporations. When corporations are allowed to effectively write their own rules, oversight becomes optional. And when it is optional, it disappears all together. This is when fines become absorbable (fine doesn’t fit the crime), and criminal accountability all but disappears. This creates power without consequences. When there are no consequences, a race to become the first trillionaire at the expense of everyone else becomes a goal.
Debt, Precarity, and Compliance
Debt is not just financial, it is behavioral. When people are burdened with debt and instability, mobility decreases and resistance becomes riskier. Precarity starts to discipline behavior. It suppresses dissent without requiring force. This is a feature of the system, not a flaw. It is by design.
Why Corporate Power Remains Invisible
Corporate power benefits from not being named. When harm is individualized in this way, people blame themselves. They did not work hard enough, long enough, not enough jobs. And they push this same level of shame on to others who are in the same situation. And as we are currently experiencing, it also is directed on groups of people who are not to blame. This allows extraction to become normalized. This is when people adapt to instead of resisting against the system. Naming the system changes the framing because clarity disrupts control.
What Happens When People See Extraction Clearly
When people finally recognize extraction for what it is, there is a marked shift. They stop internalizing systemic harm as personal failures. They begin connecting patterns instead of isolating struggles. They understand that instability is deliberately produced, not inevitable.
So, what are the solutions? How do we accomplish this? We will talk about that soon. But before we do, we must first focus on economic literacy without moralizing. Because you can’t change what you can’t name. Corporate power is the dominant force shaping economic life.
Recommended Reading
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
A foundational analysis of how corporate, political, and military power concentrates in modern democracies. Mills’ work reinforces the central lesson we discuss here: power does not require conspiracy. It requires structure, access, and insulation from consequence. Note: if you purchase the book from our affiliate link, we receive a small commission that helps support us.
Next: We’ll talk about Language, Rhetoric, and How Power Persuades. (coming soon)
Previous Post: Introduction.
View the Whole Series: How Power Actually Works.
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