The Problem:

The defining crises of our time—climate change, racial inequity, and broadening inequality—are interconnected, human-made problems. We live them daily: wildfires and floods that upend homes and drive up insurance and energy costs; communities of color disproportionately targeted  for resource extraction and denied equal opportunity; jobs stripped of safety, fair wages, and retirement security.

These are not natural outcomes. They are the predictable results of concentrated power—systems built without accountability that reward short-term profit while undermining collective long-term stability. We chase the symptoms because they’re visible, but the root cause is a lack of participatory economic power. When people are locked out of decisions that shape our lives, corporations are free to pollute, exploit, and destabilize our political systems with little to no consequence.

Climate change feels like randomized extreme weather until we connect it to fossil fuel companies pouring trillions into lobbying, misinformation, and drilling instead of clean energy. Inequality feels like the natural order of things until we see corporations spending profits on stock buybacks rather than fair pay and safe workplaces. Job precarity appears to be the fault of the individual worker until we connect it to investors incentivizing layoffs and union-busting in the name of efficiency.

This concentration of power doesn’t just create negative economic shocks—it upends democracy. Around the world and here at home, democratic norms are eroding as corporate influence and political capture bend civic systems away from the public interest. Left unchecked, concentrated power prioritizes private profit over democratic norms, weakening the very safeguards meant to protect the public good.

And the stakes are only rising. From the climate emergency to widening inequality to the unchecked expansion of artificial intelligence, today’s crises foreshadow deeper instability unless we confront the systems of concentrated power driving them.