Essay On Corporate Elites

Corporate Elites Pose as a Threat to Our Freedom

Money is power, and we live in a capitalist society; possessing a great number of money comes with a large amount of power, and one could do just about anything with the two. As of 2011, corporations hold $2 trillion. Corporate elites own most of the money in America, thus giving them control. A corporate elite is the owner, director and senior executive of the largest and most important of a nation's business corporations. A corporation is a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person) and recognized as such in law Corporations were initially created by the people, and for the people.

They are legal structures enabled by our legislatures and enforced by our courts to serve our purposes. We, the People decided to allow this form of legal structure to serve us by aggregating the needed resources to accomplish large-scale projects that serve us. They are supposed to provide us with benefits in the form of goods and services and good jobs and taxes. (Johnson)

Citizens have placed their trusts in these corporate elites by granting them special privileges, expecting for them to use that privilege to benefit the people by accomplishing the large scale tasks, employment, and etc. One example of this privilege is the limitation of liability. In other words, investors are not held liable for the actions of their company. In case the company was to be sued for whatever reason, they will not lose more than their investment. Although corporations were fabricated for our benefit, they have done more for themselves than us. Corporations only have one motive- profit. In order to gain profit, corporate elites utilize their money as a supply of power via contro...

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...ucts. The answer is because they will be losing profit. “Corporations ... are structured to make money. In the pursuit of this one goal, they will freely cast aside concerns about the societies and ecological systems in which they operate” (Cray and Drutman). A further case where corporations bring us harm rather than good deals with the price of their products using the method of supply and demand. The law of demand states that if all other factors remain equal, the higher the price of a good, the less people will demand that good. The law of supply states that quantities will be sold at a certain price in relationship to the demand; the higher the price, the higher the quantity supplied.

The main reason why corporate elites are a threat to our freedom is because they control the media. The vast majority of the media are owned by a handful of large corporations.