The PIES Declaration of Economic Independence
Inspired by the United States’ declaration of independence, we offer our own.
July 4th, 2025
Premise
When the systems we depend on begin to fail us, it is the right and the duty of the people to change them. This truth has echoed through history, shaping new governments, reforming old religions, and reinventing economies. Today, we find ourselves in such a moment again. The signs are everywhere. Inequality rises, communities are strained, and the very tools meant to serve us now seem to serve only a powerful few. We believe the economy of these United States is no longer working for the many and we say so here, plainly and with purpose, just as America’s founders once did nearly two and a half centuries ago.
Background
We hold this truth to be self-evident: all people are created equal. And because we are conscious, thinking beings, we each have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To do that, we must work together to build things, grow things, and serve one another. The purpose of an economy is to organize these efforts, this labor, in a way that ensures everyone gets what they need to upholds their rights. But ours has strayed far from that path. It has grown so massive, so complex, that it often feels beyond anyone’s control. And while the system generates wealth, it often does so by rewarding the worst behaviors: cutting corners, hollowing out communities, and chasing short-term gains at long-term expense. If we want something better, we must name what’s broken—and understand why it broke in the first place.
Follow the money.
The PIES hypothesis on the origin of economic strife in America is the stock market. A nebulous opaque web of clearing houses, exchanges, brokerages, firms and more, “The Stock Market” is really a gang of financial giants. Together, these public stock exchanges “move” more than $150 billion every day. Every day, more than double the US’ daily GDP changes hands. Imagine the influence that has over how these publicly traded companies run their businesses. Directly and indirectly, these massive corporations affect every single one of us.
The history of these corporations is a history of repeated injuries and injustices, together constituting absolute tyranny over our lives. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
PIES believes the root of America’s economic pain is the modern stock market. What looks like a single marketplace is really a tangled maze of clearinghouses, exchanges, brokerages, and giant funds. A tight-knit club of financial titans. Together they shuffle more than $150 billion every trading day! That’s roughly twice what the entire United States produces in that same span. When that much money changes hands, it changes priorities. Public companies don’t answer to people anymore; they answer to the market. And that affects us all.
The history of these corporations is marked by repeated harms and injustices—quiet enough to ignore, but powerful enough to shape our daily lives. To prove this, we submit the following facts to a candid world.
The Economic Crimes of “Business as Usual”
For generations, large corporations have placed short-term profit above the long-term well-being of people and the planet. In doing so, they have committed repeated economic, environmental, and social harms.
These actions were not accidental. They were carried out under the direction of boards and shareholders, whose narrow definition of “return on investment” serves only their personal wealth. Since there are virtually no consequences for their actions, they repeat them in a vicious cycle that’s simply become “business as usual”.
Enforced by the power dynamics of today’s stock markets, this system is guilty of the following offenses:
- Shifting good-paying jobs overseas, exploiting workers in regions with fewer protections and weaker labor rights.
- Suppressing wages at home by lobbying against fair pay laws and dismantling workers’ rights to organize.
- Laying off employees by algorithm, treating people as costs to be cut, not as lives impacted.
- Abandoning retirement promises, gutting pensions and pushing workers toward volatile 401(k) plans with little support.
- Profiting from basic needs, driving up the price of medicine, housing, and energy until survival itself feels out of reach.
- Contaminating water supplies with toxic chemicals like PFAS, lead, and industrial waste.
- Fueling climate collapse through unchecked carbon emissions and the destruction of forests.
- Polluting our ecosystems with microplastics, pesticides, and waste from industrial farming.
- Endangering public health by flooding the market with ultra-processed food and toxic consumer products.
- Dominating entire industries, crushing small businesses and blocking new ideas from ever taking root.
- Buying power in politics, flooding elections and policy with corporate cash and unchecked lobbying.
- Dismantling protections, weakening labor rights, environmental safeguards, and financial regulation through strategic deregulation.
- Dodging their fair share, exploiting tax loopholes and offshoring profits while everyday people shoulder the burden.
- Trapping people in debt, with predatory lending, payday loans, and hidden fees designed to exploit the vulnerable.
- Crushing collective power, busting unions and intimidating employees who organize for fair treatment.
- Dodging responsibility, misclassifying workers as contractors to deny them benefits and protections.
- Stealing labor, through wage theft, unpaid overtime, and on-call schedules that demand constant availability.
- Cutting corners on safety, exposing workers to hazardous conditions in pursuit of greater profit.
- Stripping away dignity, using surveillance, micromanagement, and using constant tracking and automated systems to control every moment.
- Turning care into commerce, as essential services like healthcare, education, and clean water are run for profit, not for people.
- Fueling displacement, by treating homes as financial assets rather than places to live.
- Trapping students in debt, through lending models that reward rising tuition over affordable access.
- Creating incentives to incarcerate, with investment-backed prison systems that grow by locking up more people.
- Exploiting illness, as investors seek returns from high prices on critical care and medicine from a captive market.
- Turning people into products, by harvesting and selling personal data without consent.
- Prioritizing profit over well-being, through algorithms designed to hook users, regardless of mental health costs.
- Designing for disposability, with products built to break so replacements can be sold.
- Automating jobs without accountability, displacing workers in pursuit of efficiency and returns—with no plan for what comes next.
- Greenwashing, using deceptive environmental claims while continuing harmful practices.
- Diversity washing, tokenizing representation without addressing systemic inequalities.
- Astroturfing, imitating grassroots activism to serve corporate agendas.
Speaking Out Against These Offenses
At every stage of these abuses, the people have raised their voices—protesting, petitioning, demanding better. But our calls have been met not with justice, but with silence. Not with reform, but with retaliation. An economy that refuses to serve its people does not deserve their labor, their trust, or their participation.
Addressing the Complicit
We do not condemn “business” itself—nor do we call for its abolition.
Commerce, at its best, builds. It connects, employs, nourishes, and uplifts.
But when power is hoarded by faceless institutions, answerable only to profit, business loses its way. Today, the stock market is the true seat of power—quiet, abstract, and overwhelmingly controlled by a wealthy few. Institutional investors hold over 80% of public equities, and with that, the power to shape how corporations treat workers, communities, and the planet. If we, the people, bear the consequences of these decisions, then we must also hold the power to make them. We must become the shareholders, not just in name, but in influence. Business must not be abolished. It must be made accountable. To all of us.
We know that PIES is not a governing body. We don’t write laws, and we don’t set regulations. What we do offer is a new foundation, one where financial influence comes from people who care. By changing who holds the power of ownership, we can shift what gets prioritized in boardrooms, balance sheets, and business models. PIES isn’t here to fix every injustice, but it is here to build a market where doing better is rewarded, and where people, not profits, shape the future.
Independence Proclamation
We, the Peoples’ Institute for the Enlightenment of Society (PIES), do therefore declare our intention to build a new economy, one rooted in justice, shared prosperity, and collective well-being. Our mission is economic nirvana for people, our communities, and our planet. We believe that the path to economic bliss is paved by the collective efforts of all of us, working together to make a better life for ourselves and each other. We believe that now, more than ever, we should be raising the standards of how we do business. We believe the tools now exist to build a new kind of stock market, one designed to serve the many, not the few. And we believe that when everyday people are granted the rights of shareholders, we gain more than power over our investments, we gain a say in the world we are building.
PIES, its team, and all those who join below, hereby commit to building this economy together: an economy of the people, by the people, and for the people.
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