Imagine a relationship built on a permanent threat of departure.
One person is always negotiating. The other is always conceding. Every disagreement carries the same implication: keep me happy, or I'll leave.
Most people would not call that a healthy relationship. They would call it coercion.
Yet this is often how American cities are taught to think about large corporations. We are told that prosperity depends on keeping them satisfied, that public resources must be marshaled to meet corporate demands, and that any scrutiny of labor practices, tax avoidance, or political influence risks driving them away.
Even then, they often leave anyway.
In 2013, Washington state handed Boeing what amounted to one of the largest corporate tax packages in American history. The terms were familiar: Give us what we want, or we take the jobs with us. The state complied. The incentives were delivered. And the departures came anyway. Boeing moved its corporate headquarters, and the jobs vanished. The public coffers, which might have funded schools, transit, and housing, were instead handed over to shareholders who owed this state nothing and proved it. The takeaway from that episode was not that we failed a business — it was that we trusted a relationship that was never meant to be reciprocal.
We see these types of results everywhere. We have been conditioned by decades of compliant editorial boards, corporate propaganda, and the ambient mythology of American capitalism to treat the word "business" as though it describes a single, coherent thing. Amazon is a business. So is worker-owned Jude's in Rainier Beach. Starbucks is a business. So is family-owned Homer on Beacon Hill.
But to speak of multinationals and community businesses in the same breath, to subject them to the same political calculus, is to participate in a fiction. And it is a fiction that has never served the people who actually live here.
When Mark Zuckerberg's $300 million yacht recently floated into Seattle at the same moment his company Meta announced plans to cut nearly 1,400 local jobs, it served as a fitting metaphor for the modern corporation. Capital arrives. Capital extracts. Capital departs. The relationship is often transactional, and increasingly temporary. If there is a cleaner image for the nature of extraction, it has not yet been coined.
And still, the same conversation resumes. Starbucks expands into Nashville, a city where, as John Burbank recently pointed out, workers earn $7.25 an hour, abortion is banned without exception for rape or incest, and the legislature has just gerrymandered away its only Black-majority congressional district.
At Jude's, a worker-owned cooperative in Rainier Beach, the people serving the food and washing the dishes are also the owners. Their wealth does not vanish into a shareholder portfolio held in a city they've never seen. It circulates through the neighborhood. It pays rent in the same zip code. It sends children to the same schools. The workers of Jude's are not a variable cost to be managed in a downturn. They are the institution. When the cooperative succeeds, Rainier Beach feels that success. And crucially, they are not leaving. They are already home.
This is the distinction we have been trained to ignore.
When a fire forced Homer on Beacon Hill to close for months, the owners continued paying their staff in full. Not because a law required it. Not for good press. But because they understood something the Fortune 500 playbook does not teach: that workers are not spreadsheet inputs. They are neighbors. They are the reason the business exists inside a community rather than merely adjacent to one. That understanding is a choice, just the same way maximizing shareholder value, despite what generations of executives have implied, is also a choice. Public corporations are not legally required to cannibalize their workforce, hollow their tax base, or threaten municipalities into submission. They choose to.
We do not have to keep choosing this.
A recent Intentionalist survey found that more than two-thirds of Seattle's small business owners reported greater financial stress today than during the height of the pandemic. Most employ fewer than 10 people. Most operate below a million dollars in annual revenue. They are the businesses that make neighborhoods navigable and that root culture in place rather than float it offshore.
These businesses are asking, with considerable restraint, for low-interest capital, for grant programs that don't require fronting money they don't have, for stable rents and walkable streets, and someone to help them tell their story. They are pleading for the city, and its occupants, to support them with the same urgency we extend to those who threaten, loudly and publicly, to leave.
None of this portends hostility toward large corporations. But it demands clarity and that we stop organizing civic life around the preferences of institutions whose commitment to us is, at best, contingent. The businesses most deserving of public support are the ones whose futures are inseparable from our own.
Because this city is not, and has never been, a transaction to them.
It is home.
And a city that finally decides to invest in the people who have always known that, who have always built here, stayed here, raised children here, mourned here, persisted here, is not a city hostile to business.
It is a city finally learning what business is for.
Marcus Harrison Green is the founder of the South Seattle Emerald.
We're building a newsroom rooted in community, not corporate backing. Help us raise funds to hire our first-ever full-time reporter and grow our capacity to cover the South End. Donate today.