Its like you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them" (corporations/governments/groups of lobbyists) from working together.

I'll point to the gun rules, where gun owners prevented the state from building gun registries, forced gun sale records to be kept on gun store premises, and then largely purchased from small independent gun stores. They ensured the background check was on the person and not the gun. All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.

You can avoid giving any single person or group too much power. It does take effort.

Your thesis that the solution is to "not to have the power exist at all, anywhere" and your insistence here that "you need a list of laws rules and enforcement "we" people have built to stop "them"" are at odds. "We" did not build those laws nor do "we" enforce them. The government wrote those laws and the government enforces them with its monopoly on violence. You cannot have a set of laws which anyone respects or enforces without a source of power capable of doing so, and in the US that source of power is not "we the people," regardless of what your civics classes might have taught you.

>All intentionally with the understanding that someone somewhere was going to attempt to grab the power of who had what guns.

And so it became impossible to do anything effective to prevent gun violence and mass shootings and "that someone somewhere" proceeded to centralize power anyway because the gun owners don't actually care as long as no one touches their guns.

Meanwhile the rest of the Western world has democratic governments which actually function and don't have mass shootings.

Good work I guess.