Why you feel powerless against big corporations - and the one thing you need to flip the script

Big corporations are destroying our health. 

• They’re manufacturing harm (from tobacco to ultraprocessed food to fossil fuels) and manipulating our surroundings to profit them at the expense of our well-being (from car companies “insidiously shaping” cities for cars above all else to food companies creating the obesity crisis by shaping our food supply and environment). 

• They’re covering up the damage they do (Big Tobacco hid evidence about the dangers of smoking cigarettes, Big Pharma lied about how addictive their painkillers were, Big Oil scammed the public into thinking plastic would be recycled, NFL covered up concussions, Meta hid research about the negative impact of Instagram on teens, the list goes on). 

• And to add insult to injury, they’re blaming US - suggesting it is our lack of discipline and willpower that gets in the way of limiting our intake of drugs and foods and social media that they meticulously design to be addicting; that we need to watch our carbon footprint despite the fact that the largest companies are not only responsible for the vast majority of harmful emissions but lobby actively against laws that might help protect the planet; that we should just make different choices in environments that they have manipulated to make the choice that profits them the easiest - and sometimes the only - choice.  

Many of us recognize this. But we feel like there’s nothing we can do about it. 

It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of corporate power. Corporations and their leaders have billions (and billions) of dollars and direct lines of influence to our politicians. You might work for them and you almost certainly buy from them or invest in them. 

So, what’s one to do, right? 

Here’s little ol’ me on one side and this GIANT, powerful, rich corporation on the other. 

What’s the point in even trying to do anything? 

But here is where we need to flip the script. 

This is not an underdog story. 

This is a teamwork story.

Alone, yes, any one of us is relatively powerless to fight back against corporate greed. 

But TOGETHER, we can. 

Corporations are giant and powerful and rich because they’ve gamed the system and made us reliant on them. But ultimately, their profits come from our pockets and their power comes from those profits, along with policies stacked in their favor. 

If we come together as a team (in strategic, coordinated ways), we can stop lining their pockets and change the policies that make us reliant on them, allowing them to ruin our health, planet, and society in pursuit of more and more profit.  

So, what do we need to become a real team, fighting against corporate power and for community power? 

Think about the best sports teams in history. We need: 

• shared goals and coordinated strategy, 

• trust and connection, 

• clear roles and accountability, 

• a supportive, positive culture, 

• strong leadership. 

How do we get there? 

It starts with building trust and connection in our own neighborhoods and communities. Get together (yes, IRL!), listen with an open mind, find ways to help each other, and open up conversations to uncover shared goals. 

For those already organizing or taking political action as a team, it starts with getting more strategic and coordinated. What are you trying to change, what specific big ‘P’ (governmental) or small ‘p’ (organizational/institutional) policies need to shift, what set of coordinated, collective action can you help facilitate to make those shifts happen, and what roles and responsibilities can your team members commit to so that you can take those actions effectively and consistently? 

More broadly, we also need to consider what stands in our way of becoming a team and how to overcome or change that (neighborhoods designed to isolate us, schedules that leave no time for connection and community, a lack of local news to hold local policymakers accountable and investigate community problems - alone, we might not be able to change these things, but together, we can). We should also think more creatively about new ways to build this kind of team, how to bring more folks into these efforts, and how to sustain action. 

Together, we can reclaim our health, our planet, and our future. 

Let’s go. 

How Pittsburgh fought a private water giant - and won

Pittsburgh handed control of its water supply to a private multinational corporation, Veolia, in 2012 (yes, the same Veolia that was later sued by the state of Michigan for its role in the Flint water crisis). Over the next several years, Veolia made decision after decision that prioritized profits over safety and health - leading to high lead levels in the water, increasingly expensive water bills and major billing errors, boil advisories and water shutoffs (which were concentrated in mostly Black neighborhoods). 

A class action lawsuit and public pressure led the city to end its relationship with Veolia, but the crises of lead contamination and unaffordable water persisted. The Mayor sought to once again privatize the city’s water, this time with Peoples Gas (and while the city was exploring this partnership, the Mayor’s chief of staff went to work for Peoples Gas - a typical example of the revolving door politics that corrupts our systems). 

Enter Pittsburgh United. This coalition of community, labor, faith, and environmental organizations had already been engaged with the city’s water authority around a clean rivers campaign, and separately, had been working on expanding affordable housing with the very same communities now most impacted by water shutoffs and rising water costs. 

This positioned the coalition well on two key fronts: 

• Building a diverse coalition to keep water a public good: They were able to convene community groups from across the city (many of whom were already part of their existing campaigns around clean rivers and affordable housing) to organize the “Our Water Campaign” to keep the city’s water public. The coalition organized community members to knock on doors and connect with community members about their water bills and water quality, attend board meetings of the city water authority, provide public comments about community needs, and widely communicate the desire to keep the city’s water public. The coalition also included a wide range of groups and advocates that cared not just about water, but housing, economic justice, and environmental justice - this both made them a larger team and made others in the community and city council pay more attention to them. 

• Playing the inside-outside game: The coalition recognized the importance of finding allies inside government and knew from its work on clean rivers that at least some employees within the state water authority were both unhappy with Veolia’s management and cared about environmental justice. By working with the state water authority, the coalition was able to get them to create community advisory committees (“an accountability model…by which ordinary people can oversee the public water utility”) and agree to key changes like flexible payment plans, full (rather than partial) replacement of lead water lines, and a moratorium on water shutoffs (for unpaid bills) during the winter. 

In other words, community members came together as a team. They had trust and connection built over time, including working on other problems before the water crisis even happened. They had coalition leadership to provide guidance and coordination. They had a defined goal and a strategic, collective plan they put into motion together. 

Through their efforts, Pittsburgh residents were able to reclaim their water and send private corporations focused only on profits packing. 

And they’re not the only ones. Here at GASLIT, we’ll continue to bring these community success stories to you. 

Because together, we can. 

This post is a summary of the case study, “Water as Public Good: Pittsburgh’s Our Water Campaign,” published by Demos and Pittsburgh United in 2022. Check out Demos’s Economic Democracy Case Studies for more stories of communities reclaiming power from corporations and what it takes to win. 

Why telling smokers to quit didn’t work - and what actually did

The reduction in cigarette smoking in the U.S. is one of the biggest public health success stories in our lifetime. 

Source: American Lung Association analysis of CDC data 

How did we get here? 

I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t by telling smokers to just quit already. 

An individual smoker, who’s smoking a cigarette painstakingly designed to keep them hooked, vs. a giant multinational corporation with billions of dollars, policymakers in its pocket, and a legion of scientists being paid good money to design the product to be increasingly addictive and get it placed and marketed in highly appealing ways - that’s a losing proposition. 

Over decades, tobacco control organizations (including the Truth Initiative, where I worked for several years), state attorney generals, community advocates and others in the U.S. came together with coordinated strategies to push for solutions that actually put a dent in smoking rates. 

So, what actually worked? 

1. Prevention > After-the-Fact Treatment

Once you’ve started smoking, quitting is hard. Nicotine is physiologically addictive. Even though almost 70% of adults who smoke say they want to quit, and more than 50% try in a given year, fewer than 10% are actually able to quit each year. 

What works better? Preventing people - especially young people - from smoking in the first place. Among daily adult smokers, 87% tried their first cigarette by age 18 and 95% by age 21. 

And what works to prevent young people from smoking? Changing systems (what’s available and visible and where, how expensive it is, and so forth) and social norms (i.e., what their peers and others they care about think is okay). Which brings us to the next two lessons learned from what worked to bring smoking rates in the U.S. down. 

1. Changing the system > Changing the individual 

You can try to get each young person to ignore the temptation of shelling out a couple dollars to try a cigarette that they see front-and-center every time they pop into a shop, advertised all over the place with appealing flavors and colors - OR you can make cigarettes harder to get, more expensive, less advertised, and less appealing for all young people. The evidence is clear on what works to reduce smoking: tobacco taxes work; restricting advertising where cigarettes are sold works; banning menthol and other flavors in cigarettes works. 

Another key approach to changing the system that worked to bring smoking rates down in the U.S. is a joint legal challenge. Tobacco companies were forced to settle in court in 1998 through a Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with 52 state and territory attorney generals, which has directed billions of industry dollars towards preventing smoking and contributed to a significant drop in smoking in the U.S.

1. Population-level solution > single-person solution 

All those systems changes are powerful because they apply to all people in a community, all at once. Another thing that applies to all people in a community, all at once? Changing the unspoken rules about what’s okay to do - aka social norms. How did smoking cigarettes go from being cool and rebellious to lame and icky? A combination of things, including laws making restaurants, bars, and other places smoke-free and effective nationwide media campaigns (like the truth campaign’s anti-industry messaging, and the FDA’s Real Cost campaign, focused on the cosmetic effects and other costs of smoking). 

This is what public health is all about, as I explained in a TEDx talk a few years ago with the help of my daughters:  

Like jamming a square peg into a round hole, there is a fundamental mismatch between the individual level at which we think about and try to improve health and the population level at which health is actually determined.

So often, we get the message that if you’re not healthy - blame yourself. And if someone else isn’t healthy - shame on them. 

But that ignores the reality of the policies and systems that shape our choices and the increasing degree to which corporations mold those policies and systems to favor their profits over our well-being. 

So we need to put down the square peg and pick up the round peg:

- Put down single-person solutions & pursue population level solutions instead.

- Put down efforts to change individuals & change systems instead.

- Put down after-the-fact treatments & pursue prevention instead.

And yes, making the shift to prevention, to systems changes, to population-level solutions will be challenging. But together, we can do it - look no further than the graph at the top of this post for proof. 

What is Systemic Change? (A Beginner’s Guide in 3 videos)

So here at GASLIT, we’re talking a lot about the need to change systems. But what does that even mean? 

My favorite illustration is the upstream/downstream parable that most of us in public health hear early in our training: 

For those who prefer to read it, the story goes like this: A couple is fishing on a riverbank and all afternoon, they see people struggling in the current and rescue them one by one. Finally, they go upstream and discover an unprotected overlook where people have been falling in. They realize that if they could post some warning signs and put up a protective barrier, they could prevent everyone from falling in, instead of trying to rescue folks one at a time after they’re already drowning. Warning signs and protective barriers are just two examples of the kind of systems changes we focus on in the public health field. For a Kindergartener-ready interactive version of illustrating this story, check out my experience at my daughter’s elementary school career fair. 

By changing the system - instead of changing or treating the individual - we are more likely to address the root cause of the problem and come up with a solution that is effective and sustainable. 

So now we know what changing the system looks like. But how do we go about really understanding a system and identifying what needs to change about it? Often, when we start to think about how to change a system, we focus on the one piece of it we interact with or know about. This is a huge mistake. For more on why, let’s visit another favorite parable of mine (this one is a familiar one for those who’ve learned about systems thinking): 

For those who prefer to read it, the story goes like this: Six blind/blindfolded individuals encounter an elephant for the first time. Each person feels only one part of the elephant and comes to a conclusion about what they are encountering based on that (the one feeling the tail says it’s like a rope, the one feeling the tusk says it’s like a spear, the one feeling the ear says it’s like a fan, the one feeling the trunk says it’s like a snake, and so on). It leads to a lot of misconceptions and no single person who has the full and accurate picture. 

Systems thinking and systems change requires us to broaden our perspective. We have to work together across individuals, organizations, and sectors to get to a better shared understanding of all the intersecting parts of a system - and thus, a better understanding of where and how to intervene to improve the system. 

We also need to deepen our perspective to take in the entirety of a system - not just the tip of the iceberg. Which brings me to my next favorite systems thinking illustration, this one more a metaphor than a parable:

For those who prefer to read it, the basic idea is this: The problems we see in our communities are like the tip of an iceberg - they give us incomplete information, because 90% of an iceberg is below the surface of the water. The iceberg model organizes an issue into four levels: at the surface is the event or presenting problem that you can obviously see, under the surface are first underlying trends or patterns, then structures or forces contributing to the patterns, and finally at the deepest level, the mental models (beliefs, values, stereotypes, biases, and -isms, many of them subconscious)  that maintain the system structures.

When we dive deeper to see the whole iceberg, we get beyond reacting to events and symptoms and can get more proactive about addressing deeper root causes as well as gaining empathy and understanding for the perspectives of others in ways that might help us work across differences to improve our communities. 

With a better sense of how to think at a systems level, we’re still left with the question of how do we actually MAKE systems change - in our own work, in building community power, in reducing corporate power? That’s what we’re hoping to unpack here at GASLIT. For some initial examples, see our recent posts about how a community coalition in Pittsburgh fought to keep their water system public and how organizations and people across the country came together to change systems in ways that drove cigarette smoking rates way down in the U.S. 

If you’re trying to figure out how to apply systems thinking in your own work, you can find some very practical tips and guidance in the places the videos above are drawn from. The upstream video is drawn from a TEDx talk I gave a few years ago, and the elephant parable and iceberg model videos are from a systems thinking training I helped develop in partnership with the Rocky Mountain Public Health Training Center, which folks can access for free here. 

Individual-level solutions aren’t the answer to our public health and other problems, but individually, we can each begin to make the mindset shifts from individual-level thinking to systems-level thinking. That’s what we need to build community power and pursue systems-level solutions that actually work. Our health, our planet, and our future hang in the balance. Let’s do this. 

3 things you can do today to build community power

Building community power is key to strengthening community connection and agency (i.e., being able to make and influence decisions!), building buy-in for policies and system changes that support our health and planet, and reducing corporate power. 

Which all sounds great, but how in the world does one build community power? 

We’ll tackle what community coalitions and groups can do in another post but today's post is just about you. What can YOU do, especially if you aren't already part of a coalition or group advocating for change in your community?

• Text your neighbors, your local friend group, your book club, your church group, your basketball team, whoever your people in your local community are. Find a time to get together IRL and be intentional about what you’ll do in that time. Here are some options ot consider: 

• check in on how they are, 

• discuss how you all can help each other, 

• share how connected you each feel to your community (and what might help strengthen that), 

• find out if there are any local policy issues folks are interested in working together on.

Whatever set of questions feels right for your particular group, explore them. Feeling a sense of community and connection are step 1 before any meaningful organizing or joint action can happen.  

If you don’t know your neighbors or have “your people” in your local community yet, take some initial steps to build that (even if for no reason other than your own sense of community!). It’ll feel hard and uncomfortable at first, but know that many others are also seeking community and will be grateful you reached out or showed up. 

• See when your next local school board, planning commission, or health coalition meeting is and put it on your calendar to attend (take a neighbor with you if you can!). Before you have a sense of what to advocate for locally, you need a lay of the land, an understanding of the key players, and more information about the pros and cons of various policies under consideration. The first step to having your voice heard is being present and informed. 

• Find your local newspaper, news website, radio station, or other media outlet - start reading/listening, subscribe to it if you can, and keep it in mind if you advertise for your company. Strong local newsrooms help us: hold local public officials, agencies, and businesses accountable; investigate community problems; highlight community solutions that work; and build community connections. 

Many of us have lost our “civic muscle” over years of living in relative comfort and safety - it’s time to pick up those weights. Start small. Start local. You got this.