This deep dive is our monthly love letter to the community. We keep it free for everyone because knowledge on commercial influence should be accessible.
US $6 trillion in corporate welfare for just three industries
Here is a statistic that might permanently imprint itself in your brain.
In his book “Dark PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment,” Grant Ennis highlights a stark contrast: over US$6 trillion in annual global subsidies flow to unhealthy food, road, and fossil fuel industries whose products are associated with more than 5.5 million preventable deaths each year.
Let’s let that sink in.
Placed side by side, those figures amount to roughly a million dollars in direct and indirect public financial support for these industries for every fatality that public health has associated with them.
And that’s only three industries. Ennis’s numbers do not account for other harmful sectors like firearms, Big Tech, alcohol, nicotine, gambling, and more.
How did we get here?
How did we get here? How is it that business activities and products that harm people and planet are not only allowed but financially incentivized even well after their dangers become known? Why is it proving so hard to shift political systems so that they put our money behind economic models and businesses that help us thrive?
We know it’s not impossible to regulate industry harms. After all, we no longer consume all sorts of toxic substances in our food, drinks, and consumer goods thanks to the U.S. Government prohibiting their use. So what do harmful industries do to stay over-subsidized and under-regulated?
Last month, Commercially Determined covered how harmful industries talk to convince us and policymakers to accept their preferred policies (and what to do about it). This month, we turn our attention to how industries spread their messages to policymakers and citizens. While the tactics and avenues of corporate political activity are many, they boil down to one simple principle: industries work overtime to make their preferred messages loud while quieting opposing views.
A coordinated influence system
When you’re fighting for public health, environmental, or social policy that impacts big business, you’re not just up against opposing viewpoints or arguments. You’re up against a coordinated influence system that stacks the policy game in industry favor. The system relies on oversized access to policymakers and distorted narratives to stunt regulatory processes.
Securing access
It starts with securing political access and credibility even before a business regulation might be proposed. To gain access to policymakers around the world, harmful industries:
Fund regulatory groups, business-friendly political candidates, and sometimes even make payments to politicians.
Make donations to government departments and initiatives.
Maintain a revolving door with regulators who can offramp to lucrative jobs in industry.
Borrowing credibility through science, astroturfing, and reputation management
To make their policies seem credible and rooted in evidence, businesses conduct their own research or fund outside scientists to do their preferred policy-relevant work. Corporate involvement in research introduces conflicts of interest into science which can bias not only the very questions that researchers ask, but also what they report finding and the conclusions they draw.
Businesses coordinate their efforts to protect their interests through trade, front, and non-profit groups in both public and hidden ways. While trade groups transparently promote their members’ interests, industry-funded front and non-profit groups manufacture an air of independence. The policy positions of industry-backed front and non-profit groups can appear to be coming from credible grassroots while hiding the profit driven motivation from their arguments, a tactic dubbed “astroturfing,” and “digital astroturfing” when done online.
Alongside securing the ears of policy makers, harmful industries prioritize building favorable sentiment across the general public to get us to support their policy positions. To do so, businesses utilize a variety of reputation management practices that Commercially Determined will dive deep into in future editions. The most important thing to know is that these practices often make businesses look like credible “good guys” who are trying to be part of the solution to the very problems they cause. Reputational management practices include:
Enacting ineffective voluntary standards and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives that greenwash and healthwash without meaningful change.
Working with governments on public-private partnerships that introduce conflicts of interest and dilute policy action.
Providing free educational resources to public schools, universities, and professional development for teachers, doctors, and other highly trusted groups to train them in industry-preferred narratives and solutions.
Often though, these initiatives not only fail to create meaningful change, they also reinforce the status quo. By spreading the industry-preferred ideology that emphasizes individual responsibility for societal ills, reputation management tactics help businesses continue to evade regulation.
Pelaez and Sbicca (2003) in Schölin et al., 2025
Manufacture loudness by putting a megaphone to industry-preferred messaging
Once access to key players and credibility is secured, harmful industries put a megaphone to their preferred policy positions by:
Widely publicizing their policy positions through purchased media pieces.
Secretly ghost writing op-eds, academic articles, and other communications that get published by outlets and individuals that are perceived to be credible.
Flooding public comments on proposed policies with preferred positions themselves and directing allies to do the same (i.e., trade, front, and astroturf groups and their representatives who do not disclose industry ties).
Pay armies of registered and shadow lobbyists to repeat industry positions to policymakers and regulators early and often through regular closed-door meetings.
While wanting to get your message across to policymakers is reasonable, businesses don’t always play fair. Their tactics manufacture the appearance of widespread support that can mislead the public and policymakers.
Manufacture silence by intimidating and exhausting opposition and regulators
Because individuals and groups fighting for public health, environmental, and social policies tend to be poorly funded in comparison to industry, their messaging is already likely to be quieter from the outset. In addition, many nonprofits who could be advocating or lobbying for policies that advance their causes do not do so, leaving political power on the table. Harmful industries further tilt this uneven political playing field by quieting others through tactics that intimidate and exhaust opposition, like:
Working behind the scenes to prevent policy-relevant research from taking place, being published, or being reviewed in policymaking processes.
Pushing to have papers retracted by writing accusatory letters (that don’t reveal industry ties) to journal editors.
Attacking, discrediting, or delegitimizing scientists, research findings, or organizations on baseless grounds to sway regulator decisionmaking away from considering opposing arguments.
Burying opposition and policymakers in expensive, exhausting, and drawn-out legal proceedings.
These activities can silence policy opposition and discourage others from ever speaking up.
Fight for upstream policies that transfer power to industry
While many nonprofits and advocacy groups might lobby for public health or environmental policies that protect people from a particular harmful product or business practice, few work further upstream to secure regulatory power. Upstream is where corporations shape what they and other organizations can do in the political sphere. Industry is shaping the rules of the game when policies:
Remove limits from corporate funding of political campaigns and candidates.
Fail to pass or enforce strict corporate lobbying and transparency laws.
Stop state and local regulators from being able to enact stricter pro-public-good legislation than federal laws.
Put the burden of proof for corporate harms on the public, nonprofits, or regulators rather than making industry prove their products are safe, adopting standards of causal proof of harm that are extremely hard to meet.
Tie up regulatory agencies in time-consuming processes, limiting budgetary rules, and unfair cost-benefit analyses that pit public health and environmental benefits against business costs.
Documented effects of corporate political activity by harmful industries
Researchers have demonstrated several effects of sustained corporate political activity by harmful industries.
Access to policymakers is unbalanced: Industries can gain oversized preferential access to decision-makers during the policymaking process compared to pro-public-interest groups, sometimes overwhelming the typically strained policymaking process.
De Olho Nos Ruralistas (2022) in Schölin et al., 2025.
Narratives are distorted: Industry narratives can get a megaphone and what looks like consensus can mask hidden coordination.
Science and policy are chilled: When scientists are dragged through public attacks or legal battles, a message is sent to others around them to be careful about what they study and write. When strained policymakers are flooded with industry opposition, it too can cool off similar proposals or implementation of policies elsewhere.
Who wins? Who loses?
In the end, when public-interest science and policies are delayed, weakened, or entirely forestalled, business as usual continues, protecting harmful industry profits. In the meantime, trust in government and science can suffer when corporate influence is revealed while public health, safety, and environmental harms continue. Democracy itself is undermined when some voices are routinely privileged and amplified, while others are systematically dampened or excluded, leading some analysts to describe underhand corporate political activity as political corruption.
Leveling the playing field and understanding the game being played
It’s not only that harmful corporations have tilted the playing field, which they’ve done to an inordinate degree. They are playing an entirely different game on the same field. Too often they design the game and its rules in the first place.
Unlike industry advocates, pro-public policy proponents typically follow procedure and propose and comment on policies using best available evidence in a transparent way and at human scale. Many harmful industries, on the other hand, use their financial power and underhand tactics to subvert procedures, undermine opposing science and views, and propose and comment on policies in a way that creates the illusion of widespread support.
Acting on these tactics isn’t about silencing business. It’s about preventing any single interest from dominating democratic systems, moving away from under-regulation and over-subsidization of harmful industries, and creating economies that help us thrive.
Understanding the corporate political activity system is the first step to changing it. Next week, we’ll look at what can be done in your social change space.
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By Selda Ulucanlar and seven colleagues in International Journal of Health Policy Management, 2023
This manuscript from the commercial determinants of health research community offers a taxonomy of narrative and action tactics that businesses use to shape policy messaging and get it to those in power (and to the public). The authors developed their taxonomy by pouring over research on strategies used by unhealthy commodity industries (UCIs) such as tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and beverages, and gambling. This manuscript is a vital guide for knowing what to expect from industry corporate political activity to anyone working on policies to protect people and planet.
By Wendy Wagner and two colleagues in DePaul Law Review, 2024
An enlightening legal paper on how the chemical industry has profoundly shaped the rules that govern it in the United States. The authors focus on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the main federal law regulating industrial chemicals, and argue that its design places heavy burdens on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) when the agency tries to restrict dangerous substances. The result is a system that often struggles to protect the public from harmful chemical exposures. While the EPA formally considers many perspectives in writing rules, Wagner and her coauthors explain how the law’s procedural requirements, standards for court review, and multiple points of access give industry repeated opportunities to delay, weaken, or challenge regulation. They propose reforms to reduce these structural advantages and strengthen the agency’s ability to protect public health.
By William Oberman in Business & Society Review, 2004
Many business papers on corporate political activity normalize it as a thing that is done in the pursuit of profit. They don’t see any issues with it and unproblematically describe underhand corporate activities as just how things are, like knowingly calling astroturf groups “manufactured agents.” But not William Oberman. In this oldie but goodie 2004 paper, the business school professor takes a step back to question not how industries can go about influencing the political system in their favor, but whether they should. He discusses how much of corporate political activity undermines democracy itself by systematically cutting out public voices while privileging corporate ones. He proposes that businesses should have a voluntary code of ethics for corporate political activity to make sure it does not hurt society. It’s an important read for all business leaders, academics, and professionals! Although, we believe that voluntary standards are not likely to be effective and enforced regulation of corporate political activity is a better way forward.