The other day I had a conversation with Marianne Williamson, right after she’d suspended her bid for the US presidency.  She and I were lamenting the corruption that is so pervasive everywhere, the fact that the US Congress, the news outlets, the government agencies supposedly there to protect the public – in fact, the entire matrix on which democracy is based – is controlled by one giant corrupt, interlinked matrix of international corporations.

Our magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You once did a survey of donations to US members of Congress, and virtually every last one, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, was accepting donations from drug companies, in a few cases up to a half million dollars a year.

And don’t expect the Food and Drug Administration to do anything to police Big Pharma, since half of the agency’s funding is paid for by the drugs industry itself.

Or the media to expose any of this because news outlets are now conglomerates controlled, in most instances, by the corporate giants.

Bottom line: in health and every other industry, the dice are loaded.

So what do we do?  How can we powerless individuals get anything changed?

The first way is by understanding how very powerful we the people actually are.

Take the European farmers. Farmers right now are being squeezed in every direction.  Supermarkets are forcing them to accept about 10 percent less for the food they supply.

The farmers have had to lower their prices even more, to compete with cheap imports of produce from Ukraine after the EU waived quotas and duties following the Russian invasion.

And while many farmers agree with the EU’s green measures to combat climate change, these costly regulations are impossible to meet when they are also asked to accept ever lower prices.

So what did they do? Farmers across Europe – from Italy Greece, Poland, Germany, Portugal, and France, and now even India – piled into their tractors and started protests.

Recently, hundreds of them gathered in Brussels city center to pelt the European Parliament with eggs. Others choked off traffic access to Paris city center and many other highways across the continent.

Finally, the lawmakers were forced to listen. French president Emmanuel Macron and his prime minister are now calling for EU-wide laws that would oblige supermarkets to pay fair prices and the lawmakers to create subsidies for farmers.

A grassroots movement forced the government to act.

Virtually all major change in the world starts with a small social movement.

Take Mohandas Gandhi and his movement to liberate India from British colonial rule. He understood that cheap machine-made British fabric was disrupting the whole of Indian textile production.

So what does he do?  He encourages the entire country to spin, weave and wear khadi, which is handwoven fabric from handspun thread.

He also leads the movement to bring spinning wheels to villages in India, to give employment to the poor.

Spinning, the khadi and the khadi cap became a symbol of Indian self-rule and the centerpiece of Gandhi’s National Congress party.

The spinning wheel was even on the party’s flag, a potent symbol of the movement that ultimately ended British rule.

Or, take the early days of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement.

By 1963, after a decade of protest, King’s movement wasn’t gaining much traction.  He and his small band of followers had been fighting the laws in the South that made it impossible for African Americans to vote, get a decent education or job – even to drink from the same water fountain as a white person.

King and Wyatt Walker, executive director of his organization, came up with a plan.

In May 1963, King upped the ante by organizing a march in Birmingham, Alabama, the most racist of all the places they’d marched on.  This time they were going to directly confront Bull Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, a good ol’ boy segregationist fond of saying, ‘Down here, we make our own laws.’

One of King’s team had been working with local schoolchildren, teaching them the principles of nonviolent resistance, so King’s group began dropping leaflets in churches and schools, inviting children to the march. By midday, some 1500 children poured into the streets, most of them just as spectators.

Connor was ready for them.

As the children began swarming forward, Connor ordered firemen he had on hand to turn on their hoses.

The force of the water ripped the shirts off many children’s backs, forcing them against shop doors, but the march carried on.

Once the children moved closer to ‘white’ Birmingham, Connor ordered in officers with a batch of well-trained police dogs.  One of the young people there on the day was a sophomore named Walter Gadsden, a 6-foot, handsome well-dressed 15 year old.

Gadsden wasn’t a marcher, only a spectator, but at one point, an officer and his dog Leo, a large German shepherd, lunged toward him.

Walker had made sure that a photographer from the Associated Press was present, and just as Gadsden appeared to lean in passively as he was about to be torn to pieces, the photographer snapped the picture.

By the next day, that photo was on the front page of every newspaper in America, and an appalled President John F. Kennedy and his Congress finally snapped awake.

By the following year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of modern American legislation, was passed.

As it happened, Gadsden was far from the passive victim.  He later described that he’d grown up around dogs, and knew how to protect himself, reflexively throwing his knee up in front of the dog.

But both King and his team all realized the power of image, and that photo alone began the serious move for change.

In every instance, these were grassroots movements that grew into a massive social revolution that ultimately changed history.

And that’s the immense power that each of us has when we start a grassroots movement.

Do you know what would happen if we began a movement on social network to make it uncool to take a drug less than five years old (there are older, safer drugs that do all the same things as all the modern ‘me-too’ drugs), and that really caught fire, just as the Ice Bucket Challenge had?

The share price of most big drug companies would start going through the floor (most of their money is made from copycat new drugs), the shareholders and politicians would start paying attention, and we’d likely be able to bring about change.

That’s the power you hold – particularly the power of your wallet.

So what movement would you like to start?  List your ideas below.  Because change – big change – is going to start with you and me – as it always has – and our collective power as a group.