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-------Original Message-------
Date: Monday, July 02,
2001 05:47:38 PM
Subject:- ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY
Forwarded News Item
Please
copy and distribute to other interested individuals and
groups
**********
When you read the following, keep in mind
that the two most influential science journals in the world, Nature and
Science magazines, devote approximately 50% of their pages to slick
advertisements, mostly from biotechnology, pharmaceutical and chemical
companies. The same is true for the top mainstream medical journals.
Editorial boards of all of them are stacked with fanatical advocates of
biotechnology and drugs, millionaire doctors and scientists with personal
financial vested interests in continuance of the corporate-dominance in
science and medicine. Against this backdrop, any scientific or
health-related discovery which would disempower the multinationals must
remain small-scale and relatively hidden, or risk being smashed to bits.
Internet is the only true "free market" information resource, with "open
competition" for new ideas
and
approaches.
J.D.
=======================Electronic
Edition========================
.. .
.. RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT &
HEALTH NEWS #725 .
.. ---May 24, 2001--- .
.. HEADLINES: .
.. THE
ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY .
.. ========== .
.. Environmental Research
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=================================================================
THE
ENEMIES OF DEMOCRACY
The enemies of democracy are flexing their
muscles. A corporate front group calling itself Frontiers of Freedom has
petitioned U.S. tax officials to revoke the tax-exempt status of
Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a major environmental organization (www.ran.org). If successful, the petition
would put Rainforest Action Network out of business, and would open the
door for lethal attacks on other environmental advocates. Frontiers of
Freedom acknowledged to the WALL STREET JOURNAL that, if successful
against RAN, "it will challenge other environmental
groups."[1]
Frontiers of Freedom was founded in 1995 by Malcolm
Wallop, a former U.S. Senator (R-Wyo.) and "friend of vice-president Dick
Cheney," according to the WALL STREET JOURNAL. The JOURNAL reports that
Frontiers is funded by Philip Morris Companies, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco
Holdings, Inc., and the Exxon Mobil Corporation.
This latest
corporate attack on freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom
of assembly, is not random. It is part of an accelerating campaign to
replace representative democracy with control by corporate
elites.
Now a new book, TRUST US, WE'RE EXPERTS! by Sheldon Rampton
and John Stauber, provides a chilling, documented history of ongoing
corporate efforts to use propaganda and "public relations" to distort
science, manipulate public opinion, discredit democracy, and consolidate
political power in the hands of a wealthy few.[2]
The Big Idea
behind the anti-democratic corporate-power movement is that people cannot
be trusted to make political decisions because they are irrational,
emotional, and illogical. This cynical view of humans is widely held by
the public relations industry's experts but also by the scientific experts
they employ to 'guide' the public. For example, physics professor H.W.
Lewis (University of California, Santa Barbara), a well-known risk
assessor, says people worry about non-problems like nuclear waste and
pesticides because they are irrational and poorly educated. "The
common good is ill served by the democratic process," he says. (pg.
111)
If people are not rational they cannot be guided by reason, so
they must be manipulated through emotion, PR experts say (thus justifying
their own propaganda services). For example, a spokesperson for
Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm that manipulates the public on behalf of
Philip Morris, Monsanto, Exxon Mobil and others, told the Society of
Chemical Industry in London in 1989, "All of this research is helpful in
figuring out a strategy for
the chemical industry and for its products.
It suggests, for example, that a strategy based on logic and information
is probably not going to succeed. We are in the realm of the illogical,
the emotional, and we must respond with the tools that we have for
managing the emotional aspects of the human psyche...The industry must be
like the psychiatrist..." (pg. 3)
The PR psychiatric manipulation
industry is now enormous. Corporations spend at least $10 billion
each year hiring PR propaganda experts (pg. 26) and our federal government
spends another $2.3 billion or so (pg. 27) -- and these are no doubt
underestimates. But these huge sums are not wasted -- they provide major
benefits to the clients. For example, about 40% of all stories that appear
in newspapers are planted there by PR firms on behalf of a specific paying
client. Because most radio and TV news is simply re-written from newspaper
stories, a substantial proportion of the public's "news" originates as PR
propaganda. Naturally the connection to the PR source is edited
out.
The COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW analyzed the WALL STREET
JOURNAL and found that more than half its stories are "based solely on
press releases" even though many carry the misleading statement, "By a
WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter." Thus what passes for news these days
is, as often as not, corporate propaganda. Tongue in cheek, Rampton and
Stauber refer to the major news media as the disinfotainment
industry.
Unfortunately, as Rampton and Stauber make crystal clear
with example after example, all of this manipulation has devastating
consequences for real people. The news media largely set the limits on
public discussion, and thus on public policy debate. What is
excluded from the news is often more significant than what gets inserted.
For example, approximately 800,000 new cases of occupational illness arise
each year, making occupational
illness much larger than AIDS and
roughly equivalent to cancer and all circulatory diseases, but most people
have no idea that this is so. (See REHN #578.)
Combined with
on-the-job injuries, work-related illnesses kill about 80,000 workers each
year -- nearly twice the national death total from automobile accidents.
In 1991 former NEW YORK TIMES labor correspondent William Serrin reported
(but, notably, NOT in the NEW YORK TIMES) that about 200,000 workers had
been killed on
the job since the passage of the Occupational Safety and
Health Act (OSHA) in 1970, and that an additional 2 million workers had
died from diseases caused by conditions where they worked.[3] That's
273 work-related deaths EACH DAY, day after day after day. This
corporate carnage is ignored by the news media, which prefer
to keep us
focused on yuppie SUV crashes, and crimes of passion.
During the
same 20-year period, 1970-1990, an additional 1.4 million workers were
permanently disabled in workplace accidents. Yet during those 20
years, only 14 people were prosecuted by the Justice Department for
violation of workplace safety standards and only one person went to jail
-- for 45 days for suffocating two workers to death in a trench
cave-in.
PR experts "spin" stories for the media on the assumption
that most reporters are too overworked (or too lazy) to search out the
truth for themselves. But Rampton and Stauber exhaustively document that
"spin" goes much farther than merely providing a "news hook," a viewpoint,
or a few facts. Modern corporate propaganda involves purchasing scientific
opinions and planting them in scientific journals (without, of course,
mentioning the money connection to the corporate benefactor). Tobacco
companies invented this technique, but now others are using it freely. For
example, in the early 1990s, tobacco companies paid $156,000 to a handful
of scientists to sign their names to letters written by tobacco company
lawyers. The letters were published in the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL
ASSOCIATION, the LANCET, the JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL CANCER INSTITUTE, and
the WALL STREET JOURNAL, and were then cited by the tobacco companies as
if they had been written by independent scientists. "It's a systematic
effort to pollute the scientific literature," says professor of medicine
Stanton Glantz (University of California, San Francisco), a longtime
critic of Big Tobacco. (pg. 199)
In 1999 drug maker Wyeth
Laboratories commissioned ghost writers to manufacture ten medical
articles promoting a combination of Wyeth drugs called fen-fen, as a
treatment for obesity. Two of the articles actually got published in
peer-reviewed journals. After fen-fen was pulled from the market for
permanently damaging
peoples' heart valves, lawyers for injured victims
discovered that Wyeth had edited the articles to play down and
occasionally delete descriptions of side effects caused by fen-fen.
Prominent scientists put their names on these articles in return for fees
as small as $1000 to $1500 -- and journal editors published the articles
as if they represented independent scientific inquiry. Wyeth could
then cite these "independent" studies to convince
doctors to prescribe
fen-fen.
In 1996, Sheldon Krimsky of Tufts University examined 789
articles published by 1105 researchers in 14 leading life science and
biomedical journals. In 34% of the articles, at least one of the chief
authors had an identifiable financial interest connected to the research.
None of these financial interests was disclosed in the journals. Krimsky
said the 34% figure was probably an underestimate because he couldn't
check stock ownership or corporate consulting fees paid to
researchers.
Science, like democracy, depends crucially upon the
free flow of information. When secrecy is imposed, errors go undetected
and fallacies proliferate -- only to be discovered years later, if at
all.[4] For example, secrecy has allowed the U.S. military to create
a "pattern of exaggeration and deception" in its reports to Congress, just
as secrecy allowed the military to waste more than $100 billion (!) in
failed attempts to create a workable "star wars" missile defense
system.[5] In 1993, a front-page story in the NEW YORK TIMES began,
"Officials of the 'Star Wars' project rigged a crucial 1984 test and faked
other data in a program of deception that misled Congress..."[6] Secrecy
invites deception and destroys democratic accountability.
Rampton
and Stauber point out that "Corporate funding creates a culture of secrecy
that can be as chilling to free academic inquiry as funding from the
military. Instead of government censorship, we hear the language of
commerce: nondisclosure agreements, patent rights, intellectual property
rights, intellectual capital." (pg. 214)
A key feature of the
corporate anti-democracy strategy of the past 20 years is reduced
government funding for needed research, thus inviting corporate funders to
step in. This is what "tax cut" really means. Tax cuts are not primarily
aimed at givingfamilies another $300 to spend -- they are mainly intended
to reduce the capacity of governments to fund needed public services, such
as medical research. As a result, corporations are asked to provide the
funds and thus they gain an opportunity to influence the national research
agenda and the results.
In 1994 and 1995 researchers at the
Massachusetts General Hospital surveyed more than 3000 academic scientists
and found that 64% of them had financial ties to corporations. They
reported in the JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION (JAMA), that
20% of the 3000 researchers admitted that they had
delayed publication
of research results for more than 6 months, to obtain patents and to "slow
the dissemination of undesired results." "Sometimes if you accept a grant
from a company, you have to include a proviso that you won't distribute
anything except with its OK. It has a negative impact on science," says
Nobel-prize-winning biochemist Paul Berg. (pg. 215) In 1999 Drummond
Rennie, editor of JAMA, said private funding of medical
research was
causing "a race to the ethical bottom.... The behavior of universities and
scientists is sad, shocking, and frightening," Rennie said. "They are
seduced by industry funding, and frightened that if they don't go along
with these gag orders, the money will go to less rigorous institutions,"
he said. (pg. 217)
In this rich, deep book, Sheldon Rampton and
John Stauber have painstakingly documented the specific techniques that PR
experts and their corporate masters employ to deceive the courts, the
legislatures, the media, educators, and the public. The next time someone
accuses you of "chemophobia" or of relying on "junk
science" you'll
know you're dealing with corporate manipulators who are being guided by PR
skanks. Their overriding goal is to discredit decision-making by the
public and replace it with control by corporate elites. They know better,
they're experts, trust them.
The final chapter of this important
book tells us how to fight back. If you care about democracy, science or
simple truth and want to know exactly how corporate elites subvert all
three, this is the book for you.
================
[1] Anne
Marie Chaker, "Conservatives Seek IRS Inquiry On Environmental Group's
Status," WALL STREET JOURNAL (June 21, 2001) pg. unknown.
[2]
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, TRUST US, WE'RE EXPERTS HOW INDUSTRY
MANIPULATES SCIENCE AND GAMBLES WITH YOUR FUTURE (New York:
Tarcher/Putnam, 2001). ISBN 1-58542-059-X. And check out their web site:
http://www.prwatch.org/cgi/spin.cgi.
[3]
William Serrin, "300 Dead Each Day: The Wages of Work," THE NATION Vol.
252, No. 3 (January 28, 1991), pgs. 80-81.
[4] Tim Weiner,
"Military Accused of Lies Over Arms," NEW YORK TIMES (June 28, 1993), pg.
A10 quoting a 3-year investigation by the U.S. General Accounting
Office.
[5] William J. Broad, "After Many Misses, Pentagon Still
Pursues Missile Defense," NEW YORK TIMES (May 24, 1999), pgs. A1,
A23.
[6] Tim Weiner, "Lies and Rigged 'Star Wars' Test Fooled
theKremlin, and Congress," NEW YORK TIMES (August 18, 1993), pgs. A1,
A15.
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