USA

WARNING: This site deals only with the corporate corruption of science, and makes no inference about the motives or activities of individuals involved.
    There are many reasons why individuals become embroiled in corporate corruption activities - from political zealotry to over-enthusiastic activism; from gullibility to greed.
    Please read the OVERVIEW carefully, and make up your own mind.

OPINION ONLY

Matt Swetonic was a well-known science lobbyist and disinformation expert who worked for most of his life for Hill & Knowlton (often through its E Bruce Harrison Co. subsidiary), and much later as the New York partner in the Dilenshneider Group.

His most important clients were all companies and industries with major health and product-liability problems.

• Asbestos — Johns-Manville. He ran the Asbestos Information Association for them.
  
• Chemicals — Dow Chemicals. He ran a group of scientists ('a flying circus') who toured America telling the media and public that Agent Orange and dioxins weren't that harmful.
  
• Tobacco — both Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds. He founded and helped run the Total Indoor Environmental Quality association (NEDA/TIEQ), and promoted the Premier 'smokeless' cigarette.

George Carlo is one of Washington DC's most notorious science-for-sale entrepreneurs, and he has dozens of companies and non-profits. His main two are the Health & Environmental Sciences group (HES) and the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).

Carlo and Swetonic were old scientific lobbying associates since they both worked for Dow Chemical on Agent Orange and dioxins leaching out of toxic waste dumps.

Carlo has also worked for Dow Corning (on failed breast implants); Philip Morris (on studies proving the Environmental Protection Agency was biased, and on formulating new standards for regulatory epidemiology); and later with the Cellular Telephone Industry Association (CTIA) on a $27.5 million dollar Wireless Technology Research (WTR) program to prove cellphone radiations were safe.
[After 1999 he swapped sides and made money from radiation protection devices etc.]

This letter has been copied to MWH who is M Ward Hubbell, an ex-Reagan speechwriter, who had once been a Dow Chemicals internal lobbyist and then Hill & Knowlton/EBH staffer and associate of Swetonic. Hubbell was then acting as the "Executive Director" of the Total Indoor Environmental Quality (TIEQ) coalition which E Bruce Harrison had established under the umbrella of another fake organisation known as the National Environmental Development Association (NEDA).

Swetonic and Hubbell had founded both the NEDA and TIEQ for Philip Morris and a group of chemical and manufacturing companies to act as a lobby front for less regulation of Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). Essentially they were the same organisation with different funding sources (NEDA - chemicals — TIEQ - tobacco)

The original Swetonic document can be found at:

Smoking-gun document

    DATE: August 21, 1992
TO: Betsy Annese
FROM: Matt Swetonic
SUBJECT: George Carlo Meeting
COPIES: MWH

    As we have already discussed, yesterday I met in Washington with George Carlo, head of the Health & Environmental Sciences Group, a D.C. based health sciences consulting firm. I have known Carlo since 1983, when he was part of my "flying circus" of Dow scientists touring the country talking about the Agent Orange issue.

    As recently as three or four years ago, he had a working relationship with EBH [the E Bruce Harrison Co.] doing joint projects for various chemical industry clients. In short, we know Carlo very well and, as a result, he was quite open and. candid in the meeting.

    The study you sent me from Risk Analysis [the journal of the Society for Risk Analysis — virtually controlled by Carlo's friend John D Graham] was funded through the Institute for Regulatory Policy [a tobacco front run by Carlo's partner Thorne Auchter for Philip Morris] which, as you know, has been the lead group trying to pressure the White House to release the Executive Order on risk assessment reform.

[ Executive Orders from the president are a way of bypassing Congress. In this case the project was supported by Vice President Dan Quayle and his Council on Competitiveness, which consisted of only large corporations. They were trying to force the EPA, FDA and OSHA to do cost-benefit analyses before imposing any regulations on poisonous or polluting products... effectively putting the regulatory process in the hands of industry economists and opening the process to repeated legal challenge.]

    There were actually two studies published as part of the IRP effort to demonstrate to the White House that the scientific community had little faith in the way regulatory agencies were assessing risk. The second, a copy of which is enclosed, asked a ton of questions to scientists regarding what types of evidence they would consider important in assessing risk. A number of the questions relate directly to the ETS
['passive smoking'] situation, although none address it by name.
[The technique used by Carlo for the Philip Morris "Bias study" consisted of phone interviews where scientists were asked to register their reactions to the perceived dangers of radon, dioxins, lead, etc. with smoking being just one-among-many. The idea was to "prove" that scientists often had "preconceived biases" about certain products, and therefore couldn't be trusted to be impartial and dispassionate. Of course, only brain-dead scientist would not have formulated an opinion about these subjects by this time.

    The second part of the so-called "Bias study" study was actually more an elaborate PR program which was designed to promote the idea that scientists couldn't be trusted to do research directed at regulation. The public were essentially asked "Should the regulators use sound-science only when formulating their rules? (as against what the industry labelled as 'junk-science' or 'biased science')]

    The second study, in particular, received some favorable publicity in the environmental trade press around the beginning of this year (copies of those articles are attached). According to Carlo, EPA was so concerned about the implications of the study that he was called to a meeting at the agency to explain "what the hell I was up to."
[Note the hint that Carlo was a braggard, who couldn't always be trusted not to embroider the truth.]

    Regarding the Risk Analysis study, since, as I relayed to you previously, Carlo is unwilling to speak out directly in support of ETS, his "handlers" at the "primary funding organization" [Newman Partners Ltd. acting for Philip Morris] did little to publicize it when it was published in March.
[The problem was that the cynical journalists had always assumed that scientists would have preconceived ideas about the dangers of dioxins, cigarettes, lead, etc. because almost every thinking, breathing person, including most journalist, had the same ideas.... except for tobacco executives and libertarians.]

    Carlo believes, and I tend to agree, that it is probably too late to make much of a splash with it now. But there is something else he believes can be done.

    Carlo was personally involved in a number of meetings at the White House on the Executive Order and he believes, as does Ward Hubbell, that the primary reason the Order was never issued was because it would have been perceived as a caving-in to industry at the expense of the public health.
[Which it undoubtedly was, and Ward Hubbell, as a Reagan-Bush Republican zealot as well as a PR executive, would have known this well.]

    According to Carlo, Boyden Gray "screamed" (his word not mine) at them at one meeting that they had blown the whole thing by their heavy-handed corporate lobbying tactics and that he couldn't afford to hand the Democrats one more issue to beat President Bush over the head with in an election year.
[C Boyden Gray was a Reagan-Bush attorney and White House counsel, who was also a heir to a part of the RJ Reynolds Tobacco fortune. He later became a top lobbyist for tobacco via an astroturf, Citizens for a Sound Economy (now FreedomWorks) before rejoining the White House as an adviser to President Dubya Bush.]

    Carlo's idea for resuscitating the Executive Order is to create a groundswell of support among scientists for massive changes in the way regulatory agencies assess risk. He believes this would enable the White House to issue the Order, not because industry wants it, but because the scientific community believes it to be necessary.
[They finally persuaded President Clinton to issue a watered-down version of the order — but Clinton was smart enough to fire Thorne Auchter and other tobacco lobbyists from the advisory committee before the Order was drafted.]

    As evidence of the viability of this idea, he points to the finding in the new study I sent you that 81.8 percent of scientists disagree that "Public health dollars for reduction in environmental health risks are properly targeted in the United States."
[This sort of polling is a sure bet, as was the older 'Bias study'. Every health scientist believes that research dollars are misspent on supporting other inferior scientists, while not giving them enough for their own clearly-superior research projects.]

    In addition, he said he talked to dozens of independent scientists about the need for risk assessment reform, and nearly to a man they said: "What can I do the help?" He said "I had to tell them 'nothing right now' because that wasn't the original game plan."
[To an independent health scientist the idea of 'risk assessment reform' means a flood of research dollars from the regulatory agencies.]

    Carlo also told me that the reason EPA decided to reassess its dioxin risk assessment was not because of pressure from industry, which most people believe, but because the agency reluctantly concluded that the scientific community had lost faith in the original assessment and considered it totally off base.
[Carlo, when working for the Chlorine Chemical Council, was instrumental in promoting the industry claims that dioxins were not excessively dangerous (See Banbury Conference). His disinformation efforts for the CCC were primarily responsible for the EPA's Commissioner Reilly deciding that the agency had got it wrong, and needed to re-evaluate dioxin's carcinogenicy. Later under the Democrats, the EPA's dioxin controls became even more stringent.]

    In short, he sees the viability of a grass-roots effort directed at scientists across the U.S. to mobilize them in support of risk assessment reform.

    Specifically, Carlo is suggesting a series of highly publicized national risk assessment reform symposiums at which highly respected but carefully selected risk assessment experts would make the case for a revamping of our national approach to environmental risk assessment.
[The keywords here are 'carefully selected.' Risk Assessment is a discipline which was largely funded by poisoning and polluting companies, and it was overwhelmingly populated by their science-for-sale lackeys.]

    The program, he believes, could generate the scientific community support — which he believes exists but has yet to be coalesced — necessary to move the Executive Order out of the White House and into the realm of national policy. He feels Harrison [E Bruce Harrison Co.] has plenty of environmental umbrella groups through which the effort could be funded, and indeed suggested NEDA [National Environmental Development Association] as a potential sponsor. Ward [Hubbell who runs the NEDA and TIEQ operations] agrees and sees the new NEDA/RAP (Risk Assessment Project) as the proper vehicle.

    I can't say whether or not the project is doable, however, I think it has sufficient merit to carry the conversation forward. I told Carlo that I would discuss his idea with RJR and then get back to him regarding a possible follow-up meeting. If, following a face-to-face meeting, you see potential in the project, he said he would put together a formal proposal, with budgets, time-lines, etc.
[Despite George Carlo's constant protestations today that he was 'anti-tobacco', this is clear evidence of his complicity.]

    If you want to press forward on this while I am on vacation, I am enclosing Carlo's business card. I am also attaching his CV.

    By the way, he does not currently have any financial arrangement with the original sponsoring entity, although he is still on the IRP science advisory board, so he sees no conflict in initiating discussions with RJR.
[He fell out with Philip Morris because he didn't want his name to be used as a supporter of the tobacco industry, and therefore refused to front press-conferences when they were promoting his studies.]

Action Requested: Think this thing over and let me know if there is anything you want me to do. Please ignore the nanosecond window of time regarding my availability on the Cape to discuss the project.

• Philip Cole, Uni of Alabama who also worked for Dow Chemicals and the tobacco industry {There are a number of Philip Coles in this area[
  
• Keith Solomon of Uni of Guelf, Canada who also supported the tobacco and chemical industries and worked with Carlo on a number of occasions
  
• Robert Squire, Johns Hopkins Uni who also worked for HES on other occasions, and also for tobacco. He ran Dow's Kociba dioxin re-evaluation project which supposedly gave dioxins the green light.
  
• Anthony Miller, University of Toronto, who worked with Carlo on tobacco projects.

• Rachael's Environment & Health News, commenting on Wall Street Journal article Feb 20.

A remarkable front-page story in the WALL STREET JOURNAL February 20 confirmed that the paper and chlorine industries have waged a successful two-year campaign to bamboozle the nation's media about the toxicity of dioxin, and that U.S. Environmental Protection (EPA) fell for it too.

    The point of the campaign was to salvage the paper industry, which uses 15% of all the chemical industry's chlorine output, and which is facing billions of dollars in lawsuits brought by citizens claiming damages from dioxin released from paper mills.

    The JOURNAL's story ("How Two Industries Created a Fresh Spin on the Dioxin Debate") by Chicago-based staffer Jeff Bailey, describes a bald- faced campaign by the American Paper Institute (API) and the Chlorine Institute to "revisit" the scientific evidence that dioxin is a potent carcinogen.

    The JOURNAL says, "The paper industry scored its first major public-relations success in 1990, when paper companies arranged to challenge the findings of the most influential dioxin study ever done. That study, reported in 1978 by Richard Kociba, a Dow Chemical Co. pathologist, was done on 485 white rats, whose food was spiked with dioxin. Dr Kociba found a strong link to cancer: a daily dose of billionths of a gram led to tumors."

    The JOURNAL goes on: "Next the Chlorine Institute... arranged to bring three dozen of the world's foremost experts on dioxin to a conference at the Banbury Center [on Long Island in October, 1990]." The JOURNAL continues, "Also present was George L. Carlo, a scientist but not widely regarded as a dioxin expert...." "Carlo is not a scientist with a long history of dioxin credentials," Dr George Lucier of the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences told the JOURNAL. The JOURNAL goes on: "Why was Carlo there? Though described as a 'conference participant' by the Chlorine Institute, he was actually the industry's $150-an-hour observer. Based on his account, the institute would later circulate reports that the scientists had reached an important consensus. [snip] that dioxin does no harm until a certain threshold of exposure is reached. In other words, Carlo claimed — and the Chlorine Institute sent out press statements claiming — that the Banbury meeting had reached agreement that there is some amount of dioxin that is safe.

    However, before the world had a chance to learn that the Chlorine Institute was playing fast and loose with the facts, the Institute's disinformation about Banbury was fed to William Reilly, chief of EPA, who fell for it. Citing the Banbury "consensus," in early 1991 Reilly ordered his scientific staff to officially "reassess" the toxicity of dioxin.

• PM disinformation executive, Craig Fuller's Monthly Report for July 1992:

With regard to environmental tobacco issues, the Washington Relations Office continued its work with Corporate Affairs and PM USA to urge the Administration to issue an executive order that would establish procedures to enforce the application of sound scientific principles on all federal! risk assessments.

    In support of those efforts, Market Strategies, on behalf of the Institute for Regulatory Policy, conducted a nationwide survey which demonstrated overwhelming public support for basing environmental regulations on sound science (88%) as well as public concern that if regulations are driven by media or political concerns rather than science, American taxpayers can be hurt by such regulations (83%).

    Nevertheless, it appears that the EPA and the environmental groups have succeeded in blocking an executive order until after the election.

    Administration sources pointed to the difficulty of coordinating such an order during the campaign, and the adversaries argued that such an order would be perceived as a delay of necessary regulations and a lowering of standards under the pretense of applying sound science. [snip]

    Although the Administration's deferral of an exeeurtive order was a sigmiificant setback, we will continue our aggressive efforts to require the application of sound science to the ETS risk assessment.

• Tom Humber of Burson Marsteller (working for Philip Morris), organnised a petition to President Bush asking him to add risk assessment to the moratorium on regulatory activity.

    Humber wrote:

The Institute for Regulatory Policy
Started specifically to address the panoply of problems in the risk assessment and regulatory process identified by OMB
[Office of Management & Budget] in August 1990, IRP is an existi–ng mechanism that currently is in the best position to assemble and mobilize a wide variety of business groups, corporation–s, local governments and other parties concerned about or victimized by EPA excesses.

    Burson-Marsteller has worked with IRP, and its Director, former OSHA Administrator Thorne Auchter, since its inception, and has several clients who are among IRP's key supporters.

    In September, 1992, B-M mounted an intensive grass-roots effort on behalf of IRP to solicit quality signatures for a petition to President Bush asking,him to add risk assessment to;the moratorium on regulatory activity. That effort produced a total of 349 letters, the signers of which now represent an important base for a number of activities. Attached is a list of signers.
Citizens for a Sensible Environment (Citizens for a Sound Economy)
    This group is well-known to Philip Morris, and, like IRP, already has a track record of activity and is well-positioned to undertake a number of coalition-building activities.
[This was the group taken over by White House counsel, C Boyden Gray when Bill Clinton became president.]

    Burson-Marsteller has provided support to several previous activities, most notably in August 1992, with regard to a CSE-sponsored conference in Columbus, Ohio, featuring Vice President Quayle.

    Working with the office of the VP, the staff of the Competitiveness Council, CSE and IRP, B-M was involved in both concept and execution of a strategy that made sure that media coverage of the discrete message regarding over-regulation superseded the political noise surrounding the VP's appearance.

• Risk Assessment and the Bush I Executive Order
A Public Citizen: report on John D Graham

As an integral part of this campaign, in 1992 Philip Morris was tracking political developments with regard to a sweeping "risk assessment" executive order that was awaiting signature by then-President Bush.

    The executive order would have imposed a requirement on all government agencies to decide the validity and priority of regulatory proposals in terms of rigid risk estimates and would have mandated clearance of all regulations through a centralized office, in violation of many agencies' direct authorization from Congress to act to protect the public health and safety.
[Jim Tozzi the partner of Thorne Auchter, John Graham, and some other tobacco industry lobbyists and political friends, at various times during Republican presidencies took over the OIRA (Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs). This existed within the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and managed to stall most attempts at regulation for the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II Administrations]

    Philip Morris was working closely with governmental officials on the precise terms of the executive order. Corporate documents reflect ongoing conversations between Philip Morris and Thorne Auchter, who was a former Administrator of OSHA and was appointed in 1992 to the President's Risk Assessment and Management Commission and has been affiliated with the anti- regulation group, the Institute for Regulatory Policy (IRP).

    According to PR Watch, Philip Morris had given Jim Tozzi, of Multinational Business Services, [Thorne Auchter's partner and Reagan's director of the OIRA] $880,000 to establish IRP, a non-profit "think tank "which would work with both Philip Morris and APCO & Associates.
[APCO established TASSC, SEPP and Steve Milloy's junkscience.com websites to promote climate and smoking denial, and 'junk-science.]

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