Global

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

Many people imagine that public relations and professional corporate lobbyists are rather nasty, obsequious people who lie constantly.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Such people are totally ineffective.

You can't make a living in glad-handing professions [politics, PR, lobbying and the distortion of science and the political processes] unless you are an affable, attractive, one-of-the-boys/girls type. Most of these people are gregarious and intelligent.

Nor do these people simply distort the truth by outright lies: it's far too easy to be caught out. Most PR is a matter of selectively packaging the truth while de-emphasisising inconvenient facts and figures.

Similarly, don't imagine that every scientist who received a grant from the corporate research funds for the tobacco industry was necessarily engaging in distorted or corrupt science. There are many ways to skin a cat.

It should be remembered that many grants were given to independent scientists to conduct research that the tobacco industry had already conducted in secret (they had secret laboratories in Europe) so they knew the outcome before the grant was given. A null-output (finding no effect) is almost as valuable to a public-relations practitioner as a positive finding of some kind.

And the scientific conferences mounted or just funded by the tobacco industry were rarely packed solely with tobacco scientists; the trick was always to have many genuine specialist speakers, and to simply control some of the key conference/seminar roles — such as the moderator of the debates, the keynote speach, and particulary the summing up and the organisation, and editorial task of the publishing the proceedings. This sort of thankless task was often left to volunteers, and no one is keener to volunteer services more than corporate lackeys who have the resources of billion dollar corporations to fall back on for the hack work.

The running of organisations — provide the required secretarial, treasury, fund-raising, organisation, administration, and editorial services.

The fact is that every branch of science develops a group of science-administrator who prefer to play the role of meeting chairman, editor, manager, delegate — often with the prestige that such a position carries — to that of the practitioner. Some see such 'work' as simply a means for career advancement, while others delude themselves that their motives are predominantly philanthropic

One of the great tricks widely used in the corruption of science is to sieze the linguistic high-ground — take control of the jargon, and assume a proprietary interests in terminology by defining it to suit your self or your corporate clients.

This was a favourite trick in the tort reform industry. The appeals for regulators to use "sound science" implied that they weren't ... and the constant harping on "junk-science" became ambodied in a number of corporate funded "astroturfs" who purported to be the authorities identifying and defining what was good and bad science. The master practitioner of this black art was Steve Milloy, although the idea seeems to have been invented by Peter Huber.

Another is the promotion of "Risk Assessment", and the development of this as a univesity discipline. In effect it was little more than the additional accounting of cost-benefits to the principles of estimating biological risks. But it was boosted by the corporate lobbyists into a guiding prinicple, since it had the effect of hobbling the regulatory agencies, and adding an extra burden to their already-over-stretched budgets and staffing resources.

When promoted to the unknowing public, the idea of the EPA or FDA conducting "Risk assessment" before promulgating new regulations, carries much the same image as the popular medical expression "Evidence Based Medicine". Who could possibly reject either? Of course the problem is 'who decides what is the evidence, and who decides what is no...' and what assumptions like behind the 'assessment'.

The great guru of Risk assessment, John D Graham, who ran the Harvard Risk Assessment Center, supposedly attached to the Harvard School of Public Health (neither of which, despite the names, were under Harvard university's administrative or ethical control) has an almost infallible record in his ability to bet on the wrong horse. CAFE, tobacco, etc. In fact he was so consistent, that George W Bush chose him to run the OIRA, or the OMB to supervise the supervisors — the EPA, FDA, OSHA, etc.

Smoking-gun document

This website began as an infromation exchange between journalists and academic researchers involved in reading and analyzing the 7 million-odd documents which the US tobacco industry released under various legal discovery actions, and as a result of negotiated settlement between the States Attorney-Generals and the executives, who were in danger of being charged with raceteering under the US RICO act.

    To fully understand the significance of most documents in the tobacco archives requires a reasonable knowledge of the people, the organisations and the activities — and often the nicknames and acronyms and jargon being used. Some require substantial scientific knowledge, and others require more than a smattering of legal expertise. For this reason the left-hand column alongside the time-lines always provides access to quick-check acronym/jargon indexes. There is also a Dates index if you want to discover what was happening in the tobacco battlefield at the time documents were being written.

    However some documents can stand alone as clear evidence of the immoral and unethical behavior of various individuals and organisations working for the tobacco companies and/or their coalitions. These are the 'smoking gun' documents that often were so obvious (even to tobacco's bought politicians) that they could not be ignored.

Purpose

• The tobacco companies also owned the giant world-wide food conglomerates; soft-drink and coffee producers; wine and beer makers; oil and energy companies; international shipping and transport; very large US real-estate developments; pharmacueticals; and both insurance and assurance companies.
  
  
• Behind the scenes they also had financial and (often) controlling links to the largest of the global public relations companies, lobbying firms, public polling organisations, campaign management groups, and headhunting firms.
  
  
• Executives of tobacco and other large American industries often had 'revolving door' careers: part-time at the head of global Corporate Affairs/Issues Management divisions; part-time as apparatchiks and managers of the major political parties; partly as lobbyists and presidents of industry associations; part-time as professors of law or business at some of the most prestigious universities.
  
  
• The middle management levels of the corporations usually had a revolving door through aides to compliant politicians or Congressional committees, and the running of corporate-funded think-tanks and policy institutes.
  
  
• The tobacco industry established and coordinated many coalitions with other industries (and individual companies) that had related problems:
  • public liability threats (aka 'tort reform' activities)
  • discounting science which threatened their businesses (the 'sound-science' and 'junk-science' movements)
  • promotion of shared interests (fake indoor air-quality testing with ventilation companies and equipment maintainers/manufacturers)
  • exerting political influence in the major parties (specifically the Republican party)
  
  
  
• They owned scientific front organisations. The also started and controlled scientific journals (often peer reviewed), and funded and controlled scientific conferences (which published 'selected proceedings'). Some were specifically connected to tobacco or indoor-air quality, but others were more general (toxicology, risk assessment, etc) which they shared with other industries.
  
  
• They also sought to influence the general media in many different ways, including take-overs and influence activities, such as:
  • outright payment made to feature writers and newspaper columnists. Special syndication deals with a number of feature distribution organisations.
  • the secret purchase of a top American national magazine, the Saturday Review.
  • suggestions that they purchase the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and/or Omni magazine.[Did it happen?]
  • Organised distribution of 'packages' of copyright-free general interest articles, cartoons, columns to local and small-circulation newspapers and magazines.
  • Control of the CBS TV network (by the Tisch family which owned Lorillard)
  • Special deals struck with the National Educational Television (NET) network.
  • Organised distribution to mainstream print and broadcast media of Video News Releases (VNRs), sound bites and interviews, opinion articles (often directed at a political action).
  • Organised networks of cash-for-comments academic economists, lawyers, labor union executives, etc. to write commissioned op-eds and letters-to-the-editor of capital-city and local newspapers
  • Funding of the corporate-controlled National Journalism Center in Washington DC (which also provided a placement service for its graduates)
  • (perhaps) establishment of an International Journalism Center in Eastern Europe following the break up of the Soviet Union, in association with the Heritage (US) and the Adam Smith (UK) Foundation
  • hundreds of international junkets for journalists and editors, often to exotic tropical locations in the midst of winter.
  • Special deals struck with News Corporation [Rupert Murdoch's media group] in exchange for financial and other support. (including Board swaps)

The Corruption of Science

1. The overall design of the scientific research procedureds,
   • the selection of hypotheses to test
     • A certain amount of commissioned scientific research is only done when the results are foreknown by corporations..
     • Some research is only done when it is already established that the researchers will find nothing.
     • And a certain amount of research is done when the hypotheses to be tested are known to be irrelevant.
   • the design of the testable protocols.
   • conducting the research
         • Was it done in the way they claim it was done?
     • Many of the so-called 'protocos' read more like PR of push-polling plans
     • We usually have no way of knowing that the numbers of tests claimed, were ever actually done.
     • We don't know that 'blinded' techniques were followed
   • the manipulation of the data and the conclusions drawn
     • Who prepared the final report; who did the statistical work?
     • Who subedited the final report (usually the scientific PR people)?
     • How much of the data was discarded, and how much was 'normalised'?
2. the distribution of information in the scientific world
   • the writing and/or presentation of the study in a publication of symposium
   • the 'peer review process'
   • the exploitation of citations and citation-counts
3. the deliberate misinformation of the public/consumer, or
4. the regulatory activities arising out of scientific discoveries/findings

Corruption is a corporate activity

• remove redundancy — often there will be 20 or more copies of the same document. (However some might have important hand-written marginal notes)
• ignore irrelevancy — after files have been culled, sometimes we are left with nothing but dozens of fax cover-sheets when the actual contents are shredded.
• bypass housekeeping — corporate files will always contain a high percentage of useless information for the outside researcher.
• reveal submerged — sometimes, in documents with dozens of closely-typed housekeeping information, there will be one paragraph (perhaps expressed in cryptic form) which is vitally important to understanding what was happening.
• de-couple complexity — you will often find that multiple documents grouped under one file-heading have been indexed as a single document. Some of the most interesting documents have been uncovered by laboriously searching through these multiple pages of useless information.

What do we mean by Science Corruption?

Many politicians had a hand in this deception, and were therefore part of the systematic corruption, but it is difficult to finger them individually.

    The individual scientists involved in the tobacco industry's scientific corruption can best be described as having exhibited "unethical behaviour" rather than corruption. In many cases scientists have allowed their political and personal philosophies to get the better of their scientific judgements, and influence their associations with highly dubious enterprises, plans and projects. Sometimes they knew who was behind these organisations and operations, and sometimes they didn't. It is very difficult for an outsider — especially one with a different social and political mindset — to make valid judgements about the motivations of particular scientists even when the accumulation of documented evidence points strongly to what could be construed as corrupt behaviour.

    Equally, it is clear that many academics and scientists were using the status afforded them by their employment in tax-payer-funded universities and medical research facilities for personal profit by offering their services to the tobacco industry. Sometimes this is so obvious that you wonder how anyone could take their pronouncements seriously, and how they could retain their tenured position in universities and colleges, but that is a judgement taken with the benefit of hindsight and 10 million tobacco industry documents.
    Problems with collaboration

    Another reason why you must often suspend judgement on individual scientists is because much of this type of research involves collaborations of different kinds, between scientists and academics from different disciplines, often with different ethical views.

    For instance Dr Carl C Seltzer, a physical anthropologist from the Peabody Museum on the Harvard University grounds, had access to the Harvard mainframe computer at a time when such processing power was scarce. He worked virtually full-time for the tobacco industry, who promoted him as an "independent Harvard professor" and statistical expert to various independent groups conducting epidemiological research. With such qualifications and access to a mainframe computer, he became a highly attractive collaborator to have attached to the documented research reports — especially since he was offered for free, and willing to undertake the hard slog of report preparation. The Kieser Group got caught in this way, and the study which was released under their name bore little resemblance to their findings — to the point where they vocally withdrew they report and issued a fresh one of their own.

    This was a case where the tobacco industry's lackeys overstepped the mark, and bought attention to themselves. But you can be certain that this was a rare occasion, and that similar activites were taking place constantly once the industry realised how effective this ploy was. It only takes one rotten apple in a barrel to destroy the value of the lot.

    There are many cases where one highly-disreputable scientist's name appears in the credentials list on important studies .. which leaves you wondering how much influence he/she was in a position to assert.
    The politics of science

    The blind study is an important tool of science for very good reasons. Those with the problems of interpreting scientific findings have long understood that personal attitudes, religious and political convictions can play a large part in the outcome of an experiment. The idea of blinding a study, so those making the judgements of the outcomes are not familiar with other possible influences, is often essential.

    Knowing this, we should also recognise that the same personal and attitudinal factors are involved in other ways — ways that very often also influence the outcome:

• In selecting what study to do, and the way to do it.
• In selecting who to collaborate with
• In selecting the source of funding, and how the approach will be made.
• In selecting where the study will be published

The evidence of "Need to Know".

Maverick self-image

1. Sticking their neck out so far that they can't retreat.
2. Arrogance and self-delusion
3. . Reinforcement by religious-right delusion (notable in even the Enron executives,)
4. Convinced by the 'God has rewarded us by making us wealthy' delusion. This solves any conscience problems.
5. The Galileo syndrome — the mistaken belief that Galileo, Newton, Einstein were so far ahead of their contemporaries that their ideas were universally rejected. By inversion of logic, they are able to accounts for why their own ideas are universally rejected.

How much document destruction took place?

If you look through the documents in the archive and search using the basic code "type=fax" to identify which documents arrived at the tobacco companies by fax you will find an incredibly high proportion are first-page oversheets only.

    As anyone in the record-keeping business knows, the oversheet pages are the first to be discarded. So we can assume that for every single-page oversheet there once existed an important document which had been filed and kept — but later shredded.

    Based on this evidence, you can safely assume that perhaps 80% of the major incriminating documents were deliberately trashed .

    This judgement is roughly supported by checking on carbon-copy lists.

    Most of these corporate executives and staff involved in disinformation, bribery and corruption were mad copiers — this was their way of telling large numbers of their associates how active and important they were. So often a document will carry 5, 10, twenty or fifty ccd names — yet when you check there may be only one or two in the files. It is a fair guess that some were only of transient interest, but the other 80% were trashed in last minute purging,

    We owe it to these copiers that important documents still turns up in someone elses files — even when they have disappeared from the file cabinet of the originator.

    People are always more diligent at purging self-incriminating evidence from their own files, than they are of dumping evidence which might sink the boot into someone else.

Legal threats

CONTRIBUTORS:LR13 SHHS KRS8