The Deception Industry

I discovered this interesting story this morning from the BBC.

"Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour."

I’ve been asking this question for a while. What do we call the intentional organized effort by corporations to disinform and confuse the public over matters of public safety and public health?

Now there's a word for the study of intentional corporate falsehood. But is there a name for the act itself?

Until this dangerous corporate strategy is understood and there's a name for it it's hard to make it a crime.

Ignorance is their friend.

The lag time between harm done and public awareness allows decades to go by, while the company reaps large annual profits, and their dangerous products cause harm to millions of people.

This same delay allows the statute of limitations to expire. It allows their victims and witnesses to die off and the evidence to vanish.

Chemical companies whose products cause neurological diseases use this strategy.

The global Catholic hierarchy used this strategy for decades to cover up for pedophile priests, enabling them to go on destroying innocent lives.

Big tobacco used this strategy.

The asbestos industry used this strategy.

Big Oil knew the dangers of global warming caused by CO2 emissions and covered it up for decades, paying scientists to fabricate and distort evidence and confuse the public.

The NRA’s allies in Congress have prevented the scientific study of the harm done by gun violence.

Police departments have prevented the collection of information on police abuse and police shootings.

The corporations that control the machines that tally our votes claim the technology is “proprietary” and therefore it is a secret and the public has no business overseeing the vote count.

Why is there no name for this deliberate, organized, systematic and decades-long practice of keeping the public in the dark? Is the language also in thrall to their corrupt money? Without language to define the abuse it is hard to pass laws against it. Corporate money buys more lawyers and creates wealthier lawyers, who then endow law schools and universities, and the ignorance becomes a public fact, a carefully nurtured public policy.

Money shapes how we think. Call it “moneythink.” It certainly shapes our laws and how our laws are enforced. This same corrupt money dominates our legislative process, thanks to Citizens United, which was shaped by the right wing of the Supreme Court, which was created by the dominance of corporate money in politics. Millions more Americans vote Democratic than vote Republican, yet the Republicans still control both houses of Congress. Corporate money helps them do this.

But we are complicit too. We are individually in thrall to “moneythink”. When we are unsure how to vote or what to think we delegate our decisions to our money. What do our stock portfolios want us to do? If it’s a coin toss decision between left and right, we too often side with the markets which hold our retirement plans hostage, and the markets are dominated by large corporations.

Never mind that the markets have always done significantly better during Democratic presidencies, the corporations and the people in control of them prefer deregulation and lax enforcement and public ignorance of the damage corporations are causing to public health and well being. What we don’t know can’t hurt them.

The Four Stage Policy of Climate Change Denial

A series of stories in the LATimes has been explaining how EXXON knew very early that fossil fuel use was causing potentially catastrophic climate change and how they decided to cover it up and tell the public nothing was wrong.

This bit of dialogue from a BBC political comedy sums up the trick that’s been played on humanity by the oil companies and their Republican stooges.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Meanwhile our tax dollars subsidize the oil giants with billions of dollars a year and their shareholders pocket trillions of dollars of profits year by year. By the time the oceans rise and global food production collapses they will be beyond prosecution and their riches will be safely stashed somewhere beyond our reach. Because of what they knew all along their offshore bank will not be on a Caribbean island but Switzerland.

Here's Bill McKibben's damning article about what EXXON knew, in the New Yorker.

And in The Nation, again by Bill McKibben.