The Dangers of Smoking, food additives and global warming illustrate how
time and time again corporate interest attempts to corrupt the scientific
process. When it comes to scientific facts which corporate interests views as a
threat to their bottom line , the tactic is to create the illusion of
controversy. This is done by funding phony research and making sure crank scientists
who say helpful things get a loud microphone.
Bob Zannelli
Corporate Corruption Of Science: They Can't Help It -- The System Makes Them
Do It
In the United States alone in 2002, a total of 139 million workers suffered “
5500 fatal work injuries, 4.4 million nonfatal injuries . . . 294,500
illnesses . . . [and] estimates suggest that occupational disease deaths exceed
55,000 per year.”
The result of "isolated and unique failures of science, the government, or
industry to protect the best interest of the public," the proverbial few
rotten apples in the barrel?
Not even close -- the entire barrel is rotten argues David Egilman and
Susanna Rankin Bohme in the current edition of the International Journal of
Occupational and Environmental Health
The theme of the issue is corporate corruption of science: how corporations
influence science and the effects that influence has on environmental and
occupational health.
In other words, the current economic and political system (both in the
United states and in the global context) privileges corporate actors and actually
provides incentives for the production of injury and disease rather than its
prevention. This metaphorical barrel produces diseasebecause political,
economic, regulatory, and ideological norms prioritize values of wealth and
profit over human health and environmental well-being
And the problem, according to Egilman and friends, is not the evil employer
or corrupt corporation, it's the system that's based on Milton Friedman’s
1970 directive, that “the [only] social responsibility of business is to
increase its profits.”
The corporation is an entity whose main purpose is to generate profit for
its stockholders. The imperative to reduce costs means keeping wages low,
minimizing investment in environmentally-friendly technologies, resisting
regulation by the state, and failing to implement “voluntary” safety and health
standards. In the global economy, the mandate to maximize profit leads
corporations into a seemingly unending “race to the bottom,” where transnational
corporations shop for the nations with the lowest occupational and environmental
standards
What all this means, of course, is that corporations need to control
science:
Science is important to corporations, public health professionals, and the
public. It is the yardstick for measuring the health risks of corporate
products and processes, and is depended upon by politicians, consumers, and workers
to make decisions about what is a “reasonable” risk to citizens, to
themselves, to the environment, and to society at large. Corporations have much at
stake when the safety of their products is put to scientific test, and spend
hundreds of billions on research each year worldwide.
The authors don't just curse the bad guys, they also attempt to come up with
solutions. In short they advocate a
broad agenda that has as its goal the mobilization of a populace through the
articulation of concerns about corporate-funded science and the presentation
of alternatives in a manner that resonates with people’s own concerns,
interests, and issues.
Occupational and environmental health offers an ideal platform from which to
address wider social and economic inequities on a national and international
basis. Many people experience first- or second-hand the serious effects of
ill health. Those who are healthy can be moved by an understanding that their
health or the health of their children may be at risk.
Well, I could go on an summarize the entire issue for you, but I'm tired and
I'd just be enabling you to depend on me -- when, thanks to the good folks
at IJOEM, you can read it all on the web yourself. Get ye there, or better yet