Satire for Sanity

 “The Playbook – How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World” by Jennifer Jacquet, 2022

This book masquerades as a secret guide for corporations on how to stop or delay science findings that kill profits.  It is constructed as a how-to for a generic ‘Corporation’ to stymie consumer, environmental, health and safety alarms sent up by activists, scientists, journalists and the government which will lead to ‘onerous regulation.’ 

Jacquet in this book mentions the history of dozens of different scientific issues – at least 40+ specifically - and how Corporations dealt and deal with them in the past and present.  Among them are global warming, cigarette smoking and vaping, factory farming and meat, DDT, glyphosate (Round-Up), atrazine, overfishing and bycatches, obesity, sugar, tanning salons, oil spills, fracking and pipelines, vinyl chloride, lead, asbestos, nuclear energy, water pollution, Teflon, toxic food additives, insecticides, antibiotics overuse – the list is long. 

Tongue in cheek, Jacquet illustrates how denial is part of the fiduciary duty of every Corporation.  She shows ways to buy or buy off University professors, experts, researchers, institutes and think tanks.  She retails how to flood the media-sphere with advertising, adverts, press releases, bought-and-paid-for science studies, editorials, letters-to-the-editor, internet posts, websites and Astro-turf groups.  The whole point is to cast doubt, delay and hopefully kill any regulation, divestment or drop in sales or in the worst case, the complete scrapping of a product.  Every bit of delay and stalling adds millions to corporate coffers, which is the plus.

The Corporations’ allies are found in law firms, think tanks, P.R. firms, consultants, universities and their professors, paid experts, fake public front groups, trade associations, the Chamber of Commerce, even some non-profits, unions and liberal advocacy groups. Search results on Google, etc. can be massaged or have ads placed above certain search results.  Schools can be inundated with corporate educational materials.  The Playbook points out that no professor has ever been sanctioned for conflict of interest problems. It illustrates how to hide financial ties to Corporations for various players, like funneling cash through secretive entities like Donors Trust.        

A blinding omission in this book is the buying or influencing of regulators and politicians, which is the most lucrative strategy of all.  ‘Regulatory capture,’ Congressional members’ own stock ownership and massive campaign donations are never mentioned by Jacquet. Nor are explicitly political organizations like the Republican ALEC or the massive corporate funding of both official Parties in the 2-Party System.  This is a significant gap and shows her liberal fear of engaging the corporate state or appearing ‘partisan.’

Nor does Jacquet mention the key military or financial sectors, as both are not quite ‘consumer’ facing sectors.  Yet they use many of these same tactics when confronted with evidence of their problems and failings – financial products or planes that don’t work or are too expensive or just plain deadly.

Serial Corporate Criminals

HOW TO

The Playbook advises corporations to hide or destroy incriminating evidence or statistics, lie, dissemble, embrace hypocrisy, buy and stash research that goes against their product, keep a low profile and let the front groups do their work. They should always play on the open-ended nature of science, advocate doubt, cast aspersions on opponents by character assassination – and, based on circumstances, fully deny any allegations.  It details the myriad ways to deal with a scientific problems – full denial, say they are being looked into, say they’re very small, say there are bigger problems and the grand-daddy, saying in various ways, “correlation is not causation.”  Always allege bias, i.e. vegan researchers are biased; meat eaters are not, or that there are alternative causes.  Critics are ‘boring,’ ‘alarmist’ or have financial ulterior motives (pot calling kettle black...)  Another method is to finance very carefully constructed science studies to prove the Corporation is right or not so bad.

Change the language – use euphemisms that hide the nature of what is going on. Cancer becomes ‘biological activity; global warming becomes climate change; toxic sludge become ‘biosolids;’ tetraethyl lead becomes ethyl.   Added strategies are green-washing, woke-washing, women-washing and what-have-you washing – always claim you care.  The most common is claiming any regulation will result in unemployment or that minorities will be harmed. In this regard ‘progressive social advertising’ is quite prominent now and she gives it less focus that it should have.  Other tacks are to blame consumers, workers or the failure of regulators in the government for problems. ‘Human nature’ can be blamed – as if human ‘nature’ always lies in lazy unconcern.  Then there is the political mantra of ‘look forward, not back.’  Jacquet does not allude to this, but the political allies of corporations promote anti-science attitudes in the general population so as to hide the real role of science in corporate profits.  Things like this she calls “the creation of ignorance.”

Internal dissent must be suppressed, whistle-blowers rooted out and fired if they exist. Lawsuits, claims of scientific misconduct, intimidation, retaliation by employers, allegations of ‘elitism’ and even up to assassination – popular in certain countries – are recommended (the latter recommendation should not be in print). 212 environmental activists were assassinated in 2019 worldwide.

This book doesn’t look at capitalism as a ‘system of denial,’ but the glacial pace of real change in the U.S. – something she alludes to – points to the strength of corporations in society, which are the bulwark of reaction.  Not sure how you can write a book like this without pointing that out.  It is more for people either trying to understand how Corporations function in this realm, or those organizing a fight against one.  It will resonate, as these are all clichés and methods we have heard or seen.

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Propaganda” (Bernays);“The Tragedy of American Science,” “People’s History of Science” (both by Conner); “Reason in Revolt” (Woods-Grant); “Big Bang,” “Ted Assumptions of Science,” “Fashionable Nonsense,” “The 5^th Risk” (Lewis); “Dead Epidemiologists” (Wallace); “environmentalism,” ‘Advertising Shits in Your Head,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” “Animal, Vegetable, Junk.”  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / December 30, 2022 (Happy Another Year!)