In truth the problem of the takeover of government agencies was not new: half a century before Eisenhower’s address Woodrow Wilson in presidential election speeches was warning:

“If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business, then don’t you see that big business men have to get closer to the government even than they are now? Don’t you see that they must capture the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture the government? They have already captured it. Are you going to invite those inside to stay? They don’t have to get there. They are there.”

But at least President Wilson could still talk about “big business men”. Coupled with the issue of the invasion of institutions and government by commercial/industrial interest is the lack – notably acute in the field of vaccines - of accountability and liability.  In a valuable article of January 1999 veteran economist JK Galbraith highlighted the twin problems of the influence of powerful lobbies in government and the lack of liability for corporate fraud or failure, an insight which apart from anything else foreshadowed the banking collapse of 2008:

“The fraud also conceals a major change in the role of money in the modern economy. Money, we once agreed, gave the owner, the capitalist, the controlling power in the enterprise. So it still does in small businesses. But in all large firms the decisive power now lies with a bureaucracy that controls, but does not own, the requisite capital. This bureaucracy is what the business schools teach their students to navigate, and it is where their graduates go. But bureaucratic motivation and power are outside the central subject of economics. We have corporate management, but we do not study its internal dynamics or explain why certain behaviors are rewarded with money and power. These omissions are another manifestation of fraud. Perhaps it is not entirely innocent. It evades the often unpleasant facts of bureaucratic structure, internal competition, personal advancement, and much else…”

The lack of accountability by “business bureaucrats” is compounded by their capture of the government bureaucracy:

“A more comprehensive fraud dominates scholarly economic and political thought. That is the presumption of a market economy separate from the state. Most economists concede a stabilizing role to the state, even those who urgently seek an escape from reality by assigning a masterful and benign role to Alan Greenspan and the central bank. And all but the most doctrinaire accept the need for regulation and legal restraint by the state. But few economists take note of the cooptation by private enterprise of what are commonly deemed to be functions of the state. This is hidden by the everyday reference to the public and private sectors, one of our clearest examples of innocent fraud.”

If we, for example, consider the pharmaceutical companies today, even when companies become liable for huge fines no individual ever seems to carry the can even to point of losing their job, let alone facing criminal charges: it is simply at best a calculated risk for shareholders.  With vaccines since 1986 and Vaccine Injury Act the problem has become even worse since corporations themselves face no effective liability and enjoy a substantially captive and ever growing mandated market for their products, with zero financial incentive to ensure their safety.

There are further troubling aspects to this: generally speaking the government bureaucracy and the medical profession are even less frank about the risks of the products than the manufacturers: they enjoy a revolving door relationship with the manufacturers, notably when Centers for Disease Control director Julie Gerberding left her post to become head of Merck’s vaccine division in the space of less than a year . The CDC is itself affiliated to the pharmaceutical manufacturers through non-profit organizations such as the CDC Foundation and Task Force for Global Health . The debate about autism and vaccine apart from anything else may well have been influenced by the fact that the most prominent autism charity, Autism Speaks, was endowed at its inception by CDC Foundation board member emeritus and billionaire Bernie Marcus to the tune of $25m.  Marcus, founder of DIY empire Home Depot, also stated in an interview in 2006 :

The worst thing I could imagine is to be the CEO of a pharmaceutical company today. I can’t think of an industry that has done more to alleviate suffering and improve the human condition than pharmaceuticals. Yet the industry is under a withering assault from plaintiffs’ lawyers and is depicted by some in the media as a pariah. I don’t think that Jonas Salk could have developed the polio vaccine in today’s legal environment.

This was a remarkable claim when pharmaceutical domination of the media was at its financial peak (see below) and effective litigation over vaccine damage had not been possible for 20 years.

The allegedly independent Institute of Medicine Review of 2004 of vaccine safety only slightly masked a complex of conflicted and corrupt relationships. Not only did it turn out that the CDC had instructed the IOM not to find anything , the IOM commissioned flawed and fraudulent studies in themselves controlled by the CDC by various means, notoriously studies co-ordinated by Danish indicted financial fraudster Poul Thorsen . None of these studies has ever been retracted, including a British study which made blatantly false claims about mercury exposure in the developing world in order to endorse World Health Organization vaccine schedule. They were recently cited again without irony before Congress by Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee chairman Thomas Insel, not only as if they were in any way valid but as if they were new science .

On top of this we need to consider the initiative of the Food and Drugs Administration under President Clinton in 1997 to substantially deregulate 'direct to the consumer' pharmaceutical advertising enabling the industry at a stroke to buy out the media. According to one source pharmaceutical advertising rose from $700m in 1996 to $5.41b in 2006 . This may have tailed off to about $4.5b in 2008-10 but the source of revenue would have been ever more critical to an ailing industry. The result of a government agency initiative – never even apparently discussed at a democratic level – was to lead either the exclusion of dissenting voices or organized hate campaigns against anyone who dares speak out of turn notably Andrew Wakefield , Jenny McCarthy and Katie Couric .

Meanwhile, the industry can buy or isolate virtually every politician out of the petty cash.

Happy Independence Day everybody, Happy American Revolution!