Here we Go...
We live in a corrupt fucking society wherein literally everything is for sale now. The masses at large don't see any problem with this, because the concept of morality and even right and wrong has been totally annihilated.
It used to be that industry stooges were not allowed to run government agencies or otherwise dictate industry legislation. Those days are long over. And gone are the days when the defense department wasn't just a revolving door to Lockheed Martin. On the media side, News departments are now so busy servicing their myriad advertising agreements that telling the truth has become a quaint concept from a bygone era. Creating "stories" that capture audience attention and otherwise drive ratings is the order of the day. All of the major news outlets - not just Faux News - have devolved into garbage tabloids seeking a specific audience demographic to drive ad placement.
Saying that markets are more efficient at allocating resources is one thing, however, allowing industries to dictate the rules of the game is the complete other end of "efficiency" and efficacy. And yet, it was just that preoccupation with privatization and commercialization that allowed corruption to take root, as the dividing line between public and private became blurred and now non-existent.
Your Corruption Smells of Destruction
Worse yet, is when these climate denialists have no problem with ExxonMobil hiring its own "climate scientists" who write their own "research". Or when companies otherwise clog the internet with pseudo-scientific research on topics pertaining to their own markets. That apparently is fair game. Well unfortunately it's all just corruption but clearly the climate issue is on a slower schedule than some other major issues at the moment. So the denialists will discover their own corruption via other means, such as when they realize that Wall Street never changed a damn thing since 2008 - and hence risks only grew in the meantime. Believing that Wall Street would magically fix itself even as the stooge regulators were looking the other way, is the self-delusion of a lifetime, adopted by a society too corrupt and stagnant to believe anything different.
This corrupt society will learn the hard way that the unvarnished truth does not come via the advertising agencies. It only comes from people who have been vetted and proven that they have no ties to industry and therefore serve the integrity of their profession - whether that is a regulatory watchdog or a true journalistic organization not established to make as much money as possible. I realize this is a quaint concept, but these things have a habit of coming back into fashion when everyone realizes they should not have been wholesale abandoned in the first place.
