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By Root 2790 0

the top 10 percent by 44.6 percent, the bottom 60 percent lost ground and the income of the lowest 20 percent fell by 12.5 percent.125 Real hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees (i.e., the 80 percent of the workforce that holds working-class jobs) fell by 4.8 percent between 1973 and 1999.126 This, along with the adverse trend of social indicators in the same period,127 suggests that the welfare of the majority declined in this era of high employment, a “new economy,” and a spectacular upswing in the stock market. In its euphoria phase, which ended abruptly with the collapse of the dot.com market in 1999 and 2000, the mainstream media hardly noticed that only a minority had been the beneficiaries;128 they briefly discovered this issue only under the impetus of Pat Buchanan’s rightwing populist outcries during the 1996 presidential election campaign. In the 2000 electoral campaign, once again the two major party candidates said nothing about the failure of the majority to be lifted in the supposed “rising tide” that would benefit everybody; only Ralph Nader and other marginalized candidates did, and as noted, the dominant media found that the agenda of the major parties was all that they could ask for.

Another striking application of the propaganda model can be seen in the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation. Because of the industry’s power, as well as the media’s receptivity to the demands of the business community, the media have normalized a system described by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring as “deliberately poisoning us, then policing the results.”129 Industry is permitted to produce and sell chemicals (and during the 1990s, bioengineered foods) without independent and prior proof of safety, and the “policing” by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been badly compromised by underfunding and political limits on both law enforcement and testing.130 A major National Research Council study of 1984 found that there was no health hazard data available for 78 percent of the chemicals in commerce, and an Environmental Defense Fund update found little change had occurred a dozen years later. The federal government’s National Toxicology Program tests about ten to twenty chemicals a year for carcinogenicity (but not for the numerous other possible adverse effects of chemicals); but meanwhile five hundred to a thousand new chemicals enter commerce annually, so our knowledge base steadily declines.131

This system works well for industry, however, as it wants to sell without interference, and leaving virtually all of the research and testing for safety in its hands, with its members to decide when the results are worthy of transmission to the EPA, is a classic “fox guarding the chickens” arrangement. The system has worked poorly for the public, and its inadequacy has been reinforced by the industry’s power to influence, sometimes even capture, the EPA.132 Nevertheless, the industry often contends that the safety of chemicals is assured by EPA (or FDA) regulation,133 which industry does its best to keep weak and which, as noted, has failed to deal in any way with the great majority of chemicals in the market.

With the media’s help, the chemical industry has also gained wide acceptance of its view that chemicals should be evaluated individually on the basis of an analysis of their risks to individuals and individual tolerances. But it is very hard to measure such risks and tolerances for humans—controlled experiments are not possible, damage may show up only after many years, the forms of damage are hard to know in advance, chemicals may interact with others in the environment, they may be bioaccumulative, and the breakdown products of chemicals may have their own dangers. Furthermore, if thousands of chemicals enter the environment, many longlasting, bioaccumulative, and interacting with other chemicals, a public policy that ignores their additive and interactive effects on people and the environment is deeply flawed and irresponsible.

Policy based on the “precautionary principle,