CAPTURED
Chapter Six
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
Anyone can sell you a boat and claim it has no leaks. In the middle of your crossing, when water starts pooling in and you begin to sink, is when the unavoidable certainty of the situation takes precedence over any false claims, wishful thinking, or misguided trust.
We learned a hard lesson about trusting Big Tobacco’s claims, but this was only one aspect of the lesson. Because we were incomplete in diagnosing the full scope of the opposition we face when it comes to these dangers, we did not vanquish them in any sufficient way.
In the case of the Tobacco Industry, we can say there is a reliable consensus of understanding regarding their first tactic of the False Claim. Most everyone knows they lied—and that they are liars. The Bad Company can still try to assert “our products don’t cause cancer”, but the evidence from the independent science and from what our own experience showed us eventually and logically connected the cause to effect and their statements no longer hold weight. This industry is not considered trustworthy anymore by the majority. In normal circumstances, without Playbook interference and manipulation, this should be where the story ends. Making false claims worked, until their deceit and its treacherous consequences made us stop believing them. The swindler should have been run out of town via the power and influence of our consumer sovereignty.
The linchpin of the Playbook is #2: Capture. All the Bad strategy depends upon it and falls apart without it. Corporations’ ability to influence government agencies and lawmakers, judges and media outlets, in their favor, overrides the public’s recognition of their deceit and trickery. They can make the false claim, we can spot it as false, and then the captured entities who have authority over our environment can force us to accept it or exist with it regardless of our feelings about it. The Capture is the scaffolding which holds up the lie where otherwise it would crumble.
We must acknowledge that cigarettes and vapes, Teflon and other fluorocarbon products and packaging, RoundUp, RoundUp Ready GMO Crops, and Oxycontin, to name only the most egregious, all came to market through current legal business channels of approval and regulation. In the year 2025, Big Tobacco now has more products for sale at every market, not less, not none. PFOAs still have not been phased out and RoundUp is right now on the shelves at your Home Depot1. We must accept the reality that no factor or no person, within those industries, within our government, or anywhere within the system of consumer capitalism in a free democracy, successfully blocked these toxins from entering our environment and our bodies. The combined death count per year from all this is likely near a million Americans or more, year after year. Cigarettes are still the #1 cause of preventable death. PREVENTABLE.
Our policymakers and regulators lived through the same timeline of corporate malfeasance that we did, with better knowledge than any of us on the tragic statistics of disease and death and billions of dollars lost. Their salaries paid with taxpayer money, they had the resources and the mandate to analyze the observable data, glean the requisite wisdom from the catastrophic missteps of their past, and come up with some kind of updated and improved game plan for blocking anything produced by the same industry who previously lied to them, and stopping those companies from introducing new dangers to the population.
Thus, bigger than the problem of our trusting a claim from a Bad Company who clearly puts profit over people, is our trusting of those we assumed put the health of the nation over Bad Companies. The sole duty of these agencies and officials is to protect the public interest with effective oversight over these powerful industries. They have not. Year after year, they allow harmful products through the gate. Year after year, they fail to remove products after the harm has become evident. Year after year, they lead us into danger with the illusion of safety that does not bear out in the real world. These are danger zones we would never have set foot in using our own insight and discernment. The external attachment to our decision-making process is what is faulty. Logically speaking, which is the bigger threat to the credulous: a swamp where there are likely alligators or a swamp where there are likely alligators with a sign that says “swimming safe for the public”.
Corruption like this isn’t just a form of anomalous abhorrent behavior; it’s how business gets done in our country. Certain practices related to lobbying and campaign finance that other countries would consider illegal are, in the U.S., not only permitted but now constitutionally protected.
Being forced to live with Bad products, or also unjust wars, naturally breaks down our defenses against them and sets us up to rationalize their existence or minimize our perceptions of their harm. Like the doctors in cigarette ads, government approval is the “third-party validation” so precious to any campaign. It bolsters the corporations’ claims and gives the public enough assurance to resolve our dissonance without having to exert the direct action to oppose it ourselves. We are encouraged to believe that the fact a product has made it onto the shelves is in and of itself a guarantee of safety. But the deadly products we’ve mentioned upends this belief. We then build upon the false premise that if something is bad, wrong, or dangerous, some part of the regulatory apparatus or media advocacy would have said something, done something. This poor reasoning might enable us to do what we desire to do, which is to relax and put our shield down.
In the 1970s, Ford manufactured a car called the Pinto, its first subcompact automobile. This product had a harmful component. It turned out to have an unsafe fuel tank placement in the back so if there was a rear-end collision it could burst into flames. Because the negative effect of the bad component was fiery injury or death and investigators could quickly point to the position of the fuel tank as the cause, it resulted in a company recall of the car.
The Samsung Note S7, a phablet that launched in 2016, was initially well received. However, a problem with the battery software resulted in the phones catching fire on several occasions, including once on an airplane, which had to be evacuated. Soon, the Department of Transportation made it illegal to bring a Note 7 on a commercial flight. There was an immediate recall and the company had to eventually scrap the product all together.
Similarly, if a food product immediately makes people very ill after they eat it, the product is tested and quickly pulled from the shelves because of the discovered E.coli or whatever bacteria is resulting in food poisoning.
These are situations where the quick and direct adverse effect from a product will be quickly and directly blamed on the producer. In these examples, the companies themselves recalled the product at (close to) the first sign of harm. This is why I don’t refer to Ford, Samsung or your local grocer as Bad Companies.
The Bad Companies we are following take advantage of the years it takes for the negative results to develop from their creations and they use every trick in the Playbook to keep the causation obscured. They know the product should be recalled but let us keep buying it and using it, and hope we will never link the damage back to them. Basically, if the product catches fire in your pocket, it will exit the market. If the product gives you cancer, it will likely stay in the market…forever.
This is the very stretched-out period we are stuck in, still, with Big Tobacco and its latest products all the way to new pharmaceuticals with pending long-term safety data. This is also the excruciating paralysis we remained in for two years as the War Machine had its way with the people of Gaza. Even though there is appropriate skepticism toward any of these campaigns, much of the population still waits for the science or some authority to make the official pronouncement on risk of harm, while we continue to get sicker by the day, while Americans die every day of preventable disease and addiction, while innocent civilians get massacred on foreign soil.
Our defense has stalled at Playbook tactic #1, where the claim that something is safe or in our best interests is still being debated against the increasing amount of evidence which shows the product or agenda is harmful to humans, yet we are still stopped short of any reversal. Currently, on all these issues, the only officials whose decisions matter are still siding with the company claim.
So now, we narrow our focus beyond the easily recognizable lie or liar and onto the entities who make our recognition irrelevant. This is now the more precise location we need to defend ourselves against. And it may take some very focused energy and deep thinking to create an improved type of shield that will adequately protect us from the dangers created by the faulty shield we thought was already in place.
To paint a picture of our current position, I will tell the story which answers last chapter’s question: How is it, in the century-long relationship between Big Tobacco and our government bodies who regulate their products, that we end up with a new generation addicted and sickened by their latest batch of commercial offerings?
As mentioned, a Federal District Court found the major cigarette manufacturers guilty of lying to the American public about the deadly effects of cigarettes and secondhand smoke, and guilty of marketing to children, in 2006. Their punishment was an order to make “corrective statements” to inform the public about the deceptive practices and the true dangers of smoking. The Tobacco Companies did not do this, for 11 years. Instead, in this time, they introduced e-cigarettes, or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS), to the public.
ENDS products were astonishingly not regulated by the FDA from 2007 to 2019. In August of 2018, they got a warning label: “This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical". That ought to protect our kids from a deadly product, right?
Today, in 2025, they are still not "FDA approved" for safety. However, the FDA on their website, if you ever go to it, does “emphasize that all tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, are inherently harmful and potentially addictive.” (Just for kicks, go search the AI Overview answer for: Do e-cigarettes have FDA approval for safety? — It’s comical.)
In this period of no regulation, the Bad Companies even increased the nicotine concentration while they were rolling free out there. I mean, might as well! The average nicotine concentration in e-cigarettes sold in U.S. retailers more than doubled from 2013 to 20182.
The industry found guilty of marketing to children in 2006, marketed e-cigarettes to third graders a decade later. JUUL programs, for example, targeted children as young as 8 years old by funding summer camps, visiting schools and paying community and church groups to distribute their materials3. I mean, why not, who’s gonna stop them?
To attract the younger demographic, the Bad Companies created flavored nicotine products, resembling kids’ favorite candy and desserts, to mask the harshness of tobacco and make it easier for young people to start using and become addicted.
By the end of this ungoverned, unrestrained spree, in 2018, 3.6 million kids were vaping, representing a 78% increase in just one year, with more than two-thirds choosing flavored products. By 2022, Over 73% of students who use social media specifically reported seeing e-cigarette–related marketing content in their feeds.
Adults warn children about dangers in the environment, like getting hit by a car so that they don’t play carelessly in the street or cross without looking both ways. And the new generation learns how to be wise about that issue. The difference between that and these commercial dangers is they don’t have a counter campaign telling them on every screen that playing in traffic is fun and cool and and even adults do it. And they don’t have government workers paid by the taxes of their parents sending faster and faster cars down their street year after year.
The outrageous disregard for the public’s health and the innocent lives of children—the ones they call the “replacement generation”, the source of new tobacco users who will eventually replace the ones who die— are examples to prove and drive home the truth of the matter, at present. Not facts from the faraway past when we did not know any better, but from the last few years, when we should have. The Bad Companies behave worse than ever; the resistance against them works worse than ever. More nicotine, more marketing to children, now with candy flavors and colors. WORSE.
So — How???
What happened was—in 2008 when the FDA tried to regulate e-cigarettes on the grounds that they were unapproved medical devices designed to deliver the drug nicotine, the Big Tobacco legal teams sought an injunction against the FDA on the grounds that the agency was causing them immediate and irreversible economic harm. And…they won! A clearly captured District Court judge issued a restraining order against the FDA to prevent this “irreparable” damage to the cigarette industry. The Federal and Appeals courts almost always rule in favor of Big Industry.
The capture we speak of has never been effectively addressed, has only spread further and become worse, and is so pervasive now that no corner of our government is exempt from its reach. In the case of ENDS products, the agency trying to regulate was blocked by the courts, impeded by the White House, and repeatedly warned to back off by members of Congress. Yet, The FDA still stands as the only real barrier between harmful products and the people.
If you want to read more on this particular saga for yourself, I recommend this read for the most concise mind-bending breakdown. Or the 2019 New York Times article “E-Cigarettes Went Unchecked in 10 Years of FDA Inaction.”
And, to restate that it is the same sweet deal for all Bad Companies, you can see the same saga, different names, different harm, written about only a few months later in the 2019 New York Times article “As Tens of Thousands Died, F.D.A. Failed to Police Opioids”. The FDA has yet to admit it did anything wrong in its oversight of OxyContin and other opioids. It has only doubled down on deflecting blame, so unfortunately for us no element of their practice has been changed.
We can watch the documentaries or read the articles about toxic products which are currently dangerously under-regulated, yet we are still stopped short of any decision-maker who matters officially disclosing the harm, even after hundreds of thousands of lawsuits awarding damages for the harm. Cancer-causing pesticides and food packaging, ultra processed and hyper-palatable foods that lead to obesity and disease, all these things we ingest daily that are proven to degrade our health, are still according to today’s FDA and the rest of captured officialdom, declared “safe for the public”.
One out of every 2 U.S. deaths under 65 years is likely preventable. PREVENTABLE. These deaths are not a reflection of our individual choices—it’s something else.4
I don’t believe we are extremely shocked anymore when we hear news like this. What is shocking, is that despite the available knowledge about the failures of our chosen guards and lookouts, the population still solely relies on them.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us. =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….
Our peculiar form of American democracy has always grounded its concept of freedom in the protection of property rights. Legal and political systems were designed to secure ownership and commerce, with true human rights only emerging later, after generational movements forced the nation to reconcile economic priorities with the moral ones also outlined in the Constitution. Thethese generational struggles, took the lives of many people as well as the personal, professional, and financial sacrifice of many others. At various moments, human rights have gained temporary primacy, but the institutional framework continues to favor property as the more stable and legally protected form of “freedom”.
This is the space where powerful corporate interests and other elites with narrow, self-serving agendas can assert their wealth to capture regulatory and legal mechanisms, cementing and entrenching their position. It is also the space where social movements can rise to confront the harms of that capture and press for change.
If this pattern is structural rather than accidental, the next struggle may be to pass laws that blunt the power of capture itself and better defend against exploitation of this space. A coherent package of legal reforms such as truly progressive taxation, campaign finance and court reform, universal health care, and a robustly funded public education system, including universal pre-K and free university and trade-school options, in addition to higher wages for teachers would not only strengthen society and raise living standards but also weaken the mechanisms of capture…hopefully.