One of the great things about the scientific method is that it is embedded with a self correcting engine. Science always continues to improve because it can examine itself; it reviews and refines its flaws.

Science today is being perverted by a small group of privately paid intellectuals, who seek to obscure the results of professional scientists by spinning, twisting and undermining their results. Most of this disinformation comes from what are referred to as front groups.

A front group is an organization that claims to represent one agenda, while in reality, it serves some other party or interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned. Front groups hire scientists that are willing to obscure the truth. Unlike regular scientists, they do not publish peer reviewed papers. Their views reflect their sponsors and unlike regular scientists, their main goal is to alter public opinion. Front groups create easy to read reports that are then injected into the media or political campaigns. They are nothing more than paid propagandists hired by the private sector and used to confuse the public.

Real scientists have been marginalized partly because they have trouble expressing their complex ideas to the media, while front group's existence depends on their ability to take incomprehensible ideas and turn them into easy to understand sound bites for the public. These sound bites then enter into what is called an echo chamber. This is when news outlets begin to naively report soundbites that move like a virus through the media.

There are hundreds of these groups, receiving billions from corporations. They work to protect private interests no matter how dangerous and undemocratic, no matter how many people die, all in the name of profit.

Science and technology are powerful engines. They can make our lives better or worse. Whoever controls this mass of power has the ability to affect entire societies. But at the moment these instruments are being dominated and manipulated by an unseen army of paid charlatans.

Here are some of the corporately funded front groups, pr firms and think tanks mentioned in the video:

The Cato Institute
Center for Consumer Freedom
The Employee Policy Institute
Center For Union Facts
Global Climate Coalition
Friends of Science Society
Frontiers of Freedom
Greening Earth Society
Institute of Public Affairs
Scientific Alliance
American Enterprise Institute
Adam Smith Institute
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Accuracy in the Media
Berman and Co.