Analysis of: Some top US lobbying firms are working both sides of the Pfas issue at the same time
The Guardian | March 14, 2026
TL;DR
Lobbying firms rake in cash representing both PFAS polluters and cancer victims simultaneously, using healthcare clients as moral cover. This isn't corruption—it's capitalism's political system functioning exactly as designed: profit from both causing and treating the poison.
Analytical Focus:Contradictions Material Conditions Class Analysis
The revelation that major lobbying firms simultaneously represent PFAS manufacturers and public health organizations exposes a fundamental contradiction within capitalism's political infrastructure. These firms aren't aberrations in an otherwise functional system—they are the system operating at peak efficiency. Holland & Knight collecting $520,000 from the American Chemistry Council while also representing the American Cancer Society isn't a conflict of interest in any meaningful regulatory sense; it's a business model that extracts value from both the production of harm and the management of its consequences. The material basis of this arrangement reveals how capital accumulation generates its own political support structures. PFAS manufacturers require lobbying to maintain production conditions that externalize health and environmental costs onto workers, communities, and ecosystems. Simultaneously, the healthcare systems, water utilities, and cancer organizations dealing with these externalized costs also require political representation. The lobbying industry has positioned itself as the necessary intermediary for both, extracting rent from the contradiction between private profit and social cost. The $275,000 earned by KP Public Affairs lobbying both for and against California's cookware ban represents surplus extracted directly from this structural antagonism. Governor Newsom's veto of the consumer products ban while signing the cleanup fund legislation perfectly illustrates how this system perpetuates itself. By allowing PFAS-laden products to continue contaminating water while creating mechanisms to fund remediation, the state ensures ongoing demand for both chemical production and cleanup services—and continued revenue for lobbyists on all sides. The contradiction is not resolved but managed in ways that preserve capital accumulation while distributing health consequences to working-class communities whose drinking water, schools, and bodies become repositories for corporate externalities.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Chemical industry corporations (PFAS manufacturers), Lobbying firms (Holland & Knight, KP Public Affairs, etc.), State legislators and governors, Public health organizations (American Cancer Society), Water utilities and municipal governments, Working-class communities and families, Healthcare systems, Farmers (Maine)
Beneficiaries: PFAS manufacturing corporations maintaining production, Lobbying firms extracting fees from all parties, Cleanup industry positioned to profit from remediation, Insurance and healthcare industries managing chronic illness
Harmed Parties: Working-class families exposed to contaminated water and products, Children with in-utero PFAS exposure, Farmers with contaminated land, Public school children drinking contaminated water, Wildlife and marine mammals, Communities bearing healthcare costs
The chemical industry wields concentrated capital power through lobbying expenditures ($520,000 from ACC to Holland & Knight alone), while affected communities rely on underfunded public health organizations that often unknowingly share representation with their poisoners. State actors mediate this relationship in ways that consistently favor capital—Newsom's veto exemplifies how political decisions manage contradictions to preserve accumulation rather than resolve public health crises. The 'halo effect' described by former lobbyist Browning reveals how public health organizations' moral authority is instrumentalized to legitimize firms that simultaneously work against public health.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: PFAS production generates billions in industry revenue, Lobbying firms earn hundreds of thousands per client, Water remediation creates new profit opportunities, Healthcare costs externalized to public systems and families, Weak state disclosure laws protect lobbying industry opacity
PFAS production exemplifies capitalism's tendency to externalize costs. The chemicals are 'widely used in consumer goods and industry' because they reduce production costs for manufacturers while health and environmental costs are shifted to workers, communities, and future generations. The lobbying industry represents a secondary extraction point—these firms don't produce goods but extract surplus from the political management of production's consequences. The $96,000 Princeton Public Affairs earned lobbying both for and against the same bill demonstrates how political influence itself becomes a commodity.
Resources at Stake: Clean drinking water for millions, Arable farmland (Maine contamination), Public health infrastructure funding, Regulatory framework controlling chemical production, Healthcare system resources treating PFAS-related illness
Historical Context
Precedents: Tobacco industry lobbying tactics and eventual isolation, Lead paint industry's decades-long delay of regulations, Asbestos manufacturers' extended denial campaigns, Chemical industry's pattern of manufacturing doubt
This case follows a well-established pattern in neoliberal capitalism where regulatory capture and lobbying replace direct state ownership as mechanisms for protecting capital from democratic accountability. The report's comparison to tobacco lobbying is apt—the chemical industry has deployed similar strategies of funding doubt, capturing regulatory processes, and using industry-friendly research. However, the dual-client lobbying model represents an evolution: rather than simply opposing regulation, capital now profits from managing the entire political terrain of an issue, including the opposition. This reflects the financialization of political influence itself, where lobbying becomes not just a tool for specific outcomes but a rent-extracting industry indifferent to substantive results.
Contradictions
Primary: The fundamental contradiction between social production for profit and social consequences for health—PFAS are profitable to produce precisely because manufacturers don't bear the costs of contamination, illness, and cleanup that their products generate.
Secondary: Lobbying firms' business model depends on perpetuating conflicts they claim to resolve, Public health organizations seeking political representation inadvertently legitimate firms working against public health, State cleanup funds create infrastructure to manage contamination while preserving conditions of continued contamination, Water utilities supporting consumer bans while sharing lobbyists with polluters
Under current conditions, these contradictions will likely be managed rather than resolved—cleanup funds will proliferate alongside continued contamination, healthcare will treat rising PFAS-related illness while exposure continues, and lobbying firms will extract rent from all parties. The F-Minus report's call to cut ties with conflicted firms echoes the tobacco model, but without organized working-class political pressure, capital will continue finding new intermediaries. Resolution would require either removing chemical production decisions from private profit logic or building sufficient class-conscious power to impose genuine regulatory accountability.
Global Interconnections
The PFAS lobbying scandal connects to global patterns of how transnational capital manages environmental and health externalities. The American Chemistry Council represents the same corporations operating worldwide, using similar tactics to delay regulation across jurisdictions while pollution spreads through global commodity chains. Forever chemicals exemplify what Marxist ecologists call the 'metabolic rift'—capitalism's systematic disruption of natural cycles that historically maintained ecological balance. PFAS persist indefinitely in bodies and ecosystems precisely because they were engineered to resist natural breakdown processes, generating profits through durability while creating permanent contamination. This case also illustrates how neoliberalism has privatized political influence itself. The weak disclosure laws in most states that make lobbying nearly impossible to track aren't accidents—they reflect decades of deliberate deregulation of political processes. The result is a system where democratic accountability becomes another market, with outcomes determined by who can pay for access. The $80,000 Philadelphia pays Holland & Knight versus the $520,000 from the American Chemistry Council reveals the asymmetry built into this market for political influence.
Conclusion
The dual-client lobbying model exposed by F-Minus reveals that reforming corporate political influence requires more than disclosure rules or ethical guidelines—it requires confronting the material basis that makes such arrangements profitable. As long as chemical production remains governed by private accumulation while health consequences are socialized, capital will continue purchasing political protection through whatever mechanisms prove effective. The report's recommendation to 'pick a side' frames this as a moral choice for lobbying firms, but the structural logic of capital ensures new firms will fill any vacuum. Working-class organizations must recognize that their interests cannot be effectively represented within a political system where influence is commodified. The path forward lies not in finding more ethical lobbyists but in building independent working-class political power capable of imposing accountability that capital cannot purchase its way around.
Suggested Reading
- Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2000) Foster's analysis of capitalism's metabolic rift directly illuminates how PFAS production represents systematic disruption of natural cycles for profit, with contamination as inherent rather than accidental.
- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (2007) Klein's documentation of how capital profits from crises it creates parallels the lobbying industry's extraction from both contamination and cleanup, illustrating disaster capitalism's domestic operations.
- Prison Notebooks (Selections) by Antonio Gramsci (1935) Gramsci's concept of hegemony explains how public health organizations become unwitting legitimizers of capital's political machinery through the 'halo effect' described in the article.