What's "peer reviewed" worth when all the peers are suckling at the same teat?

In one of my past lives I wrote an article about the vet college at the U of G in their student newspaper, the Ontarion. The vet college bigs were dudes with Rolex's on their wrists accustomed to attending multiple foreign conferences every year. When I was tracking them down for the story, they were generally unavailable because they were attending a shindig in Zurich or London or the UN or somewhere.

Meanwhile, the vet school at U of Guelph had just been placed on probation by the American Veterinary Association, because while these guys were off on fancy trips, their school was being run into the ground.

Needless to say, my questions were not welcomed, and there were efforts made to suppress the story. That experience forever tainted my view of the academy.

Public universities are chronically under-funded. That forces them into the arms of corporate donors. In the case of a school like U of G, which began as and essentially remains an agricultural school, that partnership does not bode well for scholarship.

All the big corporate donors in any Ag program come from the Big Ag Big Chem Bayer-Monsanto end of the spectrum. Inevitably, virtually everyone peer-reviewing one another's work, across university programs around the world, has their work to some extent underwritten by the chemical-intensive ag industry.

Same goes for other industries, like pharma, for example. Big Pharma funds big on research programs at the top schools around the world. 

We should stop assuming "peer reviewed" is a stamp of intellectual integrity.