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Big Oil Benefits From Anti-Smoking Crusade |
Current rating: 0 |
by Watchdog
(No verified email address) |
15 Apr 2003
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While we watch illegal war for oil control in Iraq, Big Oil wins big as we ignore the fraudulent "anti-smoking" crusade. Corporate media and corporate-serving officials are not "protecting our health" in this campaign...they protect oil, pesticides, chlorine etc., and their insurers and investors. |
* MARLBORO MAN IS FROM OIL COUNTRY *
Chicago is now site of big "smoking" trial. Many are persuaded to think that this is a rare and nice bash on a big bad corporation. It is not. It's more like Reefer Madness. It's another bash on another "sinful" natural plant.
This "wholesome" crusade serves pretty much the same identical corporate interests as the one against pot and hemp...namely, big oil, petrochemicals, chlorine, logging/pulp/paper, pharmaceuticals and others. It is about money...not anyone's health. The packaging of this campaign is no more trustworthy than a typical cigarette ad.
Think of the Cigarette Cartel as an extensive gang...not just some manufacturers. Keep in mind also that everything these manufacturers did was, and still is totally legal, and that all the officials who are now pretending to be "shocked" paved the way, opened the doors, hid the secrets, ignored the toxic/carcinogenic additives, permitted the false advertising, refused to require tests of ANY non-tobacco ingredient, refused to demand specific warnings about even the most known deadly ingredients, refused to require an ingredients list...and, all the while, accepted money directly from the broad cigarette industry (not just cig makers) for campaign funding, and accepted tax money from the taxes.
This gang is big indeed. It includes:
* Big Oil...by way of any number of the 400 or so still registered tobacco pesticides which leave perhaps two dozen or so residues in a typical (non-organic) cigarette. About a third of these pesticides are chlorine chemicals...thus putting dioxin into cigarette smoke and, thence, into the lungs and fatty tissues of uninformed, unprotected and insufficiently-warned consumers. Dioxin is a man made thing...a by-product of man-made chlorine (Dow's monster creation). Even the US classifies it as a KNOWN Human Carcinogen. Even the US a signed treaty to phase it and 11 other Worst-of-the-Worst industrial pollutants out of existence. That's how bad it is. It's still legal in typical cigarette smoke...and not one "concerned" anti-smoking entity has raised a finger to DEMAND that it be removed from cigarette smoke. They don't even meekly suggest a Big WARNING label. Nothing. Maybe they prefer to help Big Oil/Big Chlorine, etc., escape this embarrassment...and criminal indictment.
* Pharmaceuticals: What? a Health Industry is part of evil Big Cig? Sure. Pharmaceuticals make pesticides too. How many tobacco pesticides and residues in a cigarette come from pharmaceuticals is a question that officials who accept funding from the industry haven't yet gotten to ask. Whatever of these pesticide residues are chlorinated, again, raises the issue of dioxin.
Big Pharma also supplies cigarette additives...things like artificial sweeteners, preservatives, humectants, flavorings, aromas, extracts and god knows what else. Some of this stuff helps attract those "kids" that so many anti-smoking entities pretend to be concerned about.
And...if chlorine/dioxin is outed as perhaps the major reason for all the "smoking" diseases and deaths, this doesn't bode well for an industry that makes, reportedly, about half its money on chlorine technologies. (Alternativess to chlorine are available...but, chlorine is more profitable if you don't have responsibility for the victims.)
* Big Chlorine: Cigarette paper is often chlorine-bleached. Many pesticides are chlorine substances. Many additives are chlorine-contaminated. And...the industrial waste cellulose that is used to make fake tobacco, in many US patented processes, is often chlorine-contaminated. Even the US EPA admits that chlorine is "anthropogenic" or man made...and that its by product, dioxin, is "not likely in nature".
It is particularly harmful to young people and pregnant moms. No warning...no protection from this...and no information that it's even THERE is forthcoming from cigarette makers, government officials or the probably universally fake "anti-smoking" groups. Who gets to face burdens of law and costs AND the health effects?...the victims. Corporate "medicine" doesn't even test sick people for traces of such industrial carcinogens. Victims said to have "bad diets" or "didn't get enough exercise"...or, they "smoked".
Many of the so-called "smoking related" ("smoking is NOT a scientific or medically valid term) illnesses are impossible to be caused by tobacco or ANY plant...but are well-known to be effects of dioxin exposure. The obvious move, removing chlorine from cigarettes....Before The Sun Goes Down....isn't taken. Check chlorine interests that fund officials, and commercial media, to help with guessing why.
* Big Insurance: Not long ago it was reported in Journal of the American Medical Association and British medical journal, The Lancet, that some top US HEALTH (!) Insurers were heavily invested in...cigarette manufacturing! Somehow, this scandal didn't make it to prime-time news. Some of the grotesquely-conflicted insurers listed were Prudential, MetLife, Aetna, Cigna and Travelers. Think from their view: isn't it better to let the blame fall on the natural (unpatented) tobacco plant RATHER than directly on their investment properties for intentionally adding some of the world's worst industrial poisons to the tobacco (if a cig has any tobacco)? Isn't it better to dump most of the blame onto the "disobedient" smokers who didn't heed the insufficient, mostly meaningless "warnings"? And, if these (and other insurers) were also invested in tobacco pesticides, chlorine, pharmaceuticals, paper, and so forth...isn't it best to just leave them out of it?
And what if insurers also INSURED these interests? The liabilities for..well....mass murder...can be significant.
So...here we US people are pretty much with the option of No Insurance...or insurance from owners (via stock holdings) of some of the worst health damaging industries on earth. If this issue got legs...Big Insurance would be OUT of the way of a single-payer public funded universal health program tomorrow.
* Agricultural Conglomerates: Typical cigarettes are packed with non-tobacco agricultural ingredients. Not one of them has been tested for safe use...and likely none of them are organic; so, more pesticide residues. This is not only about "tobacco states"...it's about states that produce apples, walnuts, plums, sugar, maple syrup, butter, alfalfa, beets, oranges, lemons, mint, mullein flowers (?), parsley, pineapple, and even rhubarb...for a short list. So...has anyone yet seen ADM or Con-Agra or the like at a "tobacco" trial yet?
(For a list of just 800, out of maybe over 1000, ingredients, check out
http://tobaccodocuments.org/profiles/additives . With number 11 font, you'll need 16 pages to print it out.)
* FERTILIZERS: Back in the 80s, an attempt (maybe with the idea to distract us from the chlorine and pesticides) was made to indict the radiation in typical cigarettes, from use of uranium-contaminated phosphate tobacco fertilizers. No secret. Info is at Centers for Disease Control; one article on this even published in Readers Digest! Surgeon General said this caused most (over 90%) of "smoking related" upper respiratory cancers. What happened to THIS issue? ...and why is this radioactive fertilizer not banned even yet? One can only imagine. Maybe the nuke/radiation industries were displeased by implications that this small a dose of radiation could do so much human damage. Anyway...issue disappeared as if it never happened..."anti-smoking" groups ignore info when they get it...and now we are exclusively after nothing but tobacco. Additives/adulterants/contaminants are excluded.
There's more but...back to Chicago.
This case is about cig makers' false claims that "light" cigarettes were safer. Here's what's NOT raised:
* Cig firms were ASKED to make them "lighter" because officials said they didn't like the "tar and nicotine". So Big Cig happily complied and got "lite" cigs.
* Cig makers had to add more ingredients to make these things taste half decent so they added MORE untested, often toxic or carcinogenic additives.
* Lower nicotine = more smoking, to get that "satisfaction" so...cig makers made more money and officials got more taxes. All happy...except victims...who even government officials allowed to believe they were mitigating harms. Not one law said "prove your advertising claims."
* Public regulatory agencies were not asleep here...and cig makers didn't do all of this in the Dark of Night. It was all legal as pie...no gov't checks of the products or additives were ever required...ads were approved just about no matter what they said or implied...and even officials, preposterously, continued to call this "tobacco"...as if there wasn't another component in the world. It would be LESS absurd to call a pistol "iron ore" just because it was made from that.
* Judges and juries: Are any of these checked for Conflicts-of-Interest vis a vis economic links to cigarette insurers and investors? ....to cigarette advertisers? ...to pesticides, oil, pharmaceuticals, paper, ag businesses or the rest? Is a fair hearing, or the vitally important Appearance of Justice POSSIBLE without such a check...and without recusal of all conflicted parties?
* Ah yes...Demon Big Cig being hit with big 'bond' requirements. But...imagine if, say, an environmental or civil rights group had to pay such a huge sum in order to challenge a ruling? That would mean the end of rights to access to the courts for non-corporate entities or most individuals. If we ignore this being done to a slimeball industry, we allow it to later be done to us. Justice is justice...and even the most homicidal industrial cartel, beyond even military contractors if you go by body count, must get proper adjudication.
Incidentally...it's not Big Cig CEOs who pay this money. Every dime of it comes from victimized consumers...and, like in the Enron case, there's always those regular shareholders to rob for the rest.
What to do about all this? Just ask the questions...insist that "tobacco" and "smoke" be defined for content...and check public records for YOUR public officials and their links to the above-mentioned industries.
Also...think twice about ever again believing that corporate media and corporate-funded officials will be our "consumer advocates", proudly fighting a "big bad corporation". Wolves generally do not have ideal motives for promoting "save the chickens" crusades.
* No Iraqi Blood for Big Oil's Tobacco Pesticides! *
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