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AUDIO: ExxonMobil: A 'Private Empire' On The World Stage 

ExxonMobil And Climate Change

Until 2005, ExxonMobil was run by Lee "Iron Ass" Raymond, a close friend of Vice President Dick Cheney and a skeptic of climate change. During Raymond's tenure, Exxon funded campaigns to challenge the validity of emerging science about climate change -- specifically the findings that a global warming trend existed.

"This not only borrowed from some of the tactics that the tobacco industry had used to delay public understanding of the dangers of smoking; in some cases there were even overlaps of individuals and groups that were engaged in this communications campaign," Coll tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "A lot of corporate America opposed the Kyoto Accords. But only a small set of companies did what Exxon did, which was to really go after the science as aggressively as they did."

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Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition By Robert N. Proctor ($$) 

Editor’s Note: The review of Robert Proctor’s Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition merits comment. In writing the book, Robert Proctor has drawn on the tobacco industry’s formerly secret internal documents to describe how the industry caused the epidemic of tobacco use and the resulting massive burden of premature mortality and morbidity. Even before its publication, the industry tried to obtain (by subpoena) a draft of the book; more recently, it attempted to thwart the introduction of this book as evidence in litigation. David Burns, the book’s reviewer, has been involved in tobacco control since the 1970s, when he began to edit and write reports of the Surgeon General on smoking and health.

This is a monumental work that earns its place alongside 2 other definitive descriptions of the history of tobacco and the role of the cigarette industry in promoting disease, namely Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger (1) and The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt (2). However, unlike those 2 books, which examined role of the tobacco industry from the perspective of an external and neutral observer, this volume takes the reader inside the companies, laying bare their strategies and motivations in their amoral quest to preserve profits at all costs. It is the first book to take full advantage of the vast trove of internal tobacco company documents housed in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California San Francisco (http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/). It shines a …

[Full Text of this Article]

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‘X-Files’ actor on smoking and skiing 

The actor recounts his winding road to become a TV villain in his new book “Where There’s Smoke.”

Davis tells Steve Fast why he never moved to Hollywood, how “The X Files” changed his life and the perils of a non-smoker taking on the role of “Cancer Man.”

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• "Bad Acts" Book Signing & ANR Fundraiser - RSVP and book order options 

You're Invited! Book Launch Signing Fundraiser

Come and hear authors Sharon Y. Eubanks & Stanton A. Glantz discuss their new book, Bad Acts.

The story that big tobacco doesn't want you to hear.

Saturday, June 16th, 2012 4:00 PM (program from 4:30-7:30) David Brower Center 2150 Allston Way

Berkeley, CA 94704

MORE ABOUT BAD ACTS...

Sharon Eubanks, the lawyer who led the Department of Justice team that won the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act case against the tobacco industry, and Stanton Glantz will present their newly published book, Bad Acts, that tells the behind-the scenes story of the case.

On January 20, 1999, President Bill Clinton announced in his State of the Union address that the Justice Department was planning to sue the tobacco industry and assigned the task to Attorney General Janet Reno and the Justice Department. This book is the story of that case - the politics, the litigation, the behavior of the industry and its lawyers, the efforts by the Bush Administration to gut the case, and the ultimate victory in court.

Bad Acts tells the story, not yet fully revealed, of what was happening behind-the-scenes at the Department of Justice as the case approached victory, when the Bush Administration intervened, with some success, to protect Big Tobacco. The book examines the political influences and interferences of both Clinton Democrats and George W. Bush Republicans. It is a candid behind-the-scenes account of how the case was put together, how the industry attempted to halt the case, and how it ultimately was won by the Justice Department.

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• APHA Book Store: Bad Acts: The Racketeering Case Against the Tobacco Industry 

On January 20, 1999, President Bill Clinton announced in his State of the Union address that the Justice Department was planning to sue the tobacco industry and assigned the task to Attorney General Jane Reno and the Justice Department. This book is the story of that case - the politics, the litigation, the behavior of the industry and its lawyers, the efforts by the Bush Administration to gut the case, and the ultimate victory in court.

Bad Acts tells the story, not yet fully revealed, of what was happening behind the scenes at the Department of Justice as the case approached victory, when the Bush Administration intervened, with some success, to protect Big Tobacco. The book examines the political influences and interferences of and by Clinton Democrats and George W. Bush Republicans. It is a candid behind-the-scenes account of how the case was put together, how the industry attempted to halt the case, and how it ultimately was won by the Justice Department.

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“Bad Acts” Describes Tobacco Industry Interference in DOJ Case 

A soon-to-be-published new book tells the hidden story of how the Bush Administration intervened to protect Big Tobacco from the 1999 U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawsuit filed under President Clinton. The book is authored by Sharon Eubanks, the DOJ attorney who headed up the team that won the multi-billion dollar Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) case against the industry, and Stanton Glantz, head of the University of California San Francisco's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. "Bad Acts" tells what happened behind-the-scenes -- the politics, the litigation, the behavior of the tobacco industry and its lawyers as the Bush Administration worked to gut the case just as the DOJ's team was approaching victory. The book is currently in production and will ship in mid-May.

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The Plain Truth 

14 March 2012, 6.30pm

IEA, 2 Lord North Street, London, SW1 (door on Great Peter Street)

Does Packaging Influence Smoking?

Plain packaging does not work. Furthermore, it cannot work, argue Patrick Basham and John Luik in this timely, provocative book that confronts the public health establishment's proposal to mandate the plain packaging of tobacco products.

After combing through the research literature, Basham and Luik separate the methodological wheat from the chafe and discover that plain packaging is far removed from the world of evidence-based public health. The paucity of evidence to support plain packaging would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious for individual citizens, private companies, and for our body politic. . . .

At the stroke of a pen, plain packaging will make the UK a poorer and a more illiberal society, and a nation further infantilised by her Nanny State - and, critically, not a whit healthier.

Dr Patrick Basham is the Director of the Democracy Institute. Dr John Luik is a Senior Fellow.

The Democracy Institute is a politically independent public policy research organization based in Washington and London. It aims to provide a balanced and thoughtful perspective

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LETTER: Will Barbeau: Profitable promotion of ignorance 

In the midst of the enlightened 21st Century civilization grows a richly funded cancer - the active promotion of ignorance. The public-relations business thrives on rich clients who pay millions to fight back science in many fields - particularly public health.

Tobacco is the classic case history. Back in the '50s, John Hill - founder of the PR firm Hill and Knowlton - was hired to defend tobacco against proof that smoking killed people. Hill's strategy was to create ''reasonable doubt'' about the science. Hill persuaded editors that it was their journalistic responsibility to "tell both sides of the story." Millions of smokers were convinced that they could safely continue smoking because the science was still ''unproven.'' They continue puffing their way toward agonizing deaths.

John Hill's PR firm did so well that the tobacco-case history has inspired copyists who are hired to create ignorance on numerous other subjects.

For example, some candidates for leadership of the world's most powerful nation recently disclaimed the science behind global warming. Never mind that, if ignored, warming could end life on earth. . . .

"Creationism'' or ''intelligent design'' are offered as the "other side of the story." . . .

Readers are urged to read "Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance,'' by Robert Proctor. The term was created by a team of researchers at Stanford University and is the title of a book available in soft-cover from Amazon at $17. . . .

Who is winning? Well, about half of all Americans believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old - including several leading politicians.

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• Barron H. Lerner: Was Science Sidelined in Cigarette Debate? 

Is the tobacco industry so inherently duplicitous that it does not deserve to exist, even if it is a great capitalist success? Proctor challenges his readers to conceptualize a much happier and healthier world in which the manufacture and sale of cigarettes is prohibited.

Proctor is hardly the first accomplished author to mine this topic. Books by Richard Kluger, Stanton Glantz and Allan Brandt have savaged the cigarette industry, relying in part on internal tobacco company documents that were released as a result of a series of lawsuits.

Proctor builds not only on this earlier work but on the continued release of documents in an easily searchable online database, now containing 70 million pages. As the author notes, being able to search for specific terms -- like candy cigarettes, cyanide and the famous 1964 surgeon general's Report -- made it easy for him to document the industry's perfidies. Through such searches Proctor learned, for example, that cigarette filters don't filter and that light and low tar cigarettes are especially deadly. He also learned that, remarkably, the tobacco industry was given the power to veto membership on the surgeon general's committee, leading to a report that did not condemn smoking nearly as forcefully as it might have.

Indeed, Golden Holocaust is like a 700-page how-to manual of how to sell a dangerous product that no one needs and make lots of money as a result. Here is the full story of the December 1953 meeting of tobacco company CEOs that engineered several public strategies for obfuscating the growing proof -- privately well-known to these executives -- that smoking was both addictive and almost surely linked to lung cancer. The main plan, engineered by the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, was to repetitively insist that no definitive proof of harm existed and that "more research was needed." It was a masterful example of what we now call "plausible deniability." Proctor calls it an "oncologic Ponzi scheme."

Proctor's charges gain authority by his willingness to name the names of extremely respected historians and other academicians who have received compensation for providing either written support or court testimony on behalf of the tobacco industry -- blood money, according to Proctor. One such individual, Yale University epidemiologist and smoker Alvan R. Feinstein, placed his influential theory of detection bias in service to tobacco, calling into question the association of smoking and lung cancer even as other scientists were nailing it down. In another instance, Proctor discovers a script developed by the tobacco industry's lawyers for a historian to recite during his testimony. . . .

Still, Proctor's study, like the Bain controversy, should encourage every one of us to scrutinize "business as usual." Six trillion cigarettes are smoked annually, enough to make a chain from the earth to the sun and back as well as a couple of trips to Mars. One billion people will die far too young during the 21st century as a result. The cigarette cannot disappear quickly enough.

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• New Indonesian Cigarette Book Just Big Tobacco Propaganda: Activists 

Antismoking activists have slammed the latest conspiracy theory that global forces want to hurt Indonesia’s economy by destroying its tobacco industry.

A book, “Killing Indonesia: Global Conspiracy on Destroying Clove Cigarettes,” was out on bookshelves this week to defend Indonesia’s tobacco industry, especially clove cigarettes, which are a locally made product dubbed by the book as the country’s cultural legacy.

The book claims the global anti-tobacco campaign is merely a foreign plot to kill Indonesia’s clove industry.

It said that if foreigners succeeded in restricting clove cigarettes, they would replace them with foreign-made ones, known as “white cigarettes.”

One activist derided the claims.

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Global Tobacco Control: Power, Policy, Governance and Transfer 

The first major book by political scientists explaining global tobacco control policy. It identifies a history of minimal tobacco control then charts the extent to which governments have regulated tobacco in the modern era. It identifies major policy change from the post-war period and uses theories of public policy to help explain the change.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an excellent case study in which the authors provide a thorough account of global tobacco control issues using political and public policy analysis. The book is clearly written, accessible and will be of great interest to students of politics, policy analysis and public health."

- Rob Baggott, Professor, Health Policy Research Unit, De Montfort University, UK

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Professor’s new book takes political, cultural look at tobacco policies  

West Virginia University political science Professor Donley Studlar has published a new book that evaluates tobacco policies around the world.

"Global Tobacco Control: Power, Policy, Governance and Transfer," explores the history of the tobacco industry and major concerns in the market.

The book focuses on the gap between policy problems in the industry and government response across the globe, in addition to the vast changes in the system over the past 60 years, Studlar said.

"Smoking is a very culturally and economically embedded practice in many countries. One of the most remarkable things is how much change there has been," he said. "While policies still vary in Western, industrialized countries, there's been a convergence of policies as information has diffused concerning the dangers of cigarette smoking, as well as how different countries have dealt with them."

Studlar said the modern view on smoking in the United States has contributed to economic shifts in the marketplace.

"In the 1950s, cigarette smoking was just normal and no one really objected to the situation. Today, smoking is denormalized, and there are restrictions on tobacco," he said. "What we're trying to do in this book is explore that shift - how it came about and the differences across countries."

"Smoking is usually thought of as a public health issue, but it's also a very political issue, and the fact that it is perceived differently in different countries indicates that."

Smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the world, but many countries do not possess any laws regulating smoking, he said.

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Tobacco Capitalism: Growers, Migrant Workers, and the Changing Face of a Global Industry 

Tobacco Capitalism tells the story of the people who live and work on U.S. tobacco farms at a time when the global tobacco industry is undergoing profound changes. Against the backdrop of the antitobacco movement, the globalization and industrialization of agriculture, and intense debates over immigration, Peter Benson draws on years of field research to examine the moral and financial struggles of growers, the difficult conditions that affect Mexican migrant workers, and the complex politics of citizenship and economic decline in communities dependent on this most harmful commodity.

Benson tracks the development of tobacco farming since the plantation slavery period and the formation of a powerful tobacco industry presence in North Carolina. In recent decades, tobacco companies that sent farms into crisis by aggressively switching to cheaper foreign leaf have coached growers to blame the state, public health, and aggrieved racial minorities for financial hardship and feelings of vilification. Economic globalization has exacerbated social and racial tensions in North Carolina, but the corporations that benefit have rarely been considered a key cause of harm and instability, and have now adopted social-responsibility platforms to elide liability for smoking disease. Parsing the nuances of history, power, and politics in rural America, Benson explores the cultural and ethical ambiguities of tobacco farming and offers concrete recommendations for the tobacco-control movement in the United States and worldwide.

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• New book examines public health, cultural, off-shoring impact of U.S. tobacco industry  

What has been neglected is research on tobacco production in the United States, and specifically on the people who work and live in the rural, traditional tobacco-growing areas of North Carolina.

Benson’s new book, Tobacco Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2011), examines the impact of the transformation of the tobacco industry on farmers, workers and the American public. It reveals public health threats, the impact of off-shoring, and the immigration issues related to tobacco production.

The book also examines the new public relations strategies of the tobacco industry and its recent corporate social responsibility “makeover”.

“There are whole groups of people — farmers and farm workers — in our society who dedicate themselves to growing a crop that is vilified,” says Benson, assistant professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences.

“But this book is not just about good people doing a bad thing. What I found was, in going to North Carolina and going to these farms, that the story becomes much more complex.”

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Book Talk - Unlikely Friendship Shines Light on Persecution 

The two main characters in Elliot Perlman's vast novel "The Street Sweeper" are both jolted from their private miseries by meeting a dying Auschwitz survivor and patient at the hospital, whose stories about making it out of a Nazi death camp alive feed into tales about the U.S. Civil Rights movement.

Perlman, an Australian native and former lawyer, said the seed for the book came from watching the diverse mix of people who stood smoking outside of Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital and wondering what would happen if two totally unlikely companions were thrown together there.

Q: You're dealing with some big themes. How did you move from them to the characters?

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