tobacco

Inept Liberal Lobbyists Refute Their Own Claims: the bungling Center for American Progress

by Hans Bader on September 11, 2009 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Many falsehoods were uttered by the President in his health care speech, as even liberal newspapers and Obama advisers have made clear. But the inept, George Soros-funded liberal lobbyists at the Center for American Progress (CAP) attempted to demonize ObamaCare’s critics anyway.

CAP recently shot itself in the foot by refuting its own claims in its September 11 “Progress Report.”

For example, it wrote that critics of big government and ObamaCare “include the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, corporate front groups that claim smoking is good for you.”  But if you click on the very link for their false claim that CEI believes that “smoking is good for you,” it takes you to a CEI web page, www.controlabuseofpower.org, in which CEI not only makes no such claims, but does just the opposite, noting “the health risks of smoking” in the course of criticizing the $240 billion tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

Indeed, the top post on that page, by CEI’s Ashley Jacobs, starts its last sentence about the tobacco settlement by explicitly “acknowledging the health risks of smoking.”

(The tobacco settlement has been defended in court by big tobacco companies that use it to squelch competition from smaller competitors, by forcing them to make costly escrow deposits on every cigarette they sell, under discriminatory laws states adopted as a condition of the settlement.  If CEI actually were a corporate front group, it would have defended the tobacco settlement, instead of attacking it, since its attack on the settlement dried up the small fraction of CEI’s funding that it once received from big tobacco companies).

There are many blog posts at OpenMarket saying that discriminatory regulation aimed at smokeless tobacco is bad precisely BECAUSE smoking kills, meaning that smokeless tobacco, which has far fewer health risks, should be allowed to trumpet its health-advantage over cigarettes so that smokers will stop smoking and switch to smokeless tobacco.  This public health benefit is, sadly, blocked by legislation backed by Philip Morris, the nation’s largest tobacco company, and, apparently, the Center for American Progress, which collects donations from corporations seeking to obtain corporate welfare and curry favor with the Obama Administration. (“Some open government groups, such as the Sunlight Foundation and the Campaign Legal Center, criticize the Center’s failure to disclose its contributors, particularly since it is so influential in appointments to the Obama administration,” as Politico has noted).

You can find three of my own blog posts discussing the dangers of smoking here, here, and here.

At the web sites of CEI and the Examiner, I have described cigarettes as “lethal” and “hazardous to your health” and written that “Every year, millions of smokers like my wife try and fail to quit . . . Many later die of smoking-related illnesses, which are caused by the smoke, not the nicotine.”

FDA to Smokers: Drop Dead

by Hans Bader on August 3, 2009 · 3 comments

in Healthcare, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony

The FDA is now moving towards banning a smoking alternative that could save many lives. Every year, millions of smokers like my wife try and fail to quit, because they are nicotine addicts. Many later die of smoking-related illnesses, which are caused by the smoke, not the nicotine. The obvious solution is to give smokers access to less hazardous products that provide the nicotine they crave without the deadly smoke, like chewing tobacco, or, better yet, electronic cigarettes or snus. (Electronic cigarettes, also known as e-cigarettes, deliver nicotine in a vapor instead of much more harmful tobacco smoke).

The FDA is now moving towards banning e-cigarettes, reports syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum. Cigarettes, which contain lots of toxins and cancer-causing agents, aren’t banned, but the FDA wants to ban e-cigarettes, which contain infinitely-smaller amounts of carcinogens, complaining that e-cigarettes contain “detectable levels of known carcinogens and toxic chemicals to which users could potentially be exposed” (emphasis added).”

As public-health expert, and tobacco-industry critic, Michael Siegel notes, this is terrible reasoning by the FDA, since all tobacco replacement products now on the market contain small but “detectable” amounts of known carcinogens. The FDA used to be more reluctant to block smoking alternatives that have small or imaginary risks, but that seems to be changing over the last year.

A bill supported by the nation’s largest cigarette maker that was signed into law earlier this year by Obama will keep producers of smokeless tobacco from truthfully telling smokers about the fact that smoking is more dangerous to their health than smokeless tobacco. That will harm public health, as advocates like Bill Godshall of Smoke Free Pennsylvania have noted.

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) wants to ban e-cigarettes even if the FDA does not. Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, is appalled: “This is about as idiotic and irrational an approach as I have ever seen in my 22 years in tobacco control and public health,” he wrote on his blog. “A public policy maker who touts himself as being a champion of the public’s health [is] demanding that we ban what is clearly a much safer cigarette than those on the market, but that we allow, protect, approve, and institutionalize the really toxic ones.”

This isn’t the only thing bad happening on the public-health front. The opportunity for meaningful health-care reform is being squandered.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

The health-care “reform” bills backed by the Administration perversely exempt illegal aliens from the health-insurance taxes and obligations imposed on citizens, effectively giving them preferential treatment. The bills’ drafters do not deny that they would exempt illegal aliens from such taxes and obligations. However, they do claim that illegal aliens also would also not be eligible for the bills’ “public option” health-coverage plan. That reassurance is illusory, since the bills’ drafters blocked the only effective means of verifying whether beneficiaries are in fact illegal aliens. Even the liberal Houston Chronicle has noted the “lack of a mechanism for verifying” eligibility by illegal aliens.

While America’s health-care system is very expensive, it is much better at treating and detecting common forms of cancer than most European health-care systems. The Administration’s health-care proposals put these successes in jeopardy, yet they would increase health-care costs even further, while failing to provide health-care coverage as cheap or as universal as in Europe.

More Government Waste, Corruption, and Corporate Welfare, Thanks to the Obama Administration

by Hans Bader on June 14, 2009

in Odds & Ends

Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”

Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously uncovered millions of dollars in waste and fraud in the troubled AmeriCorps program, whose budget is being dramatically increased by the Obama Administration. Inspector General Gerald Walpin was fired after he uncovered misuse of Americorps funds and sought to keep the wrongdoer from accessing federal “stimulus money.” The recently-passed stimulus package repealed welfare reform, and it subsidizes waste and corruption.

Congress is moving towards passing a “cash for clunkers” bill that would give people tax credits, but only if they own an old gas-guzzler that they are trading in for a new car. So if you bought a fuel-efficient car in the past, your tax dollars will be used for welfare for people who bought inefficient cars (cars with less than 18 MPG). The bill will increase the national debt (and thus future taxes) by billions of dollars. As Mike Budnick notes in the Wall Street Journal, “This type of legislation rewards people who have made poor decisions and penalizes only people who have already made good choices. Not the kind of incentive that we should propagate. Let the market work.”

Taxpayers are being ripped off to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to enrich wealthy buyers of so-called “toxic assets.” Meanwhile, the Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus package is actually killing jobs and shrinking the economy.

Congress passed an FDA tobacco regulation bill, but not without adding insidious provisions that will reduce competition in the tobacco industry, and actually make it harder to introduce products that reduce the harms and health risks of tobacco, notes the Wall Street Journal. We earlier described the bill’s pitfalls and counterproductive provisions. Obama has said he will sign the bill into law.

Billions of tax dollars are being spent on bailing out carmakers, but the primary beneficiaries of this corporate welfare are not the car companies themselves, which could have survived without federal bailouts by simply abrogating their collective bargaining agreements and dealer-contracts in a standard bankruptcy-court reorganization, but the United Auto Workers Union, which spent millions electing Obama and is now calling the shots. Taxpayers and pension funds are being ripped off to enrich the UAW, which enjoys wages much higher than the average American.

A similar government bailout of the auto industry actually backfired in England in the 1970s, destroying its carmakers by leaving them with excessive wages, inefficiency, and political meddling in car design.

Now, even liberal commentators are questioning whether the mushrooming auto bailouts pass constitutional muster, such as Charles Lane in today’s Washington Post. (Lane is so liberal and pro-government that in a front page article in 2003, he characterized the Supreme Court’s 2003 decisions as collectively being great for “civil liberties,” even though he admitted that the Supreme Court had rejected free speech claims in 7 out of its 8 First Amendment cases that term, largely because Lane approved of its decision upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s race-based affirmative action plan — even though legally permissible affirmative-action plans are a discretionary government function, not an individual right or civil-liberty).

Conservative columnist George Will also has a column today criticizing the auto bailouts. He points out that the Administration’s current claim that it can use TARP bank-bailout money for an auto bailout is at odds with the Treasury Department’s past admissions to the contrary: “Last September, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson testified to the Senate that TARP money was necessary for ailing ‘financial institutions.’ Nowhere in the bill’s 169 pages was there any reference to government funding of ‘automobile’ or ‘manufacturing’ companies. In November, Paulson told a House committee: ‘I’ve said to you very clearly that I believe that the auto companies fall outside of [TARP's] purpose.’”

Earlier, commentators like the Heritage Foundation, Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and liberal journalist Andrew Sullivan all agreed that the auto bailouts are illegal or unconstitutional.

FDA Poised to Regulate Tobacco, Which May Backfire

by Hans Bader on June 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, Healthcare, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony

Congress is about to enact a bill to subject tobacco to FDA regulation. Mark Berlind notes one anomalous feature of the bill: it would deny companies’ protection against “tort liability — even if they rigorously follow every FDA rule.” We wrote earlier about how FDA regulation might actually undermine public health by making it harder to market to smokers other tobacco products, like snus, that are not as lethal as cigarettes.

As Jacob Sullum notes, the law will require snus “to carry a warning that it ‘is not a safe alternative to cigarettes,’” even though “there’s no question that snus is far less hazardous than cigarettes.” And to even “introduce a ‘modified risk product,’ a manufacturer has to convince the FDA not only that the product will ‘significantly reduce harm and the risk of tobacco-related disease to individual tobacco users’ but also that it will ‘benefit the health of the population as a whole, taking into account both users of tobacco products and persons who do not currently use tobacco products.’”

In the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney wrote earlier about how the bill would reduce competition in the tobacco industry and enrich the biggest cigarette company — Philip Morris — at the expense of consumers and competitors alike. Although the bill is supported by leading anti-smoking groups (which indirectly receive money from Big Tobacco through the $246 billion Master Settlement Agreement), the bill’s “most important ally” is “Philip Morris, the largest cigarette maker in the world”:

“Philip Morris stands to benefit from this regulation in many ways. First, all regulation adds to overhead, and thus falls more heavily on smaller firms. Second, restrictions on advertising help Philip Morris’ Marlboro, a brand everyone already knows, by keeping lesser-known brands in the shadows. (Existing restrictions on advertising have already helped Philip Morris in this regard, with an added benefit spelled out in Altria’s annual report: ‘Marketing and selling expenses were lower, reflecting regulatory restrictions on advertising and promotion activities. … ‘) Finally, if the bill passes and the FDA gets added control over the industry, Philip Morris, more than any of its competitors, will have access to those bureaucrats and agency heads making the decisions.”

Federal regulation often backfires. A classic example is the 2007 child-safety law, the CPSIA, which was based on junk science. It shut down countless thrift stores and entire industries, resulting in children’s books being thrown out and pulled from library shelves by the thousands. It harmed poor people and special-needs kids. It rendered many ordinary bicycles illegal and made motorcycles more dangerous to children.

But it is now being used by Congress as a blueprint for a misguided law, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, that would put small food producers and farmers’ markets out of business in the name of food safety.

Baptist-Bootlegger Alliance on Tobacco

by Hans Bader on April 8, 2009

in Economy, Healthcare, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

In today’s Washington Examiner, Tim Carney has an excellent column on how the bill to place tobacco under FDA regulation would reduce competition in the tobacco industry and enrich the biggest company — Philip Morris — at the expense of consumers and competitors alike. Although the bill is supported by leading anti-smoking groups (which indirectly receive money from Big Tobacco through the $246 billion Master Settlement Agreement), the bill’s “most important ally” is “Philip Morris, the largest cigarette maker in the world.” As Carney notes,

“There’s a metaphor popularized by economist Bruce Yandle that is useful in explaining efforts to regulate anything from energy to toy safety. Call it the Tale of the Baptist and the Bootlegger.

“Picture a small-town Southern politician after Prohibition’s repeal. Call him Jones. Jones’ campaign needs both cash and a winning issue. The state’s most prolific bootlegger comes and offers Jones both. ‘I can bankroll your entire campaign. You just need to outlaw alcohol in the county. If you close down the bars and clear the liquor out of the corner stores, the men will all have to come to me for their fix.’

“Jones, with newly heavy pockets, walks down to the Lady’s Temperance Hall and declares, ‘Ladies, I’m running to end the scourge of alcohol in this town, and I’m asking for your support.’ At his campaign kickoff the next week, Jones has the entire Temperance Union and the local preacher onstage endorsing him, and of course, he’s got the pipeline of alcohol cash from the rumrunner who will get even richer when the county goes dry again.

“Philip Morris is the ‘bootlegger’ today — the undisputed giant of the industry. The company controls more than half of the U.S. cigarette market. . .Parent company Altria has hired three new lobbying firms so far this year, bringing its army to 19 different lobbying firms plus a powerful in-house shop. . .

“Philip Morris stands to benefit from this regulation in many ways. First, all regulation adds to overhead, and thus falls more heavily on smaller firms. Second, restrictions on advertising help Philip Morris’ Marlboro, a brand everyone already knows, by keeping lesser-known brands in the shadows. (Existing restrictions on advertising have already helped Philip Morris in this regard, with an added benefit spelled out in Altria’s annual report: ‘Marketing and selling expenses were lower, reflecting regulatory restrictions on advertising and promotion activities. … ‘) Finally, if the bill passes and the FDA gets added control over the industry, Philip Morris, more than any of its competitors, will have access to those bureaucrats and agency heads making the decisions.”

We wrote earlier about how FDA regulation might actually undermine public health by making it harder to market to smokers other tobacco products, like snus, that are not as lethal as cigarettes.

Federal regulation often backfires. A classic example is the 2007 child-safety law, the CPSIA, which was based on junk science. It shut down countless thrift stores and entire industries, resulting in children’s books being thrown out and pulled from library shelves by the thousands. It harmed poor people and special-needs kids. It rendered many ordinary bicycles illegal and made motorcycles more dangerous to children.

But it is now being used by Congress as a blueprint for a misguided law, the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, that would put small food producers and farmers’ markets out of business in the name of food safety.

Speaking of Baptists and bootleggers, a large coalition of religious leaders who know nothing about how regulation works in the real world have endorsed FDA tobacco regulation. Most of them are from liberal religious denominations, like the Unitarian Universalists and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, but the signatories also include Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention.

I wrote earlier about the Religious Left, including its claims that Sarah Palin is not really a woman (because she’s a Republican), that Ronald Reagan was “Pontius Pilate,” and its rants about the “Taliban-like American male,” who should “shut up for a milennium.” The Religious Left also believes that God hates secret ballots in the workplace, and falsely accused former Interior Secretary James Watt of publicly stating that all trees should be cut down in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

Dickie Scruggs Back in Court

by Richard Morrison on February 9, 2009

in Healthcare, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation

But, alas, not as a litigator – the role that made him rich and famous – but as a defendant. According to Legal Newsline, Richard “Dickie” Scruggs is headed back to federal court to plead guilty to another count of trying to bribe a judge. He’s already serving a five-year sentence for a previous bribery attempt.

OpenMarket readers will remember Scruggs as one of the fattest of fat cat trial lawyers to emerge from the multi-state tobacco settlement reached between tobacco companies and state attorneys general in 1998. Our own Hans Bader revisited the scandalous fees charged by lawyers like Scruggs last June and August. Attorneys, many of whom did nothing but re-file copycat lawsuits in their own states, reaped a windfall of $15,000,000,000 (that’s fifteen billion dollars) in legal fees.

But at least the money that didn’t end up in the pockets of men like Scruggs went to help sick smokers, right? That was, after all, the rationale for extorting $240 billion from tobacco companies. Not so much, it seems. Just in the last week the Virginia General Assembly has been a contentious place, as state lawmakers argue about whether the state should have spent large amounts of its tobacco settlement money on things like “high-speed Internet access in rural areas, upgrades to sewer lines, a scenic trail to honor Virginia’s musical heritage and a railroad museum.” I don’t remember anyone campaigning for the MSA by telling us they were fighting for more railroad museums and musical hiking trails. It must have slipped their mind.