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New Jersey's campaign finance system may have restricted the flow of big money into statewide elections and cut down on the abuses known as pay to play, but determined donors and fund-raisers always seem to find a loophole.
Indeed, newly available records show that big donors to the Democratic and Republican Parties -- along with law firms, engineers and others who do business with the state -- are sidestepping the state's contribution limits and pay-to-play rules by giving to the parties' governors' associations, which turn around and spend heavily in New Jersey.
Harry Pozycki, chairman of the Citizens' Campaign, a nonpartisan group that is an advocate of the pay-to-play rules, said on Monday that the two associations were providing "a huge back door for the evasion of contribution limits." He added, "Following the money becomes that much more difficult." . . .
The Republican Governors Association, which has spent nearly $3 million already in support of Christopher J. Christie, the former federal prosecutor who is challenging Mr. Corzine, has raised $90,000 from the National Rifle Association since December. . . .
Big tobacco also seems to be backing Mr. Christie, who as a securities lawyer once represented the industry in an antismoking lawsuit: Tobacco interests have given the Republican group nearly $300,000.
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Several newspapers reported in late January on the death of Horace R. Kornegay, Jr., who served as the Executive Director of the Tobacco Institute from 1969 to 1986. Mr. Kornegay's passing was little noticed, but he was one of the more notable opponents of public health measures in American history.
Mr. Kornegay took over at the Institute just five years after the U.S. Public Health Service and Surgeon General's first report in 1964 positively linked smoking to a list of chronic and deadly diseases. In his speeches, Kornegay typically portrayed public health advocates -- a category that included the Surgeon General -- as a bunch of shrill, over-emotional zealots who "plied their trade with terrifying tactics" and were involved in misguided efforts to destroy the industry. . . .
On December 11, 1979, Mr. Kornegay gave a notorious speech before the Tobacco and Allied Industries Division of the American Jewish Community in which he likened attacks on the tobacco industry to the repression of Jews . . .
When society became alarmed over skyrocketing rate of lung cancer in the 1970s, Kornegay deflected attention from cigarettes by attributing the increase to improved medical diagnostic techniques.
When Eastern Airlines attempted to create separate smoking and non-smoking sections on their commercial flights in 1977, Mr. Kornegay wrote a near-hysterical letter to industry supporters to get them to oppose it . . .
Mr. Kornegay was central to the tobacco industry's decades-long battle to thwart tobacco control in the U.S., but more importantly to history, he personified the industry's combative stance in the wake of overwhelming published research implicating smoking as a cause of disease and death. It was a stance that will not be forgotten.
Former North Carolina Rep. Horace Kornegay, who vigorously defended cigarette manufacturers in Congress and later as Big Tobacco's chief spokesman, died Wednesday. He was 84. . . .
Kornegay moved in 1969 to the Tobacco Institute, an industry trade group that also assembled a team of lobbyists and built a reputation as one of Capitol Hill's most powerful forces. There, he continued to push back against increased taxes and regulations that were dogging an industry that he cast as one of America's best.
In 1986, serving as chairman of the Tobacco Institute, Kornegay ardently fought against a Surgeon General suggestion that the nation ban cigarette advertising.
Horace Kornegay, a former congressman from Greensboro who became a spokesman for Big Tobacco, died this morning at age 84.
Kornegay was chairman of the now defunct Tobacco Institute, the powerful lobbying arm of the cigarette manufacturers. In that role, Kornegay lead efforts to promote tobacco and to head off anti-smoking initiatives. . . .
during eight years in Congress and 18 years with the Tobacco Institute, Kornegay led a futile fight against the rising public opinion against cigarette smoking. . . . When Kornegay retired in 1986, the institute had 115 employees.
He proudly quoted Sen. Ted Kennedy, a smoking opponent, who said "hour for hour, and dollar for dollar, they're (The Tobacco Institute) probably the most effective lobby on Capitol Hill."
Hour for hour, and dollar for dollar, they're probably the most effective lobby on Capitol Hill.Sen. Ted Kennedy, on the Tobacco Institute. Longtime TI head Horace Kornegay has died.
Charles Morgan Jr., a leading civil rights lawyer who was often vilified and threatened by fellow whites during the turbulent 1960s in the South but who pressed on to win a landmark lawsuit that helped establish the so-called one-person-one-vote rule, giving blacks more equitable representation in legislative districts, died Thursday at his home in Destin, Fla. He was 78.
The cause was complications of advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, a family spokesman said. . . .
A bulky man, Mr. Morgan held court every day after work in his smoky, whiskey-stained office in Atlanta or, if he were traveling, propped up in a hotel bed in some distant town. . . .
Mr. Morgan spent the rest of his career in private practice. He earned large fees and incurred criticism from old friends when he represented large corporations against what he portrayed as government efforts to abridge their rights. He once represented the Tobacco Institute in its opposition to no-smoking laws.
Longtime uber-lobbyist Charles R. Black Jr. is John McCain's man in Washington, a political maestro who is hoping to guide his friend, the senator from Arizona, to the presidency this November.
But for half a decade in the 1980s, Black was also Jonas Savimbi's man in the capital city. His lobbying firm received millions from the brutal Angolan guerrilla leader and took advantage of Black's contacts in Congress and the White House.
Justice Department records that Black's firm submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act detail frequent meetings with lawmakers and their staffs and lavish spending by Black and his partners as they attempted to ensure support for Savimbi, whose UNITA movement was fighting the Marxist Angolan government.
Then in his 30s, Black already had established himself as a pioneer of the revolving door between campaign consulting and lobbying, having been a senior adviser on President Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign before returning to K Street. . . .
Black formed the political consulting firm Black, Manafort and Stone in 1980 with two other Republican political advisers, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. In 1981, the trio started a separate lobbying company by the same name. In subsequent years, the lobbying firm added Democrat Peter Kelly, and the consulting firm tapped legendary GOP adviser Lee Atwater.
The lobbying shop represented Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute and the government of the Philippines.
When conservative opposition threatened to derail Mr. McCain just as he was surging again this winter, it was Charlie Black who called prominent conservatives to secure their backing. And when Mr. McCain was finally the last man standing, it was Charlie Black who engineered the campaign’s takeover of the Republican National Committee.
“The Republican Party’s quintessential company man,” as one friend calls him, Mr. Black has worked in every Republican presidential campaign since 197 . . .
One of five senior advisers to Mr. McCain, Mr. Black is considered the Republican Wise Man. . . .
On the trail, he sits in a big swivel chair at the front of the Straight Talk Express, joining in Mr. McCain’s rolling news conferences . . .
He is often joined by his wife, Judy, a lobbyist and former Tobacco Institute executive who is a chairwoman of Women for McCain.
Since its inception, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has grappled with how to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from accidental fires. . . .
For years, there has been an obvious way to address accidental fires: requiring tobacco companies to make cigarettes, which are the leading cause of fatal fires, self-extinguishing. But tobacco was exempted from CPSC jurisdiction when the agency was created in 1972, and a 1994 attempt to give the agency authority over cigarettes failed.
Catching Fire
The alternative was to focus on the furniture that was catching fire. And the tobacco industry, which wanted to avoid further regulation of cigarettes, did its best to steer the CPSC in that direction.
The industry's agent was a former insider named Peter Sparber. Sparber, now in his early 60s, started out as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and became a vice president of the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying arm, in the 1980s. There, he built a national network of tobacco-friendly fire marshals to call on in the fight against fire-safe cigarettes. To win their loyalty, the industry gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to fire departments across the country, according to internal documents released under the 1998 multi-state tobacco settlement.
By the late 1980s, Sparber had set up his own firm and was a volunteer lobbyist for the National Association of State Fire Marshals. In 1994, the group petitioned the CPSC to require furniture manufacturers make upholstered furniture so it would resist ignition by a smoldering cigarette and small open flames.
Unknown to the CPSC at the time, Sparber was still on the tobacco industry payroll . . .
In 2000, New York passed the first fire-safe cigarette law, which took effect in 2004. Twenty-one states have followed suit, including Maryland, effective in July.
Sparber, however, had an incentive to stick around. Starting in 1999, lobbying registration records show, he went to work for the top producers of brominated fire-retardant chemicals, which include Chemtura of Middlebury, Conn., and Albemarle of Richmond. The industry stands to benefit if the CPSC adopts the fire marshals' original proposal.
In 1987 the Beverly Hills City Council proposed a 100 percent smoke-free requirement for the city's restaurants. This ordinance would have been only the second such ordinance in the country and the first in California. For the proposal to become law, the council had to approve it on two separate readings. The ordinance passed its first reading without public opposition.
Between the first and second readings, the Tobacco Institute hired political consultant Rudy Cole to create the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association (BHRA) to oppose the ordinance.[4] To drum up membership for BHRA, Ron Saldana, the Tobacco Institute's regional director, spoke to the local restaurant owners and the Chamber of Commerce to “make them aware of the potential impact the ordinance will have on the community.â€[5] The Tobacco Institute's role in creating the BHRA was not disclosed. At the second reading, Cole appeared as spokesperson of the newly formed Beverly Hills Restaurant Association to protest the ordinance. Nonetheless, the city council unanimously passed it in March 1987, making Beverly Hills approximately the 130th community in California to pass a clean indoor air ordinance and the state's first to make restaurants entirely smoke free.
Frank Fahrenkopf, born in 1939, is a high-powered Washington lawyer and former national chairman of the U.S. Republican Party. He is president of the American Gaming Association, the lobby arm of the casino industry. He is also the co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates. He is also a trustee of the Free Enterprise Foundation.
As an attorney in Reno, Nevada in 1975 he represented the Tobacco Institute as a lobbyist, and in that capacity claimed in a March 4, 1975 article printed in the Nevada State Journal that there was no conclusive evidence that cigarette smoking was harmful to the nonsmokers and that that legislative efforts to end smoking in public places represented "a big brother approach...an attempt to legislate morals and public behavior. He further stated that "The claims that tobacco smoking is hazardous to the non-smokers are...just a facade disguising what is an attempt by one group of persons to write their prejudices into the law."[1] It is unclear how long Fahrenkopf represented the Tobacco Institute, but by 1983 he had become chairman of the Republican National Committe.
Fahrenkopf served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1983-1989 (throughout six of president Ronald Reagan's eight years in office).
In 1984, the tobacco workers' union and the Tobacco Institute, which represents US tobacco companies, formed a labor management committee (LMC). The institute relied on LMC unions to resist smoke-free worksite rules.
In a review of the internal tobacco industry documents now publicly available, we found that the LMC succeeded for 2 primary reasons. First, the LMC furthered members' interests, allowing them to overcome institutional barriers to policy success. Second, the LMC used an "institutions, ideas, and interests" strategy to encourage non-LMC unions to oppose smoke-free worksite rules.
While public health advocates missed an opportunity to partner with unions on the issue of smoke-free worksites during the era studied, they can use a similar strategy to form coalitions with unions.
1993 / Bill Clinton
Private money raised: $33 million
Big donor(s): The Tobacco Institute . . .
1997 / Clinton
Private money raised: $24 million
Big donor(s): Donations limited to $100 per person because of Democrat fundraising scandals; R.J. Reynolds sponsored a "courtesy suite."
In this 1974 letter, pollster Burns ("Bud") Roper of the Roper Organization describes to William Kloepfer (President of the Tobacco Institute) a stealthy way his firm could survey children to help the Institute find out "the extent to which kids smoke."
Roper suggests the Institute
We would design and administer about a fifteen minute questionnaire which would be "kid-oriented". It might deal with such things as clothing styles, pop singers, recreational activities, etc.
About the thirteenth minute of the fifteen minute interview would be devoted to a list of activities about which two questions might be asked.
Thus, to the kids and any eavesdropping parents, these two questions would be incidental to the study. From your point of view, of course, they would be the entire study..."
THE debate over cigarettes and public health broke new ground with the release last year of two reports on the danger tobacco use poses for nonsmokers. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the US, Surgeon General found that exposure to other peoples' cigarette smoke may have lethal consequences. The tobacco industry has reacted strongly, attacking not only this information, but the scientists behind it.
In a recent interview, two outspoken scientists, James Repace of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Stanton A, Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco, accused the tobacco industry of grossly misusing scientific data. . . .
The Tobacco Institute, the industry's arm in Washington, claims it is "anti-smoking activists" who are guilty of abusing the scientific process. The Institute made such charges in a 53-page booklet in December 1986 ("Tobacco Smoke and the Nonsmoker: Scientific Integrity At the Crossroads"). It says, among other things, that anti-smoking advocates forced a scientific workshop at Georgetown University to be cancelled last year because it wa sponsored by industry.
Repace responded in an interview with Science by laying out his own version of the propaganda war. As he began he was hit unexpectedly with what he calls "the most powerful threat that can be made against a government employee." On 12 March, Representative Don Sundquist (R-TN) sent a letter to the head of EPA. Lee Thomas, denouncing Repace for personal misconduct. . . .
He was shaken by the letter, however, because it has triggered a full-scale ethics inquiry. He says, "I now face a protracted investigation. Even if I am fully exonerated, it will give my supervisors extra work. They may ask, 'Do we really want someone who causes this kind of trouble?'" The information on fees in Sundquist's letter, according to Repace, is highly detailed, the kind a detective might dig up. "I wonder where he got it."
According to McNamara, "We asked around town who this guy was, and obviously we asked the tobacco industry. They provided us with this information, which we sent to the administrator" of EPA.
Repace says this is the latest of many examples of industry meddling in the scientific debate. . . .
There have been several skirmishes over the propriety of such conferences in recent years. The bitterest broke out last summer at Georgetown University. Sorell Schwartz, a Georgetown pharmacologist and tobacco industry consultant, put together a group of experts for the industry called the "Indoor Air Pollution Advisors' Group" in the spring of 1985. Its members, all academics, have been flown around the country by the tobacco industry to speak about the weakness of the data on environmental tobacco smoke, . . .
Through inadvertence, Schwartz says, he failed to have an assistant notify speakers that the conference was sponsored in part by cigarette companies. For other technical reasons, he also failed to print this information in the program.
In this speech, Roger Mozingo (Director of State and Local Lobbying for the Tobacco Institute) reveals how the Tobacco Institute used Gray Robertson and his company, ACVA Atlantic, to scuttle a measure that would have banned smoking in hospitals in Washington state.
"This year in Washington state, we defeated every anti-tobacco proposal under review. Of particular interest was our work with one relatively minor measure...a bill that would have banned the use of tobacco in hospitals. ... The measure originally had the full support of hospital administrators and the medical community. With the assistance of Gray Robertson's ACVA Atlantic and Covington & Burling, we drafted an amendment to the bill that would have required hospitals to meet rigid and specific ventilation standards in every operating theater, intensive care unit and other hospital areas.... At this turn of events, hospital officials became unglued and openly broke with the medical community, dropping support for the measure and ensuring its defeat. This work should help us in the future as we continue to...oppose more significant anti-smoking legislation in Washington."
Mozingo also discusses the industry's overall strategy of "taking the initiative and putting the anti's [public health authorities] on the defensive."