Tobacco Articles: org ti

McCain Adviser's Work As Lobbyist Criticized: Foreign Clients Included Notorious Rulers

Thu, 22 May 2008 04:00:00 GMT

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.

‘Steady Hand’ for the G.O.P. Guides McCain on a New Path

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

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.

Fighting for Safety: Your Couch Is Caught in a Flammable Regulatory Battle Between the Chemical and Furniture Industries

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 05:00:00 GMT

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.

The Battle over Local Tobacco Control Ordinances: Beverly Hills

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 04:00:00 GMT

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 â€œmake 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

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 05:00:00 GMT

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).

Political Coalitions for Mutual Advantage: The Case of the Tobacco Institute's Labor Management Committee -- Balbach et al.: June 2005, Vol 95, No. 6 * DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2004.052126

Wed, 25 May 2005 04:00:00 GMT

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.

How Much Fun Can $177 Million Buy?

Sun, 16 Jan 2005 05:00:00 GMT

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."

Research on Teenage Smoking

Wed, 29 Dec 2004 05:00:00 GMT

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

"offer to enter into a cooperative study with the Cancer Society, Heart Association of whoever" as cover to conduct a personal interview study among 12-17 year olds. Roper then suggests a method of conducting interviews with children that would evade parents' eavesdropping and (he hopes) avoid parental objections to the line of questioning. . . . 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..."

Tobacco Science Wars [Item not online]: The industry has been bullying scientists, according to researchers who lead the campaign against environmental tobacco smoke

Fri, 17 Apr 1987 04:00:00 GMT

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.

G. Robertson helped TI stop hospital smoking law ('88): Executive Committee Meeting, The Tobacco Institute, Remarks by Roger L. Mozingo, Senior Vice President, The Tobacco Institute, April 7, 1988

anne@tobaccodocuments.org — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 04:00:00 GMT

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."

Indoor Pollution Expert Echoes Tobacco Lobby View [Item not Online]: Health: The authority on 'sick building syndrome' has been a consultant for the industry, documents show.

Tue, 25 Feb 1992 05:00:00 GMT

Gray Robertson has been called the "Building Doctor." The 52-year-old British-born chemist and indoor pollution consultant is a much-quoted authority on "sick building syndrome" . . . Robertson's views reflect those of the tobacco industry, which has long employed him as a consultant. But Robertson, in town Monday to drum up business for Healthy Business International, his Fairfax, Va.-based consulting firm, sought to downplay his ties to the cigarette makers and at one point denied that he'd been an industry consultant. . . . The tobacco industry for years has sought to put sick building syndrome on the issues map as a way of deflecting attacks on public smoking. And Robertson has long been part of that strategy, according to documents obtained by The Times. . . . Asked at the end of his briefing if he had received tobacco funding, Robertson initially said he had merely inspected a few tobacco company buildings, as he had for dozens of clients. In response to follow-up questions, he added that he done a small amount of tobacco-funded research and had twice testified for the industry--once before Congress, once before the National Academy of Sciences--and had disclosed that he was appearing at the industry's request. He denied being a tobacco industry consultant. When he was shown the Tobacco Institute documents during a subsequent interview, Robertson responded: "If I've made appearances for people . . . I don't necessarily say I'm their consultant." . . . Robertson said the Tobacco Institute had no involvement in his current West Coast tour. . . . The seminars are being sponsored by Envirosense, a coalition of a dozen businesses, including the world's biggest tobacco firm, Philip Morris.

RE: Joint Meeting on ETS - London, England: Date: 15 Jun 1988

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 04:00:00 GMT

These remarkable minutes are from a 1988 meeting of cigarette manufacturers from the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Canada and Japan who met to discuss global strategies for dealing with the industry's greatest threat: the secondhand smoke issue. The minutes contain a fascinating discussion wherein a representative of the German cigarette industry, Dr. Franz Adlkofer, departs from the industry's established route of promoting global deceit on the secondhand smoke issue and urges the industry representatives to adopt a more responsible course: During the meeting, Dr. Adlkofer questioned the industry's continuing creation of it's own "marketable science." In a stunning departure from typical industry plotting, Dr. Adlkofer stated that what the industry was really seeking was "good public relations material, not good science." Dr. Adlkofer further said that "real science" would be "essential if the industry was to prevail on the ETS issue." Furthermore, Adlkofer "refused to endorse a situation in which scientific research is guided by public relations needs." Adlkofer questioned the wisdom of the industry's present course on the ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) issue and urged the industry instead to concentrate on identifying a threshold level for risk of ETS exposure. This controversial suggestion caused "widespread disagreement" among the meeting's participants. . . . Don Hoel summarized this session by noting that the reports demonstrated the need for "marketable research," which he defined as "good science that is communicable to persons who will benefit from it." III. SCIENTIFIC INFORMATIONAND MEDIA OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES Don Hoel introduced this session by reiterating that the sgientific and public affairs elements of the industry must work together if the ETS issue is to be successfully addressed. Only through cooperation can the industry adequately deal with changes in public attitude.

Brooklyn Jury in Smoker's Trial Issues First Punitive Damages Award On East Coast in a Tobacco Case -- $20 Million

media@tplp.org — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 05:00:00 GMT

Edward L. Sweda, Jr., Senior Staff Attorney for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern University School of Law attended the punitive damages hearing. He notes that, "the jury was clearly repulsed by the reprehensible conduct of Brown and Williamson, the Tobacco Institute, and the Council for Tobacco Research. They sent a clear message to the entire tobacco industry that conduct which values profits over the lives of consumers will not be tolerated in our society." Mark Gottlieb, also a staff attorney with TPLP, added that, "this historic verdict combined with an appellate ruling in New York last month that makes it significantly easier for plaintiffs to present evidence of industry wrongdoing to juries in these cases will likely result in a marked increase in tobacco litigation in New York state in 2004 and the foreseeable future. This verdict also comes during the week the the tobacco industry is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of a full page newspaper ad that ran in more than 400 papers promising to thoroughly investigate claims that smoking harms health. Today's verdict may have cut those celebrations a bit short."

the 'new' New York City Plan

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 04:00:00 GMT

The purpose of this plan is to amend the restaurant provisions of the New York City Smoke-Free Air Act. The proposed amendment (see section 6) has been cleared by Covington & Burling and agreed to by the member companies. The foundation of this plan is to educate the New York City Council about the hardships suffered by restaurants in complying with the law. This will be accomplished by using grassroots mobilization with supporting economic impact information and public relations. . . The United Restaurant and Tavern Association of Now York State was a tremendous ally during the legislative battle. They have agreed to spearhead continuing efforts to provide reasonable accommodation. The Association intends to present their case -the severe restaurant smoking provisions are not necessary and have a detrimental economic impact -- to elected officials in a reasonable, well-argued manner. Many restaurant owners expressed their frustration about what they perceived as a "one-sided" legislative hearing process. However, many came to see that their activity was affective, that without their involvement, the outcome could have been more severe. Now, and for the next ten months, these restauranteurs (sic) must keep their views before their City Council members. These restaurants must build on the base developed during the legislative debate. Part of this effort is making individual restauranteurs (sic) feel part of a united effort to protect their businesses. Each owner needs to understand that they are in the majority and that their combined influence is important. A newsletter will be developed by the United Restaurant and Tavern Association of New York State to provide a forum to involve individual restaurants owners as part of the large, active group.

Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association

Thu, 01 Jan 1998 05:00:00 GMT

The Empire State group has been around for a while, changing its name as suits the occasion. Aliases of the organization include: the New York Tavern and Restaurant Association, the Manhattan Tavern and Restaurant Association and the United Restaurant, Hotel and Tavern Association. While the names may change, the group's ties with the tobacco industry have remained strong over the years. Back in 1994, in testimony opposing New York City's smokefree ordinance, Executive Director Scott Wexler admitted that his group obtained money from the Tobacco Institute to pay for a number of ads, including a full page ad in the New York Times. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of tobacco control advocates in New York and public access to once-secret tobacco industry internal documents, new revelations about the Empire State group have surfaced. The New York Times recently reported that in 1995 the Tobacco Institute funneled $443,072 in lobbying money through the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association to wage its 1995 clean indoor air preemption campaign.