4-21-98
OUR TOBACCO $$$ AT WORK
PR Newswire
PR 04/20 1728 Tobacco Industry Statement in Response to Clinton
WASHINGTON, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- The following statement should be
attributed to Scott Williams, tobacco industry spokesperson, in response to
the President's comments today regarding tobacco legislation:
"There is a growing understanding across the country that Washington's
real agenda is to fund a huge tax-and-spend program while saying it wants to
pass comprehensive legislation. The industry has been open and honest about
what it can and will do to transform the way tobacco products are manufactured,
marketed, and sold in this country. Instead of seeking a comprehensive
solution that will work, Washington has decided that politics is more
profitable for government. The industry does not expect to win a popularity
contest, but the country does not like big brother government run amok. The
tobacco plan the Administration supports will raise over half a trillion
dollars in new taxes to fund a host of programs and special interests
unrelated to smoking and public health. It will create 17 new federal
bureaucracies, and force the price of a pack of cigarettes over $5 in five
years, which will in turn create a huge black market that will have
unregulated access to kids."
SOURCE Scott Williams
-0-
04/20/98
/CONTACT: Scott Williams, 202-739-0225, or Steve Duchesne, 202-739-0245/
CO: Scott Williams ST: District of Columbia IN: TOB SU: EXE
Copyright 1998 PR Newswire. All rights reserved.
That's funny, I don't see anything here saying that "smokers don't owe
one cent because smokers are not an economic burden." Golly, I wonder what
could have happened to it.
After all, they only let the anti-smokers get away with the Smoking Cost
Libel for over ten years, and never sued them over it. And they've never
told their Congres stooges to punish the CDC and OTA for fraud. They just sent
lackeys around to pay lip service to the truth once in a while, and make us
think they were finally going to do something to stop it.
No, the tobacco companies are so politically sophisticated that they just
knew that the best way to deal with it is to pay off the anti-smokers, and
make deals with them. So they let the media brainwash the public, and incite
their attorney general puppets to file malicious lawsuits, whereupon they
flopped on their bellies and surrendered without a fight.
And they promised the anti-smokers $368.5 billion of our money, to fund
their hate propaganda and their quit-smoking clinics and more anti-tobacco
lawsuits (and nothing for us) and buy off the tobacco farmers and employ every
greedy "community group" in sight to help bullyrag us, and to let the FDA
outlaw tobacco as soon as they feel like it. And, despite the mounting
evidence exonerating tobacco, they pled guilty to every health lie the anti-
smokers demanded.
Then they crawled on their bellies to Congress to approve this deal, and
licked boots and groveled and called smokers "addicts" and denounced
themselves like defendants in a communist show trial. (And they didn't give a
rip that we smokers had no voice in any part of this.) All for a few special
favors for themselves, that they didn't have the balls to fight for and win,
at the cost of increased misery for us.
And when the Commerce Committee didn't give them the special favors they
wanted, and relieved them of a few billion more as they lay there with all the
dignity of a Brinks truck overturned in the ghetto, they threw a tantrum and
whined that $500 billion was an onerous burden while $368.5 billion is not,
and $500 billion will create big brother bureaucracies and a black market and
hordes of children smoking, and fund greedy lawyers, while $368.5 billion
would not. (And what a coincidence that that "grassroots organization," the
National Smokers Alliance, is singing virtually the same tune.)
And they proclaimed, by gosh, that now they were really going to FIGHT!
Fight, for what? For the original sellout deal.
Whoopee, I'm so impressed I think I'm going to hyperventilate from
excitement. There's our tobacco $$$ at work, folks.
Courtesy of Carol Thompson
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568
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