Introducing Smoking Politics. And Our Mission To End The Right Wing Strategy Of Fear and $mear

[babylonsister]

http://www.marlboropolitics.com/2007/04/introducing_smoking_politics_a.html

Introducing Smoking Politics. And Our Mission To End The Right Wing Strategy Of Fear and $mear
Dave Johnson and James Boyce


Today, we are launching a new web site, and a new radio show, and continuing a passion and partnership that has been developing over the past year. The site is Smoking Politics and on it we will track, expose and fight back - hard - every single day against the right's strategy of Fear and $mear. We will also host a weekly BlogTalkRadio show, The Smoking Politics Radio Hour, with our first show today at noon Eastern, 9:00 am Pacific. We will be taking calls.
blog radio

Why do we call this project "Smoking Politics?" Because the origins of the conservative strategy of Fear and $mear come out of the golden age of the tobacco companies. The tobacco companies learned that with the right combination of psychological persuasion tactics and media budget that literally anything could be marketed to the American public.

They were so good that they could persuade people to kill themselves - and to hand over their money while they did it. The right saw the success of this strategy - and noted the total lack of facts and morals involved and decided - if people will pay to smoke, maybe they could be convinced to support a right-wing agenda which was equally deadly. Maybe they could actually convince blue-collar workers to accept the right-wing agenda that asked them to give up their health care and pensions so CEOs could buy bigger jets? So they took these tactics into the political realm.

Look at how much of the right's political agenda is aligned with the needs of the tobacco companies. There's deregulation, especially in the area of protecting the health and safety of the public, or of regulating toxic substances. There's "tort reform" - the attempt to prevent victims of corporate malfeasance from using the courts to hold companies responsible for their actions. And, of course, there's tax cuts for corporations - and the government looking the other way as the tobacco industry continues to spend $35,000,000 a month marketing their product.

There's another critical link between the far-right and the tobacco industry. Few people know that Karl Rove was a tobacco company advisor. Even fewer know that the heads of the "political consulting firms" like DCI that set up Republican-connected 527 front groups like the Swift Boat Vets came from tobacco companies as well. Tobacco funds supported the right. Tobacco consultants sold the agenda.

The recent Union of Concerned Scientists report on the efforts to discredit global warming science describe an in-place infrastructure of organizations that had aided the tobacco companies in their strategy of discrediting the science that said cigarettes were killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. The report describes how Exxon basically took over this infrastructure of science-denial organizations and used it to muddy the waters about the science that shows global warming is occurring.

more...

[DavidDvorkin]

1. Marlboro will probably sue

Or whoever owns that brand name will sue over use of the name.