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tobacco
Trump's Chief of Staff Pick Worked as a Tobacco Lobbyist While Running 2024 Campaign
The president-elect previously vowed to "drain the swamp," but his chief of staff pick, Susie Wiles, co-chairs a firm that has lobbied for tobacco giant Swisher International, Tesla, Uber, AT&T, and other corporate giants.
Nov 08, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday selected Susie Wiles, a longtime GOP strategist who has spearheaded the Republican leader's campaign operations since 2021, to serve as White House chief of staff, saying in a statement that she helped "achieve one of the greatest political victories in American history."
But Trump's team didn't mention in its announcement that Wiles worked as a lobbyist for the tobacco company Swisher International while running the former president's 2024 bid. Citing disclosure forms filed earlier this year, the investigative outlet Sludge reported Thursday that Wiles "worked to influence Congress on 'FDA regulations.'"
"Wiles has not filed a termination report for her work with Swisher, but she has not reported lobbying for the company since the first quarter of the year, when the company paid her firm Mercury Public Affairs $30,000 in fees," Sludge noted.
The outlet pointed out that Mercury—which lists Wiles as a co-chair on its website—has "large lobbying contracts with several junk food companies that will be working to oppose" Trump's stated objective to "Make America Healthy Again" by, among other changes, working to remove processed foods from school meals.
Mercury "lobbies for sugar cereal company Kellogg's, high fructose corn syrup sauce maker Kraft-Heinz, and Nestlé SA, the Swiss company whose brands include KitKat, Hot Pockets, and Nestea," Sludge reported.
"Some of Mercury's other clients, highlighted on its website, include Gilead Sciences, Pfizer, Tesla, Uber, Kaiser Permanente, AT&T, NBC Universal, Gavi: The Vaccine Alliance, and the nation of Qatar," the outlet added.
Kieran Mahoney, Mercury's CEO, said in a statement that Wiles' selection as Trump's chief of staff "is great news for the country," calling her "a valued colleague."
Despite his attempt during the campaign to posture as an ally of the working class and an enemy of Washington, D.C.'s pervasive corruption, Trump is expected to fill his Cabinet with billionaires and others with extensive corporate ties.
Two billionaires, Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon, are leading the transition team tasked with staffing the incoming administration. Politico reported that Lutnick—who donated more than $10 million to Trump's campaign—has "faced accusations from some Trump insiders that he has improperly mixed his business interests with his duties standing up a potential administration."
"Concerns about potential conflicts of interest for Lutnick include Cantor Fitzgerald and its relationship with one of the most controversial cryptocurrency companies in the world, Tether, which issues a digital token that is pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar and is reportedly under federal investigation," the outlet noted.
Reporting in recent days has indicated that the two top contenders to lead the Treasury Department in the second Trump administration are billionaires: hedge fund manager and Trump megadonor Scott Bessent and investor John Paulson, a vocal proponent of tax cuts and large-scale deregulation.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who pumped more than $118 million into efforts to elect the former president to a second White House term, is also expected to play a major role in shaping Trump's administration.
"Musk is helping staff the top ranks of the incoming White House and will run an unregulated entity to recommend ways to cut and reorganize government," Axios reported Thursday. "This creates conflicts of interest at an epic scale. But it's hard to see the Trump White House caring, or Musk letting it slow him down."
The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen observed in a recent report that at least three of Musk's companies—Tesla, X, and SpaceX—are currently facing scrutiny from at least nine federal agencies "for alleged misconduct."
"Enforcement priorities can shift significantly when administrations change," the group said. "Musk's self-serving desire to thwart the numerous civil and criminal investigations into his businesses seems a likely reason for the billionaire’s increased involvement in electoral politics."
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Industry Braces for PFAS Lawsuits That Could 'Dwarf' Those of Asbestos, Tobacco
The warning of litigation to plastics makers comes as EPA is accused of failing to adequately test for "forever chemicals" in pesticides.
May 29, 2024
A newly reported warning to the plastics industry and a complaint filed by an environmental nonprofit this week highlighted how companies and the U.S. government have endangered the public with "forever chemical" contamination.
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are commonly called forever chemicals because they remain in the human body and environment for long periods. They have been used in products such as firefighting foam, food packaging, stain-resistant fabrics, and pesticides, and linked to various health problems including cancers and issues with reproduction.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that attorney Brian Gross recently told plastics executives that looming corporate liability litigation related to PFAS—some of which has already begun—could "dwarf anything related to asbestos," and lead to "astronomical" costs.
As the newspaper detailed:
"Do what you can, while you can, before you get sued," Mr. Gross said at the February session, according to a recording of the event made by a participant and examined by The New York Times. "Review any marketing materials or other communications that you've had with your customers, with your suppliers, see whether there's anything in those documents that's problematic to your defense," he said. "Weed out people and find the right witness to represent your company."
A spokesman for Mr. Gross' employer, MG+M The Law Firm, which defends companies in high-stakes litigation, didn't respond to questions about Mr. Gross' remarks and said he was unavailable to discuss them.
While Gross declined to comment, Emily M. Lamond, who focuses on environmental law at the firm Cole Schotz, told the Times that "to say that the floodgates are opening is an understatement."
"Take tobacco, asbestos, MTBE, combine them, and I think we're still going to see more PFAS-related litigation," Lamond said, referring to methyl tert-butyl ether. The newspaper noted that "together, the trio led to claims totaling hundreds of billions of dollars."
Back in 2005, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that DuPont would "pay $10.25 million—the largest civil administrative penalty EPA has ever obtained under any federal environmental statute—to settle violations alleged by EPA" related to PFAS and commit to $6.25 million for supplemental environmental projects.
The EPA has also taken more recent actions under President Joe Biden's "PFAS Strategic Roadmap," including designating perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) as hazardous substances under the Superfund law and setting the country's first-ever drinking water standards for those and other forever chemicals.
The Biden administration's steps, as the Times pointed out, are expected to fuel future litigation. Green groups have called the EPA's recent moves progress but not nearly enough—and as Capital B reported earlier this month, there are concerns that PFAS cleanup could disproportionately burden communities home to the working class and people of color.
On top of calls to go further with regulation and cleanup efforts, the EPA is facing pressure to retract what Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) called "false statements" in a 2023 agency research memo and press release. The group filed a formal complaint with the EPA on Tuesday demanding a correction.
"This memo is some of the worst science I have seen come out of the agency," said PEER science policy director Kyla Bennett, a scientist and former EPA attorney, in a statement. "The fact that EPA claimed it could not find any PFAS in samples deliberately spiked is incredibly troubling."
"Scientists around the world are finding PFAS in pesticides from active and inert ingredients, contamination from fluorinated containers, and unknown sources," she continued. "EPA's claim that it 'did not find any PFAS' in these pesticides is not only untrue but lulls the public into a false sense of security that these products are PFAS-free."
Asked about PEER's submission by journalist Carey Gillam, the agency—which has 90 days to respond—said that "because these issues relate to a pending formal complaint process, EPA has no further information to provide."
Gillam reported that "joining in the allegations is environmental toxicologist Steven Lasee, who authored the 2022 study that the EPA challenged. Lasee is a consultant for state and federal government agencies on PFAS contamination projects and participated as a research fellow for the EPA's Office of Research and Development from February 2021 to February 2023."
As Gillam detailed at New Lede and The Guardian:
Amid the uproar over his paper and the subsequent EPA testing, Lasee sought to reproduce his initial results but was unable to do so. That created enough doubt about his own methodology that he sought to retract his paper.
Now, after seeing the EPA's internal testing data showing the agency did find PFOS and other types of PFAS in pesticides but failed to disclose those results, he has a new level of doubt—over the credibility of the agency.
"When you cherrypick data, you can make it say whatever you want it to say," Lasee said.
PEER's Bennett similarly said that "you don't get to just ignore the stuff that doesn't support your hypothesis. That is not science. That is corruption. I can only think that they were getting pressure from pesticide companies."
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Right-Wing New Zealand Government Scraps Smoking Ban to Fund Tax Cuts
"This is major loss for public health and a huge win for the tobacco industry—whose profits will be boosted at the expense of Kiwi lives," said one public health expert.
Nov 27, 2023
The new right-wing government of New Zealand, sworn in on Sunday, surveyed the policies left in place by the Labour Party and announced the reversal of one historic measure that was passed with the goal of preventing thousands of smoking-related deaths every year.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, head of the National Party and a former airline executive, announced that the government would scrap the generational smoking ban passed under progressive former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in 2021—a law that was praised by public health experts and inspired similar legislation in the United Kingdom.
The law has barred anyone born after 2009 from ever buying cigarettes, with the goal of stopping young people from becoming smokers. It also drastically reduced the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products and cut the number of stores that are allowed to sell cigarettes from 6,000 nationwide to just 600.
Data modeling showed that the Smokefree Act would save $1.3 billion in health costs over two decades and would reduce mortality rates by 22% for women in New Zealand and by 9% for men.
Currently, about 5,000 people in New Zealand die each year from smoking-related causes.
The possibility of reducing those deaths didn't sway Luxon and his new administration to keep the law in place, with the new prime minister explaining that "coming back to those extra sources of revenue and other savings areas that will help us to fund the tax reduction" that the National Party aims to pass.
Boyd Swinburn, professor of population nutrition and global health at the University of Auckland, said the government is "effectively wanting smokers to continue smoking and more children to start so they can collect more excise tax."
Ben Uffindell, editor of the publication The Civilian, noted that Luxon's goal of increasing revenues and funding tax cuts "doesn't take into account increased cost to the health system."
Public health experts pointed out that the rollback of the law could particularly cost thousands of lives in the Indigenous Maori community.
Health Coalition Aotearoa (HCA), which uses the Maori-language name for New Zealand, said the government's move was "astounding," especially considering that new Minister of Health Dr. Shane Reti had previously stated support for anti-smoking measures.
"This is major loss for public health," said Swinburn, co-chair of the HCA, "and a huge win for the tobacco industry—whose profits will be boosted at the expense of Kiwi lives."
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Big Oil Shill Tells Fox Viewers There Is 'No Health Risk' From Inhaling Toxic Smoke
Fox News brought on a contributor with a history of downplaying the dangers of secondhand smoke and dismissing climate science to tell viewers that particulate matter is "innocuous."
Jun 08, 2023
As smoke from massive wildfires in Quebec blanketed much of the eastern U.S., forcing millions to stay indoors as state governments issued code-red air quality alerts, a longtime shill for the fossil fuel and tobacco industries falsely told Fox News viewers late Wednesday that there is actually "no health risk" associated with inhaling such polluted air.
"Look, the air is ugly, it's unpleasant to breathe, and for a lot of people, they get anxiety over it. But the reality is there's no health risk," Steve Milloy, a senior policy fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, told Fox's Laura Ingraham. "We have this kind of air in India and China all the time—no public health emergency."
Milloy, who has long worked to spread disinformation about climate science and the health risks of secondhand smoke, neglected to mention research showing that air pollution is responsible for millions of deaths per year in China, India, and worldwide.
Watch Milloy's remarks:
A 2021 study by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, and University College London directly attributed more than 8 million deaths in 2018 to fine particulate pollution (PM2.5).
But Milloy insisted Wednesday that "this doesn't kill anybody, this doesn't make anybody cough, this is not a health event."
"Particulate matter is very fine soot. It's just carbon particles—they're innocuous," Milloy said, pointing to unspecified EPA research. "There's nothing in them. They have no effect."
The EPA website says, to the contrary, that "particulate matter contains microscopic solids or liquid droplets that are so small that they can be inhaled and cause serious health problems."
"Some particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter can get deep into your lungs and some may even get into your bloodstream," the EPA notes. "Of these, particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, also known as fine particles or PM2.5, pose the greatest risk to health."
Investigative journalist Amy Westervelt observed in response to Milloy's Fox appearance that he "has been trying to recast air pollution—particularly PM2.5—as innocuous for decades, since he was working for Big Tobacco."
"Why is particulate matter such a big deal for his coal and fossil fuel clients? Because regulating it means regulating fossil fuel combustion," Westervelt added.
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus added that "air pollution is literally the 4th highest cause of death globally."
"Every year 9 million people die due to air pollution made worse by fossil fuels," Holthaus tweeted. "The fossil fuel industry knows this AND they lie about it so they can keep making money off of our suffering."
In a deep dive on Milloy's history last year, Westervelt noted that "one of his earliest jobs was running The Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC), which was created by Philip Morris and their PR firm APCO in the 1990s to deal with the mounting evidence that linked secondhand smoke and, more broadly, indoor air pollution, to cancer."
"The secondhand smoke issue brought the tobacco industry together with lots of other industries that were worried about air pollution regulation—automotive, manufacturing, and, of course, fossil fuels," Westervelt wrote. "Which is how Milloy, working for the tobacco industry, became one of the first leaders of the climate countermovement."
Tens of millions of people on the East Coast of the U.S. are currently under air quality alerts, with some major cities classifying the conditions as "hazardous."
"Current NYC smoke levels pose a health risk for anyone outside," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote on Twitter Thursday morning.
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Processed Meats Pose Severe Cancer Risk, Says WHO
Bacon, sausage, ham labeled "carcinogenic to humans" by World Health Organization's cancer research arm
Oct 26, 2015
Processed meats have been placed in the same health risk category as smoking and asbestos by the cancer research body of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday.
Products salted, cured, or otherwise processed to enhance flavor are "carcinogenic to humans," the Paris-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found in its report, published in the Lancet Oncology. That puts processed meat in the Group 1 carcinogenic category alongside substances like tobacco, alcohol, and plutonium. And non-processed fresh meats like beef, pork, and lamb, among others, are "probably carcinogenic to humans," the agency said.
According to the IARC's report, Carcinogenicity of Consumption of Red and Processed Meat, each 50-gram portion of processed meat eaten daily—including bacon, sausages, and ham, as well as canned meat and meat-based sauces—increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent. The report was crafted by 22 international health experts for the IARC Monograph Program, which evaluates environmental causes of cancer in humans.
"For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal cancer because they consume processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed," said Dr. Kurt Straif, head of the IARC Monograph Program. "In view of the large number of people who consume processed meat, the global impact on cancer incidence is of public health importance."
The IARC's findings (pdf) come just months after the top U.S. nutritional panel, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, reported that Americans must reduce their meat intake and switch to sustainable, plant-based diets to curb greenhouse gas emissions and stave off the rise of preventable chronic diseases like diabetes and certain types of cancer.
President Obama responded to that report in February by vowing to consider the environment in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), due later this year. However, heavy lobbying by the meat industry in the intervening months led the Obama administration to rescind its promise, a move that climate and public health advocates called "disappointing" and "politically motivated."
The IARC stated on Monday that meat consumption is increasing in low—and middle-income countries (pdf). Citing the Global Burden of Disease Project, an independent research organization, the IARC reported that diets with a heavy intake of processed meat can cause about 34,000 deaths per year.
"These findings further support current public health recommendations," said IARC director Dr. Christopher Wild. He added that global governments and regulatory agencies should also use them to provide the best dietary guidelines.
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BBC Profile: Big Tobacco Lawyers Target Big Food
Attorney Don Barrett demands mislabelled food be "taken off the shelves"
Oct 16, 2012
More than a dozen lawyers who took on big tobacco in the 1990's have turned their attention to the food industry and the criminal mislabeling of food products. BBC Newsnight spoke with Don Barrett, one of the attorney's who's career capstone was the decade-long battle that forced tobacco companies to admit they knew cigarettes were addictive.
"Nobody's trying to tell the American people what they have to eat or what they cannot eat, the American people can make those decisions for themselves," the Mississippi attorney told BBC. "It's all about free choice. To have free choice you have to have accurate information. That means Big Food, the food companies, have to start telling the truth about what's in their product. The law requires it."
The tobacco attorneys are taking an aggressive tack, claiming that companies are "misrepresenting their products, promoting them as 'natural' or 'healthy', when [...] they are no such thing."
Barrett's team is focusing on the mislabeling of food and the prevailing practice of ingredient euphemisms. "It's a crime--and that makes it a crime to sell it," Barrett told The New York Times. "That means these products should be taken off the shelves."
One example he gives is hidden sugars in processed food. Barrett cites the example of greek yogurt maker, Chobani Inc--one of their targets--which lists "evaporated cane juice" as an ingredient in their pomegranate-flavored yogurt, rather than sugar. According to the suit filed earlier this year, the FDA has repeatedly warned companies not to use the term because it is "false and misleading." In total, the attorneys filed 25 cases against food industry players that also include ConAgra Foods, PepsiCo, Heinz and General Mills.
Barrett draws a parallel between his infamous tobacco lawsuits and this latest round:
"The American people assume that if a product is legal to sell, then these people are telling the truth about this product. If it's legal to sell, it must be ok, otherwise the government would have done something about it. And that's what they thought about cigarettes."
Another similarity is the money at stake. Big Tobacco ended up settling for more than $200 billion in 1998. The suits against Big Food are class actions, where the class is defined as every person who purchased one of the misbranded products in the previous four years. For most of the food companies targeted, that could also amount to billions.
"I'm 68 years old, frankly I don't need the cash, the law's been good to me." According to BBC, what gets Barrett fired up is the epidemic of obesity among young people; the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports around two thirds of Americans over the age of 20 are now obese or overweight.
"This is my job, but here we have an opportunity to really help people."
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