07/08/2015 archive

Last week the New York Tines reported that the US Chamber of Commerce was working to fight anti-tobacco measures in foreign countries:

The U.S. Chamber’s work in support of the tobacco industry in recent years has emerged as a priority at the same time the industry has faced one of the most serious threats in its history. A global treaty, negotiated through the World Health Organization, mandates anti-smoking measures and also seeks to curb the influence of the tobacco industry in policy making. The treaty, which took effect in 2005, has been ratified by 179 countries; holdouts include Cuba, Haiti and the United States.

Facing a wave of new legislation around the world, the tobacco lobby has turned for help to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the weight of American business behind it. While the chamber’s global tobacco lobbying has been largely hidden from public view, its influence has been widely felt.

Letters, emails and other documents from foreign governments, the chamber’s affiliates and antismoking groups, which were reviewed by The New York Times, show how the chamber has embraced the challenge, undertaking a three-pronged strategy in its global campaign to advance the interests of the tobacco industry.

In the capitals of far-flung nations, the chamber lobbies alongside its foreign affiliates to beat back antismoking laws.

Last year the drug store chain CVS stopped selling tobacco products. Now, in light of the Chamber’s activity on behalf og the tobacco lobby, CVS has announced that it is resigning its membership.

“We were surprised to read recent press reports concerning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s position on tobacco products outside the United States,” David R. Palombi, a senior vice president at the company, said in a statement. “CVS Health’s purpose is to help people on their path to better health, and we fundamentally believe tobacco use is in direct conflict with this purpose.” [..]

The campaign runs counter to efforts by some of the chamber’s members. Four health care companies that serve on its board – Anthem, the Health Care Service Corporation, the Steward Health Care System of Boston and the Indiana University Health system – all support antismoking programs. [..]

For CVS, which has 7,800 locations nationwide, the move is the latest step in rebranding itself as a health care destination, rather than a convenience store with a pharmacy. The company now operates nearly 1,000 walk-in clinics staffed by nurse practitioners.

Its executives have said that selling cigarettes is not consistent with its new strategy. The company has begun offering smoke cessation programs and recently helped conduct a smoke cessation study involving its employees and their relatives and friends.

“We believe the chamber has advocated for many important causes over the years, and we thank them for their leadership on these issues,” Mr. Palombi said. “Given the leadership position we took last year in removing tobacco products from our stores, however, we have decided to withdraw our membership in the chamber.”

The NYSE shutdown prompts irrepressible, apocalyptic glee: “In Zuccotti Park, Goldman Sachs boys build a squatters city out of Hermes gift boxes”

by Scott Timberg, Salon

Wednesday, Jul 8, 2015 02:59 PM EST

“I’m here in FiDi reporting from the front lines of the financial meltdown, wearing a flak jacket woven from golden parachutes #NYSEdown”

In another, “In Zuccotti Park, Goldman Sachs boys build a squatters city out of Hermes gift boxes, communicate in wiggling fingers #NYSE”

…

What does this all tell us? Well, partly it’s that many Americans hate the stock market and the corporate airlines. The former helped crash the economy a few years back and has for decades siphoned money from the nation at large and sent it to the very richest in a sick reversal of trickle-down economics. The people who work there make enormous sums even while the middle-class works harder and harder and sees its wages stagnate.

The latter has gone from being a bit stodgy but reliable to a hectic and unpleasant way to travel – all the delays and cancellations and the charging for things that used to be free, like baggage, bad food, leg room, and easy check-in. Air travel is now only bearable if you are rich enough to pay for first-class or various kinds of “platinum” treatment – in this way they resemble American life in general.

In other words, both Wall Street and airlines deserve our wrath and mockery. As  the hacker in the sky surveys its next targets, maybe the NSA, Fox News and medical insurance companies will come next.

Mom died the Sunday before last at ten in the morning, after spending one last night beside my Dad. After her second hospital stay it was clear that her kidneys would continue to fail, so we brought her home, where she wanted to be. We called hospice in. They were there every day and on call 24/7. They told us what great care we were taking of her, I’m grateful for that.

When she first came home she had a brief rally, there was no more anger, no paranoia. She smiled at Cleetus when we went in late night to move her and he brushed the hair back off her forehead. That made me incredibly happy. People got to come see her, but a few missed that window, that brief few days that she spoke, and smiled, they only saw mom in a semi-conscience state, but they did get to talk to her, and I’m sure she heard them.

The night before she died Dad and I were both in the room with her, talking softly to her and telling her it was all going to be all right, that we would be okay, and I saw tears roll down her face. I said, “Dad, look.” That was the only time she ever cried. I knew then that it wouldn’t be long. I felt certain that it was her only way of saying goodbye.

At poker that night I told Jon what had happened and what I thought it meant. I said, “You can go up there, Jonny, if you want, but…don’t feel like you have to. You can choose to let that memory of her coming to visit us here at the poker table be your last memory of her. Her smiling, and happy, and loving us all.” He said that was exactly what he wanted and I’m so glad he did, because by that point seeing his Mom Mom that way would have broken his heart, and it wasn’t necessary. By ten the next morning she was gone.

She was laid to rest in a beautiful, and historic churchyard, in a sunny spot by the treeline. I’ve been overwhelmed By people sharing memories of Mom. People who know well what we’ve lost, who she was before that terrible disease got a hold of her. How generous, how kind, and how much fun she was, all of that and more.

There’s a terrible emptiness in the house now. I keep expecting her to come up behind my chair. We’ve been starting to sort through and give away, her care supplies have been donated, her clothes, well, there’s a lot, but we’ll get there. Me and Dad are both sleeping too much, and not enough. Not enough at night, and too much during the day. Memories wash over me and I find myself crying at the damnedest things, but that’s okay, I tell myself, give it time. Mom is home in the sky now, she’s free.

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Katrina vanden Heuvel: Will Europe’s Leaders Come to their Senses About Greece?

The Greeks have made their choice. Faced with two painful alternatives, they chose to stand with their elected leaders and to reject overwhelmingly the harsh, unending austerity that their creditors demanded. Now Europe’s leaders must make their choice. Will they come to their senses and open new negotiations with the Syriza government? Or will they remain unbending, force Greece into official bankruptcy and inexorably out of the euro?

Too much of what has been reported in the U.S. media in these last, fraught weeks has echoed fulminations of the creditors that distort reality. Syriza has been painted as a party of the extreme left, with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government depicted as irresponsible and irreverent. This scorn comes from troika functionaries committed to enforcing utterly ruinous policies and whose behavior towards a democratically elected government has been insulting in the extreme.

Polly Jones: TTIP in the EU: Rejecting Democracy at Every Turn

After many twists and turns, MEPs decide today what sort of Transatlantic Trade and Investment deal (known as TTIP) they want the European Commission to negotiate on their behalf with the USA.

Negotiations were launched with many grand statements at the G8 Summit in Lough Erne in July 2013. TTIP was to be Europe’s saviour from austerity and to be the blueprint for all future world trade, wherever it takes place in the world. [..]

Trade deals have traditionally been about lowering particular tariffs for imports and exports of goods from one country to another. Trade is not as simple as that any more and for TTIP tariffs are a tiny part of the negotiations because tariffs between the EU and US are virtually non-existent these days. Trade in TTIP is about issues that are relevant and important to us all: from which services are publicly provided, to the safety of the food on our plates; from the regulations which keep us safe at work, to the very decisions governments can make in the best interests of us all. TTIP is so broad, we have every reason to be bothered about its contents.

But trade deals are not negotiated with any real democratic accountability. On TTIP we have seen democracy thwarted at every turn.

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This Day in History

Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Tokyo Bay; Industrialist John D. Rockefeller born; Word of what becomes known as ‘The Roswell Incident’; North Korea’s Kim Il Sung dies; Ziegfeld stages first ‘Follies.’

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

Pablo Picasso

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July 8 is the 189th day of the year (190th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 176 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1951, Paris celebrates 2,000th birthday. In fact, a few more candles would’ve technically been required on the birthday cake, as the City of Lights was most likely founded around 250 B.C.

Origins

The earliest archaeological signs of permanent settlements in the Paris area date from around 4200 BC. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the area near the river Seine from around 250 BC. The Romans conquered the Paris basin in 52 BC, with a permanent settlement by the end of the same century on the Left Bank Sainte Geneviève Hill and the Île de la Cité. The Gallo-Roman town was originally called Lutetia, but later Gallicised to Lutèce. It expanded greatly over the following centuries, becoming a prosperous city with a forum, palaces, baths, temples, theatres, and an amphitheatre.

The collapse of the Roman empire and the 5th-century Germanic invasions sent the city into a period of decline. By 400 AD, Lutèce, largely abandoned by its inhabitants, was little more than a garrison town entrenched into a hastily fortified central island. The city reclaimed its original appellation of “Paris” towards the end of the Roman occupation.

The Paris region was under full control of the Germanic Franks by the late 5th century. The Frankish king Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. The late 8th century Carolingian dynasty displaced the Frankish capital to Aachen; this period coincided with the beginning of Viking invasions that had spread as far as Paris by the early 9th century. Repeated invasions forced Parisians to build a fortress on the Île de la Cité; one of the most remarkable Viking raids was on 28 March 845, when Paris was sacked and held ransom, probably by Ragnar Lodbrok, who left only after receiving a large bounty paid by the crown. The weakness of the late Carolingian kings of France led to the gradual rise in power of the Counts of Paris; Odo, Count of Paris was elected king of France by feudal lords, and the end of the Carolingian empire came in 987, when Hugh Capet, count of Paris, was elected king of France. Paris, under the Capetian kings, became a capital once more.