Over the past few months Smoke Free Wisconsin has been campaigning to restore taxpayer funding to Tobacco Control. Over the last few weeks I have been showing their ties to Big Pharma! I showed their ties to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) . I also showed their ties to Pfizer. I even exposed their lies on the tax increase and the e-cigarette.
Again should dishonest organizations such as this get one single dime of taxpayers money. I think it is time we look into how much money Big Pharma has contributed to politicians. Who will help?
The department said the $2.3 billion settlement included a $1.2 billion criminal fine, the largest criminal fine in U.S. history. The agreement also included a criminal forfeiture of $105 million.
The panel’s chair – Dr. Michael C. Fiore – “reported that he served as an investigator on research studies at the University of Wisconsin (UW) that were supported wholly or in part by four pharmaceutical companies, and in 2005 received compensation from one pharmaceutical company. In addition, he reported that, in 1998, the UW appointed him to a named Chair, which was made possible by an unrestricted gift to the UW from GlaxoWellcome.”
Importantly, Dr. Fiore has reported “that he has lectured and consulted for Pfizer and has served as an investigator on research studies at the University of Wisconsin (UW) that were supported by GlaxoSmithKline, Nabi, Pfizer, and sanofi-aventis.” Pfizer is the company that markets Chantix.
Not to mention their financing a course for doctors through the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
A Pfizer promotional campaign for the controversial drug Chantix – which includes financing a course for doctors through the University of Wisconsin-Madison – has helped the drug dominate the prescription smoking-treatment market while burying mention of its serious side effects.
Chantix now accounts for 90% of smoking cessation prescriptions, even though the Food and Drug Administration has been investigating the drug for a rash of serious side effects, such as suicidal behavior and blackouts.
None of the side effects are mentioned in the UW continuing education online course, which is paid for by Pfizer. The course directly mentions only Chantix as a first-line treatment, even though the drug is one of seven first-line treatments, according to national guidelines.
I think it is high time to end all public funding to Tobacco control including the MSA.
“There has been a significant amount of speculation regarding the state’s incentive package for Mercury Marine. While the Department of Commerce does not release details regarding on-going negotiations with companies, because doing so would likely put Wisconsin at a competitive disadvantage with other states, I believe that it is important to share certain details because any advantage to another state is greatly outweighed by the benefit to Wisconsin in helping provide information that could lead to a different result should another union vote occur before this Sunday.
DUH!!! We have been at a competitive disadvantage for years high taxes and low wages are a progressives dream. They don’t believe in creating wealth they believe in spreading misery equally. The excessive taxes has driven good paying jobs away for years.
Not only has she lost population, but Wisconsin has also lost money. Every month in every community sees someone who has a little money pack up and leave the state. This has been going on for years. Money has drained out all that time.
From 2001 to 2006, folks fleeing the seven counties of southeastern Wisconsin took with them $1.3 billion more in personal income than households moving into the area. Where did they go? To other states and to the lower-tax, lower-crime areas of Wisconsin.3
What neighborhood or family doesn’t know a half score of acquaintances who have packed up, scraped together their assets and headed to sunnier or more wealth-friendly climes? Maricopa County, Ariz.; Lee County, Fla.; Denver County, Colo.; and Clark County, Nev., teem with expatriate Badgers and their cash.
A September 2008 study from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Government found that Wisconsin has one of the five worst migration patterns in the country: While people with money are moving out, we are a magnet for the poor.4
In states like New Jersey, the Princeton study found, “poor people leave, but rich people do not.” Wisconsin is the anti-Jersey: Wisconsin, it found, “is more attractive to low-income individuals than high-income earners.” . . . .
Wisconsin’s per capita income has fallen from 98% of the national average at the beginning of the decade to under 94% at the end of last year – a drop of $5,000 a year for a family of four. Yet our neighbors – who share the scourge of our climate – continue to grow comparatively rich. Our per capita income ($34,476) lags behind both Minnesota ($38,751) and Illinois ($38,297).5
We lag behind the nation and our own region both in creating jobs and opening new businesses. In 2006, the number of businesses nationally grew by 2.5%, while here the number of new private-sector businesses dropped 0.4%.6 By the end of 2007, the state had 2,487 fewer private businesses than it had in 2006.7 And so it goes. Last year, Wisconsin was one of just 20 states where local venture capital funds raised no money at all.8
Zilch.
Wisconsin isn’t just losing dollars; she is also losing brains. According to the UW Board of Regents, Wisconsin ranks dead last in attracting college graduates into the state;9 meanwhile, half of our new migrants from other states were high school dropouts. While the proportion of college graduates in the nation’s population has actually risen 1.8% in the last five years, the percentage of our population holding at least a bachelor’s degree (24.6%) dropped 0.3 percentage points. Wisconsin is now last in the region, behind Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois.
This from the same governor who recently signed a $186 million business tax hike, driving long term employers like Harley Davidson and Briggs & Stratton out of Wisconsin and also braggs about being the fifth highest cigarette tax on the poor. Of course he wants to keep them poor to maintain control!
Turns out, you’re too dumb to control your own destiny. That’s the message of the Nanny State, as revealed by its various laws, prohibitions, regulations, bans, ordinances, statutes, guidelines, policies, and so forth. We have smoking bans, drug laws, seatbelt laws, laws against gambling, laws regulating gun ownership, and on and on. We have these laws in place to protect you from your own freedom. After all, freedom is too dangerous to be entrusted to you.
Anyone who has been on Smoke Free Wisconsin’s blog knows that they are celebrating the draconian tax on cigarettes. Ignoring the fact that this is nothing but an attempt at social engineering by Comrade Doyle and his socialist brethren look at the true force behind the taxes and the ban.
Smoke Free Wisconsin was started by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Why is this relevant. Well first you have to understand exactly who they are. For more on Johnson and Johnson click here. Is there any wonder that every method that they recommend includes drugs or drug company Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT)? Why the big push for Big Pharma solutions when it has been proven time and again that cold turkey has a much higher success rate? In a recent blog entry they push the American Cancer Society’s Guide to quitting smoking. If you read the guide there is a big push for Big Pharma solutions and bashes non Big Pharma solutions. This is no big surprise since Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. exposes the ACS’s ties to Big Pharma in his book “Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War” He also exposes the American Cancer Society: The World’s Wealthiest “Nonprofit” Institution. In this article he says;
The “nonprofit” status of the Society is in sharp conflict with its high overhead and expenses, excessive reserves of assets and contributions to political parties. All attempts to reform the Society over the past two decades have failed; a national economic boycott of the Society is long overdue.
Cancer Drug Industry
The intimate association between the ACS and the cancer drug industry, with cur-rent annual sales of about $12 billion, is further illustrated by the unbridled aggression which the Society has directed at potential competitors of the industry (13). Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy had his “black list” of suspected communists and Richard Nixon his environmental activist “enemies list,” so too the ACS
maintains a “Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management” which periodically “reviews” unorthodox or alternative therapies. This Committee is comprised of “volunteer health care professionals,” carefully selected proponents of orthodox, expensive, and usually toxic drugs patented by major pharmaceutical companies, and opponents of alternative or “unproven” therapies which are
generally cheap, nonpatentable, and minimally toxic.
Notice that the question is not: “Do you recommend a medication for me, or do you recommend that I quit cold turkey?”
This is very curious (and unwarranted) advice, since we know that on a population basis, cold turkey quit attempts are the most successful. Moreover, if the patient has already expressed a desire to quit on his or her own – cold turkey – then putting them on drugs is probably the last thing you want to do as a physician.
Nevertheless, this document tells every smoker to ask their doctor which medication to take, not whether or not to use medication.
The membership loss suggests dissatisfaction on the part of AARP members at a time when many senior citizens are concerned about proposed cuts to Medicare providers to help pay for making health care available for all. But spokesman Drew Nannis said it wasn’t unusual for the powerful, 40 million-strong senior citizens’ lobby to shed members in droves when it’s advocating on a controversial issue.
Nazi symbolism used in American politics. Of course most of us know that the far left has used such imagery for years. Where was the outrage then? . . . .
Notice same reporter . . . . different president.
Now for the left.
Where was the moral outrage from the left during these protests. Why weren’t these people called unamerican????
Anti-smoking campaigners last night welcomed the move by Merthyr Tydfil council, but critics have pointed out there are already not enough foster parents in Wales.
They fear the changes might discourage potential carers from coming forward and could jeopardise the future of children already in the care of smokers.
Ah but you say this is the United States not Wales, it can’t happen here. That is where you are dead wrong.
“This is just the latest step in a growing movement to protect the most vulnerable and most defenseless victims of tobacco smoke pollution,”
says public interest lawyer John Banzhaf, Executive Director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
As a matter of fact, says Banzhaf, even years ago, when the dangers of smoking around children was far less well appreciated, ten percent of social workers specializing in adoption turned down potential parents because one or both smoked.
For similar reasons judges in more than half our states — and a few in foreign countries — have recognized that smoking around a child can be not only dangerous but deadly, and have ruled that smoking around a child can be grounds for losing custody.
Here is a scary warning from the past.
“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.” -Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, Publ. Houghton Miflin, 1943, Page 403
Of course government sanctioned discrimination does not end there, Smokers are now denied government housing.
Faye Dodd, the agency’s executive director, said they had considered making the units non-smoking for a few months partly because the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has been encouraging housing authorities to adopt non-smoking policies. She said 112 housing authorities across the country are currently smoke-free.
So now we not only have to subsidise children that we can’t have (SCHIP) but housing that we can’t live in.
In California they even Deny little kids from having lemonade stands.
Hoping to raise money for a family trip to Disneyland, the Tulare girl opened a lemonade stand Monday. But because Daniela didn’t have a business license, the city of Tulare shut it down the same day.</blockquote
Of course with Obamacare on the horizon we can expect more of the same. Here is a glib picture of our future as painted by the ACLU.
