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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 Sludgereported 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. Politicoreported 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," Axiosreported 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 Timesreported 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 Breported 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 CoalitionAotearoa (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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