Don’t despair if you’ve failed numerous attempts to quit smoking cigarettes
health agencies and private-sector advocacy groups like the the American Cancer Society and the Lung Cancer Alliance. In recent years, every U.S. Surgeon General, the Ur-tobacco Nazi, has identified tobacco as the carcinogenic poison it is. The condemnation of the nation’s top doc would provide an additional weapon in the media jihad.
The ad campaigns could be as ugly as the tobacco industry they target. The media assault would be one account that “green” advertising agencies would fight to land and perhaps handle on a pro bono basis, neutralizing the argument that tax dollars shouldn’t be spent on advocacy endeavors.
The nasty nature of the following suggestion would be justified because the ends in this case — preventing the death of 1.3 million victims of tobacco products throughout the world annually — would more than justify the necessary cruelty of the outrageous plan I propose.
For starters, plaster coast-to-coast billboards with giant headshots of tobacco company CEOs, their names, and the names of the cartels they head. One of many outrageous ad slogans might read something like this: “These ‘gentlemen’ may not fit the popular stereotype of drug dealers, but that’s exactly what they are.” The only difference between two types of dealers is that the product peddled by one of the groups has yet to be criminalized. And these legal dealers have yet to be treated like the criminals they are.
Lock ‘em up and throw away their golden parachutes so that after their release from prison, they won’t have the financial wherewithal to glide back into their 8-figure penthouses and summer homes in the Hamptons they occupy only a few weeks per year. Don’t get me started on ,000 shower curtains and all the other conspicuous consumption that the nouveaux riches enjoy and old money envies because of dwindling trust funds.
Does a single victim of her husband’s electronic purse-snatching have a soupçon of pitty for homeless Mrs. Bernie Madoff? I think not. And there would’t be much pitty forthcoming from the victims of a much worse crime. After all, Bernie “only” pauperized his victims; he didn’t kill them.
The libel suits that would inevitably follow such inflammatory but accurate “job descriptions” of corporate drug dealers would have two synergistic functions. Extra free publicity on the front pages of newspapers across the nation would reinforce the neglected truth that these tobacco monsters of their universe are legally peddling a narcotic that kills millions and increases medical costs that in turn raise health insurance premiums.
The coast-to-coast embarrassment of these literal poster boys for legal crime who contribute to charities that save lives with funds that come from ending lives might chase top executives out of the business after their children come home from school, lamenting, “All the kids say my dad is a crook!” My sympathy for these innocent victims of collateral damage is diminished by the realization that all dad has to do to end the schoolyard bullying of his children is end his affiliation with a criminal enterprise responsible for more deaths than Murder Inc.
If enough children pressure their parents to retire from the Fortune 500 Mafia, eventually, the only employees willing to occupy the executive suites will be the people who currently dust and mop them.
Investigative journalist and author Frank Sanello has written 23 books, including The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (recently published in China after its American release); Saving America: Solutions for a Nation in Crisis, co-written with Dr. Adel Shenouda, Professor Emeritus of Nephrology at the University of Tennessee); The Knights Templars: God’s Warriors, the Devil’s Bankers; and Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay America. His blog is at www.politicallyimpolite.com