TVFP on Big Tobacco

Big Tobacco manufactures, markets and sells a product that kills its users.  Tobacco also kills innocent bystanders with second hand smoke. Tobacco related illnesses are a major strain on our health care services. For instance the care and treatment for Tobacco related diseases siphons money away from the treatment and cure of childhood illnesses.

As the demographic shifts and one generation dies off Big Tobacco is forced to search for  new customers amongst teenagers and in third world populations.  Outright prohibition of Tobacco would simply create a larger black market and empower a new criminal element.

However when countries seek to educate and limit the spread of this lethal product Big Tobacco complains to the courts (as in Australia) that their intellectual property rights have been infringed.

The interesting thing (to the cynics at TVFP) is that if you wanted a poster industry for BIG CAPITALISM look no further than Big Tobacco.

When we listen to the business elite laud the BIG CAPITALIST system we look over their shoulders and notice that the system, like tobacco, is killing its users.

When we are lectured by political toadies on the need to free our industries from regulation in order to assure year on year growth, we look over their collective shoulder and see the smoldering ruins of a once bountiful landscape.  We see peoples poisoned by the relentless pursuit of profit.

When a wide eyed tenured academic points out that the wealth created by BIG CAPITALISM has provided us with freedoms and a life style unmatched in the history of man we look over his shoulder and see melting glaciers and new deserts arising and the drifting masses of the starving.

We at TVFP advocate that all products, like tobacco products, be required to reveal their lethal impact on the health of our individual planet, our one and only home.

For instance on the dashboard of your sleek new car we would like to see a picture of the devastation caused by the Alberta Tar Sands along with a note on the rising levels of deadly toxins in the downstream habitat.

Cars can kill.

As well landfill sites are filling up with millions of discarded cellphones. Toxins from these abandoned phones leaches into the ground water.

Cell phones can kill.

BIG CAPITALISM CAN KILL


Visit Jim Read's Website here.