Tobacco

Bernard Stamler reports: "Its advertising is aggressive, and deliberately so. (Remember the body bags piled up outside Philip Morris headquarters in New York?) But although tobacco companies have complained before about the commercials made by the American Legacy Foundation, one company is now formally threatening legal action against the organization, apparently for the first time. The aggrieved company is Lorillard Tobacco of Greensboro, N.C., a unit of the Loews Corporation .

The Wall Street Journal recently gave a plug to ActivistCash.com, a new website that claims to expose where "activists get their money." ActivistCash.com attacks environmental, health and animal rights activists as "nannies," "anti-choice zealots" and "hypocrites" who pretend to represent grassroots citizens while taking money from foundations.

Former tobacco industry spokesman Thomas Lauria has been working for the Northern Alliance since mid-September when he became their media liaison. Lauria, with lobbyist Otilie English and Northern Alliance spokesman Haron Amin, worked to increase awareness of the Alliance, lobbied for American military support, and tried to "dampen" reports of Alliance human right's abuses. With Northern Alliance officials now occupying high posts in Afghanistan's interim government, Lauria has been picked as one of Afghanistan's Washington-based representatives.

Tobacco and food conglomerate Philip Morris wants to change its name to Altria, perhaps because the Latin-esque moniker connotes "altruism," as in the millions and millions of dollars the company donates each year to arts, culture and social welfare groups to whitewash its evil image. Now the whitewashing includes an alias. Philip Morris has waged perhaps the most successful, expensive and deadly PR campaign of the past century, misleading the public to prevent regulation of its addictive tobacco products.