The Latest Deception to Steal Your Money

What began in 1971 as a minor inconvenience to air traveling smokers has turned more recently into one of the wildest public health feeding frenzies for lawmakers and attorneys everywhere and an erosion of liberty for all Americans.

In 1971, United Airlines introduced seperate sections for smokers and nonsmokers on their airplanes followed by the first federal restriction on smoking in public places in 1973 when the Civil Aeronautics Board required all airlines to create nonsmoking sections. Fifteen years later, in 1988, Congress banned smoking on domestic flights of less than two hours.

In 1973, Arizona becomes the first state to pass a comprehensive law restricting smoking in public places, followed by Minnesota in 1975 which passes the first comprehensive clean indoor act in the nation, which restricts smoking in most buildings open to the public.

Today, not only is smoking banned on domestic and international flights, smoking is also banned inside most airports and many localities have passed smoking bans in most public places, including many bars and restaurants.

In 1998 California enacted a complete smoking ban that included an initially controversial ban of smoking in bars. Subsequently, other states such as New York have implemented bans of their own. There are now 34 states with some form of smoking ban on the books.

In 2003 New York City amended its antismoking law to include all restaurants and bars, including those in private clubs, making it one of the toughest in the nation.

Not satisfied with strict indoor smoking bans, experiments with outdoor bans, especially in public or government-owned spaces, have begun. The state of California, known to be a leader in anti-smoking policy, has enacted certain outdoor smoking bans.

The Federal government extended it's reach in the fray, supported by trial lawyers, with their eyes on huge repositories of money to extend the reach of government and fund their big government programs. It has now become politically correct to discriminate against smokers socially with isolation and ridiculing behavior, and economically with higher taxes and other costs.

The result has been that smokers have systematically been stripped of their civil rights, denied their employment rights, and reduced to second class citizens as smoking in public has been made illegal in most states.

Smoking Aloud will attempt to clear the smoke from the controversial public health issues while probing the various claims made by the Socialist led anti-smoking movement. We will also consider the longer-term consequences of the ensuing legislative and litigative activity as well as develop the thesis that ...

The ongoing anti-smoking campaign is not about public health, drug abuse, or teen smoking. What it is all about is money, control, and jurisdiction.

MONEY

The current public health propaganda campaign being waged against the tobacco industry and smokers amounts to extortion by the U.S. government at both the federal and state levels, trial lawyers, insurance companies, and many others in the health related professions. They are simply coercing your money from you through the spreading of fear and in many cases outright lies in exchange for higher taxes, huge legal fees, higher insurance premiums, and higher medical fees. Not-for-profit public health organizations have their hands out as well, seeing an almost endless supply of money to fund their research grants.

Make no mistake about it -- MONEY is the foundational issue. Take money out of the equation and these bleeding heart liberals will tuck their tails and abandon your children.

CONTROL

The rise of the anti-smoking sentiment in America coincides with society's shift from accepting personal responsibility to attaching blame for just about everything on someone or something else other than where the true blame resides. Along with abandoning personal responsibility, "enlightened" Americans have renounced reason and truth and have handed over the control of their lives to a power hungry conglomerate of politicians, lawyers, judges, and quasi health professionals.

The first modern, nationwide tobacco ban was imposed by the Nazi Party in every German university, post office, military hospital and Nazi Party office, under the auspices of Dr Karl Astel's Institute for Tobacco Hazards Research, created in 1941 under direct orders from Adolf Hitler himself. [Robert N Proctor] Major anti-tobacco campaigns were widely broadcasted by the Nazis until the demise of the regime in 1945.[15]

The Nazi government enacted numerous legal sanctions limiting tobacco use. Tobacco was banned in theatres and cinemas, and on buses and in many public buildings including the nation's first (modern) university tobacco ban, in post offices, military hospitals, and all Nazi party offices.

Sound familiar?

Savoring the idea of more expansive government reach into private lives, lawmakers have gladly provided the structure whereby government becomes the savior and caretaker of the people. Using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as its public health propaganda arm, the federal government has used sham research to empower state and local authorities to restrict smoking in public places, including offices, restaurants and commercial airliners. Along with increased government control of private lives comes the connected bloated budgets and rising taxes to pay for it all.

JURISDICTION

Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes - be they fascist or communist in nature - have always sought to destroy the traditional family unit by severing the bonds between parents and their children, thereby increasing the power of the government.

Adolph Hitler understood that if he were to control the German people, he had to first control the children. He started by first taking charge of the children and educating them to follow his racist view and teaching them that it was ok to kill and torture Jews, and anyone that shared different ideals. Before it was over, Hitler's youth were even turning in their parents if they disagreed with the government's distorted values.

Today, the target of the American Nazi social engineers agenda is still children and the intact family is still their greatest enemy. Our kids minds are being filled with every imaginable distortion of reality by the media, the NEA led public school system and it's not too far off before "child welfare" officials will find the legal precedent to remove children from their homes if their parents are smokers.

Cigarette smoking is a form of child abuse, says James Garbarino, one of the nation's leading child abuse experts. When it comes to parental smoking, the time and place are here and now, Garbarino said. It's time to use the anti-smoking consensus to move on behalf of the next generation and ban smoking in the presence of children as part of society's efforts to protect children, he said. After all, in Hillary Clinton's words, "It takes more than a family to raise children."

Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) Executive Director John Banzhaf recently suggested in a major medical address that physicians are legally as well as morally justified in filing complaints of "child abuse" or "child neglect" in situations where parents smoke.

Smoking is becoming an effective means for a nonsmoking parent to gain leverage in a divorce struggle. Courts have now recognized that parental smoking may be a deciding factor in custody disputes, and have issued orders prohibiting parental smoking in the presence of children. An upstate New York judge recently ordered Johnita DeMatteo to stop smoking in her home and in her car if she wanted to maintain her visitation rights with her thirteen year-old son, who lives with his father.