Word: tobacco
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...main reason the tobacco companies so badly want Congress to approve the $368 billion deal they cut last year with the states is that it offers them immunity against future lawsuits. And the main reason they want immunity is to save money. But they also want to save face. In every tobacco lawsuit, plaintiffs can demand and make public the industry's internal documents, even as a condition of cases settled out of court. Just how damaging those disclosures can be is plainer than ever since last week, when a California suit opened a flood of secret industry papers. What...
Last February, Congress Watch documented a typical outing. The Tobacco Institute flew 11 members, including Republican House leaders Tom DeLay and John Boehner, to the Phoenician, a Scottsdale, Arizona resort, for a "legislative conference," complete with morning seminars on the harmlessness of nicotine and afternoons free for golf and spa treatments at the Centre for Well-Being, at a cost of $62,890. There's no linkage, of course, but five months later the Republican leadership slipped a $50 billion tax break for tobacco into the budget bill. (By contrast, Espy's Agriculture Department actually tightened poultry regulation...
AUSTIN: In Texas, everything's bigger. Indeed, at around $14.5 billion, the state's settlement with Big Tobacco ? set to be announced Friday, the day the trial was scheduled to begin ? is the largest yet. But it should be no surprise that the lawyers are walking tallest of all: They've gleaned a whopping $2.18 billion out of that total for their fees...
...Clinton this is politics as usual," says TIME correspondent Bruce Van Voorst, who has been tracking the deal. "He'll play the game, but if there's no bill he'll simply blame the Republicans." Which explains Clinton's staggering announcement that the settlement's tobacco revenues would be included in the new budget -- thus linking the phantom deal to all sorts of government goodies for voting Americans. "If they don't happen," says Van Voorst, "Well, the Republicans blew it. And, then Clinton can call them the party of Big Tobacco money...
...Tobacco's Last Puff in Texas Texas comes to a multi-billion dollar settlement with the tobacco industry in a settlement today. Will the state also limit advertising...