(Atkins Road with tobacco fields in the background. Near Cameron, N.C.)
SANFORD, N.C. - I grew up in tobacco country. We lived in a relatively small
town, Sanford, N.C., but tobacco fields surrounded the town, and most people
either worked in them or in the textile mills that also dotted the landscape.
I was a town boy, but most of my cousins were farmers and I
primed, handed, and hung tobacco most summers, mostly hung (tobacco-laden
sticks in the barn) since I was town-boy-slow out in the field. When my father
and cousin Lewis rented a four-acre stand one summer, my brother John and I went
through the entire process—from planting to harvesting.
(To the right, yours truly on the left with my brother John in a central North Carolina tobacco field)
I remember the thick black gum that covered our hands at the
end of the day, getting soaked from wet tobacco as I hung it in the upper
reaches of the old wooden barns that today are merely relics of a past era, the
bonhomie around the barn on priming (harvesting) days—nabs & RC Cola, and
lots of chatter and gossip, black and white together, with R&B or country music from someone’s radio.
“They put so many chemicals in there today, I think that’s
the reason it causes problems,” 90-year-old cousin Lewis told me during my
visit to Sanford and neighboring Cameron this month.
Back in the early 1960s, we used to “top” and “sucker”
tobacco—hand pull the plant’s flowery terminal bud and the growths that drain
its energy. Nowadays chemicals are used to do this as well as perform other
duties in growing tobacco.
Tobacco is indeed a culture as well as a plant, but science
has proven that its use is dangerous to your health and that’s why local, state
and federal governments have placed many restrictions on it.
The dangers of tobacco haven’t stopped the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, however, from waging a worldwide battle on behalf of the U.S. tobacco
industry to keep other governments from placing restrictions on its use.
A front-page article by reporter Danny Hakim in the New York Times earlier this summer
detailed the behind-the-scenes global campaign of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
to keep people in other countries smoking their lungs away.
“They were against the tobacco tax increase,” Ukrainian
lawmaker Hanna Hopko told Hakim. “They were against placing warning labels on
cigarettes. This is just business as usual for them.”
One of every two Ukrainian men smokes, compared to just a
little over one in every five in the United States. Yet the Ukrainian
government—certainly friendly to the United States in the ongoing dispute with
Russia over whether the U.S. or Russia will wield greater influence there—is so
pro-tobacco that it took international legal action against Australia three years ago when that
nation tried to restrict smoking.
The Ukrainian government worked hand-in-hand with the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce in taking that action. Such legal maneuvering is bound to
become easier once the Obama-ballyhooed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is fully
implemented, including its provisions allowing corporations to sue nations that
do anything to restrict trade.
Ironically, Ukraine exports no tobacco to Australia.
The New York Times
article cited similar legal and related maneuvering in New Zealand, Nepal,
Moldova, Uruguay and Jamaica. Prompting the U.S. Chamber campaign is a World
Health Organization treaty with nearly 180 nations aimed at reducing tobacco
usage. The United States is not one of
those nations.
The deepending influence of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce nationally
and internationally in political as well as economic issues was the subject of
another article by Simon Swartzman in Working
In These Times this month.
Reviewing Alyssa Katz’ new book, The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate
Capture of American Life, Swartzman said the chamber “today protects some
of the U.S.’s most viciously destructive corporations from any government
regulation.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the most powerful lobby
organization in Washington, D.C., and not only unions are in its cross hairs
but workers’ rights and, yes, consumer rights as well. And it does everything
it can with its deep pockets to elect Republicans across the land. It has played
active roles in the election of justices for the state Supreme Court and other
courts across the South, from Virginia and North Carolina to Alabama,
Mississippi and Louisiana.
Even in China has the influence of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce and its foreign affiliated chambers been felt. When the Chinese
government tried to impose restrictions of the use of temporary workers in
factories some time back, the U.S. Chamber weighed in heavily and managed to
get the legislation so watered down as to be meaningless.
“You don’t have choices,” the late comedian George Carlin
once told us. “You have owners. They own everything. They own the corporations
… the bought-and-paid-for (politicians). They’ve got the judges in their back
pockets.”
Carlin the prophet never said truer words.
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