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This Week in People’s History, Jan 2 – 8

Portside
Theater balcony heavily damaged by fire Deadly Fire's Legacy (in 1904), Forgotten Respect for Radicals (1939), Big Money in Lies (1954), So Long, Subway Tokens (1994), Racism wins, then loses (1959), Innocent man freed after 22 years (1939), FBI Finds "Right Kind" of Black Leader (1964)

Civil Rights Unionism

Robert Korstad Jacobin
In 1940s North Carolina, a Communist-led union of tobacco workers fought to bring democracy to the Jim Crow South.

Philip Morris’ Secret Plan to Split the Anti-Tobacco Movement

Andy Rowell The Conversation
Tobacco stub Philip Morris International, the world’s largest tobacco company, is investing billions of dollars in an attempt at reputation rehabilitation, including millions in the creation of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW). But there is a big distinction between “smoke-free” and “tobacco-free”.

A Deadly Business: Big Tobacco Still Sees Big Profits in America's Poor

Jessica Glenza The Guardian
With friends in the White House, and a pending $49 billion merger, Big Tobacco is back. The US remains the “world’s largest tobacco profit pool” outside of China, with “exciting” prospects for “long term growth”. Mergers and acquisitions have allowed the deadly industry to squeeze huge profits from customers, increasingly the poor, less educated and marginalized, and the supply chain, contract farmers, and workers, including children, who work for poverty wages.

Big Tobacco Loses in California, Eyes Rise of Big Marijuana

Stanton Glantz The Conversation
Leading tobacco control expert Stanton Glantz analyzes how a big public health push in California defeated Big Tobacco and resulted in a two-dollar cigarette tax increase. The first tax increase on tobacco in 18 years has the potential to reduce smoking prevalence from today’s 9.4 percent to 7.1 percent by 2020. Yet Glantz adds a note of caution: with diminishing cigarette profits, Big Tobacco could find a place in the marijuana market, as more states legalize marijuana.

Let Them Eat Carbon

Michael Klare TomDispatch
The giant energy companies are taking a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook. As concern over climate change begins to lower the demand for fossil fuels in the United States and Europe, they are accelerating their sales to developing nations, where demand is strong and climate-control measures weak or nonexistent. As in the case of cigarette sales, the stepped-up delivery of fossil fuels to developing countries is doubly harmful...
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