Musicians shilling for tobacco

One of the more shocking aspects of the report I talked about in my previous post were the cigarette-sponsored concerts in Indonesia headlined by artists from North America, the UK, and Australia. (Well, not all that shocking, unfortunately.) I was disappointed to see that a public campaign and petition to get artists to pull out of the tobacco-sponsored Java Rockin' Land festival appear to have failed, and the concerts went off this summer as planned. (Other artists, like Alicia Keys and Kelly Clarkson, had previously heeded the message and changed course.)

Seriously, bands? You want to advertise for tobacco companies? You want to be part of getting kids hooked on smoking? You're OK with that suffering on your conscience? A while back I posted about the Sun City campaign by Artists United Against Apartheid,* in which musicians joined together to refuse to play a resort area in apartheid South Africa and produced an album sold to raise funds for the anti-apartheid cause. If the Cranberries and others are so shameless as to participate in this exercise in irresponsibility, other artists should come together to criticize these concerts and state publicly that they themselves would and will not participate.

*It appears the video has since been removed.

"Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes" on Current TV

I've been recommending Allan Brandt's The Cigarette Century since it came out. It's a superb history of science on a hugely important topic. Although the bulk concerns the history of science - and industry interference with it - in the US, the later segments dealing with the successful push to market cigarettes in other countries are some of the most disturbing. While smoking rates fortunately continue to plummet in the US, the number of smokers, especially children, is exploding in poor countries. Many of these people don't know the risks, and hundreds of millions of them will die terrible, preventable deaths. The costs to health care systems are staggering.

I was happy to see that Current TV's Vanguard has done an episode, "Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes," on the marketing of cigarettes in Indonesia and the work of anti-tobacco activists to educate and protect children there.



For those who get Current TV, they seem to be showing the episode fairly regularly. It and the other Vanguard reports are very good.

Two significant legal decisions

The first is the decision of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Flomo v. Firestone that corporations can be sued for human rights abuses:

The Firestone opinion expressly labels the Kiobel decisions, which found corporate immunity for human rights abuses, an "outlier," which it now certainly is. Between Exxon Mobil and Firestone, along with Judge Leval's dissent in Kiobel, the reasoning of the Kiobel majority has been thoroughly dismantled.

So far the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the D.C., Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have expressly found corporate liability for human rights violations; the Ninth Circuit has assumed such liability and may make an express decision on the issue soon, and it is also being considered by the Fourth Circuit.

Only the Second Circuit, in Kiobel, has found that corporations cannot be sued. The district court's decision in Firestone was the only opinion that followed Kiobel, and now it has been reversed.

The second is also a positive development, but calls attention to a nasty policy that I had no idea existed:

The US Court of Appeals' ruling on July 6, 2011, that the government may not force US organizations that get funding for international anti-AIDS work to pledge their opposition to prostitution is an important step in the global fight against AIDS, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Alliance for Open Society International v. United States Agency for International Development affirmed lower court orders halting enforcement of the anti-prostitution pledge requirement on grounds that forcing funding recipients to adopt and espouse the government's viewpoint violated fundamental free speech rights.

...In an amicus curiae brief to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in AOSI v. USAID, 22 organizations, including Human Rights Watch, described the harmful local and global consequences of the Leadership Act on efforts to fight HIV and AIDS among sex workers and other marginalized groups. The organizations said that the act disrupts outreach efforts and joint programming with sex workers by forcing non-profit groups to present a stigmatizing, anti-prostitution message.

...While the ruling is important, Human Rights Watch said the government should take additional steps, including policies to promote and strengthen federal support for reducing HIV/AIDS in sex worker populations and to provide support to sex worker coalitions conducting HIV/AIDS work.

...The Second Circuit ruling applied only to US organizations and does not affect the Leadership Act's application to foreign (non-US) organizations receiving US anti-AIDS funding. These organizations also play a critical role in the global fight against HIV/AIDS, Human Rights Watch said.

"The Obama Administration should stop enforcing the anti-prostitution pledge immediately against all groups, including US and foreign organizations," Schleifer said. "Leadership in the fight against AIDS requires removing the pledge altogether from US law."

What a sick law this is in the first place.