It's past time for the fossil fuel industry to face the same type of courtroom reckoning the tobacco industry did in the late 1990s and Alex Jones faced yesterday.

During the week of Christmas, 1953 a group of tobacco executives met discreetly with John Hill of Hill & Knowlton, then the largest, most powerful, and most prestigious PR firm in the world, at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

News that tobacco caused cancer had leaked into the mainstream press with recent stories in TIME magazine, Readers' Digest, and Life magazine telling the stories of scientists who had reached that conclusion and the tragedies of Americans dying of lung cancer.

John Hill, according to still-extant notes from the meeting, advised the tobacco bigwigs to create an authoritative-sounding group of scientists — he suggested it be called the "Tobacco Industry Research Committee" but they later simply named it "Project Whitecoat" — staffed by well-paid scientists willing to tell the public there was nothing to worry about.

For the next four decades the tobacco industry manipulated the press; published phony science; fielded scientists, doctors, and PR flacks; placed articles in mass-circulation magazines and newspapers; went on TV and radio; and paid writers, producers, and actors to smoke in movies and on television. Read more at HartmannReport.com.

-Thom

Thursday's Daily Stack

Hour One: Democrats Shouldn't Focus ONLY On Abortion in the Midterms (Bernie's piece posted at the Guardian 10/10)
- Senator Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator (I-VT) / Chair of the Senate Budget Committee / 2 time candidate for President of the U.S.

Article: "Democrats shouldn't focus only on abortion in the midterms. That's a mistake" by Bernie Sanders.

Article: "Democrats shouldn't focus only on abortion in the midterms. That's a mistake" by Bernie Sanders.

Case: "Roe v. Wade" (1973) (abortion legal).

Article: "Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal abortion rights" by Dan Mangan, Kevin Breuninger.

Case: "Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization" (2022) (abortion).

Speech: "A Rendezvous With Destiny", 27 June 1936 acceptance speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. "An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men.""

Article: "Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin Have Reportedly Secured Billions from Saudi Government" by Ken Meyer.

Article: "Rex Tillerson" by Wikipedia.

Site: Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog.

Article: "Study: Trump Rallies Linked To Over 700 Covid-19 Coronavirus Deaths, Here Are The Caveats" by Bruce Y. Lee.

Article: "Trump campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, Stanford researchers say" by Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

Article: "Trump's rallies have left a trail of Covid clusters across the United States, report says" by Harriet Alexander.

Article: "Trump told Bob Woodward he knew in February that COVID-19 was 'deadly stuff' but wanted to 'play it down'" by Dareh Gregorian.

Article: "1869 Dr. Samuel Mudd Presentation Cane" by Antiques Roadshow.

Article: "Samuel Mudd" by Wikipedia.

Article: "When Will the Victims of Oil Companies' Lies Get Their Day In Court? " by Thom Hartmann.

Tweet: "The combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of this year are close to $100 billion. This grotesque greed of the fossil fuel industry and their financiers is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only home." by António Guterres.

Article: "Drive for climate compensation grows after Pakistan's floods" by Riazat Butt, Adil Jawad Khan.

Article: "How the oil industry made us doubt climate change" by Phoebe Keane.

Article: "Biggest Oil Giants Made 'Eye-Popping' $205 Billion in Profits in 2021: Report" by Kenny Stancil.

Article: "Big oil is wringing humanity dry. We need a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty" by Tzeporah Berman.

Article: "Revealed: oil sector's ‘staggering' $3bn-a-day profits for last 50 years" by Damian Carrington.

Article: "Denmark becomes first U.N. member to pay for ‘loss and damage' from climate change" by Sarah Kaplan.

Article: "Climate change brings irreversible harm to poor countries. At COP26, rich ones face pressure to foot the bill" by Sarah Kaplan and Brady Dennis.

Article: "Amid world crises, ‘grotesque greed' wins out" by Ishaan Tharoor.

Article: "Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting", December 14, 2012 by Wikipedia.

Article: "Whitecoat Project" by SourceWatch.

Announcing New Legislation
- Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI, 2nd District) / Member & Former Co-Chair-Congressional Progressive Caucus / (Committees: Appropriations / Also, Education & Labor)

Article: "Pocan, Khanna Introduce Bill to Strengthen Medicare, Define Alternative Plans" by Mark Pocan.

Article: "'The Cash Monster Was Insatiable': How Insurers Exploited Medicare for Billions" by Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz.

Book: The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich by Thom Hartmann.

Tweet: "Last week, a caller on the @Thom_Hartmann show asked me why Medicare Advantage is allowed to use "Medicare" in their name when they're totally separate programs. Today, @RepRoKhanna and I introduced a bill to fix that [video]" by Rep. Mark Pocan.

Video: Outlawing Medicare Advantage Could Save Lives Featuring Rep. Mark Pocan.

Article: "Maps And Charts Of Iraqi Oil Fields" by Dick Cheney.

Clip: "Iraq sits on top of 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, very significant reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia." Vice President Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, September 14, 2003.

Article: "Number and Capacity of Petroleum Refineries " by US EIA.

Article: "Enjoy your tax cuts while they last" by Jeanne Sahadi.

Article: "Saudis take 100% control of America's largest oil refinery" by Matt Egan.

Article: "Deepwater Horizon oil spill" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Wells Fargo account fraud scandal" by Wikipedia.

Case: "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission" (2010).

Site: Medicare.

Article: "Medigap" by Wikipedia.

Article: "House Jan. 6 committee eyes bringing sprawling investigation in for landing" by Tom LoBianco and Caitlin Dickson.

Article: "How the J6 committee plans to drop the hammer at tomorrow's hearing" by Areeba Shah.

Article: "Donald Trump Pleads the Fifth After Saying Only Guilty People Do" by Katherine Fung.

Article: "Trump pleaded the Fifth more than 440 times during his deposition in New York, answering only a question about what his name is, NBC reports" by Cheryl Teh.

Article: "Eric Trump Pleaded The Fifth More Than 500 Times In Deposition, Court Filing Says" by Josephine Harvey.

Article: "‘Armed Guards Will Throw Them Out': CNN Airs Clip of Roger Stone Laying Out Plan to Invalidate Election Results" by Michael Luciano.

Article: "Roger Stone" by Wikipedia.

Article: "Stop the Steal's massive disinformation campaign connected to Roger Stone" by Rob Kuznia, Curt Devine, Nelli Black and Drew Griffin.

Article: ""Stop the Steal" Didn't Start in 2020 - It Was 20 Years In the Making" by Thom Hartmann.

Article: "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote" by Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder, November 12, 2001.

Friday on The Thom Hartmann Program, 12-3pm ET

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