Margaret Thatcher transformed British political life forever. So did Ronald Reagan in the United States. Now Canada has experienced a similar, dramatic shift to a new kind of politics, which author Donald Gutstein terms Harperism.

Among its key tenets:

• A weakened labour movement – and preferably the disappearance of unions – will contribute to Canada’s economic prosperity
• Cutting back government scientific research and data collection will improve public policy-making

These and other essential elements of Harperism flow from neo-liberal economic theories propounded by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek and his U.S. disciples. They inspired Thatcherism and Reaganism. Stephen Harper has taken this neo-liberalism much further in many key areas.

The success of Harperism is no accident. Donald Gutstein documents the links between the politicians, think tanks, journalists, academics, and researchers who nurture and promote each other’s neo-liberal ideas.

Boost production in B.C.’s resource industries and we’ll all be better off — especially those of us in the Lower Mainland.

That’s the soothing message emanating from the province’s newest corporate-sponsored think tank, Resource Works. It’s good news for all of us, and especially for the Christy Clark government, which has hitched its horse to the resource-development cart.

But is it true? Will we be better off with increased resource industry production rather than, say, increased tourism or technology development?

Such questions arise given the close links between Resource Works, the mining industry and the Clark government.

Resource Works was launched with a big splash in April. A paper produced for the fledgling think tank by Philip Cross, Statistics Canada’s former chief economic analyst, concludes that cities benefit the most from resource development because that’s where financial, business and even transportation services are located.

More resource-based jobs are created in the Lower Mainland than in the rest of the province, Cross’s study found.

This could be true. Think of all those Lower Mainland-based lawyers, lobbyists, insurance executives, financiers and PR flaks needed to protect Imperial Metals from the damage wreaked by its devastating Mount Polley tailings pond collapse. Then think of the baristas to serve their coffee and the foreign nannies to look after their kids. And so on.

Development good, but compared to what?

To launch his study, Cross and advisory council chair Lyn Anglin met with the Vancouver Sun and Province editorial boards on a Wednesday. The next day both papers published uncritical accounts. (See here and here.) The Globe and Mail followed in similar fashion the next day.

All three papers presented the same message: most jobs created by resource development are in Greater Vancouver. And Resource Works is not an advocacy organization, but one dedicated to providing research to help the public make sound resource-industry decisions.

The organization’s ability to command such positive media attention may be related to the fact that executive director Stewart Muir was the Vancouver Sun’s deputy managing editor for nearly 14 years.

But something is missing from Philip Cross’s research. Resource development may be good, but compared to what? Cross should have compared resource to other economic development. Does resource development create more jobs than tourism, high tech or some other sector? Perhaps we don’t need more mines, liquefied natural gas plants and pipelines because we can focus on more environmentally sustainable green alternatives.

By omitting information that would provide a meaningful comparison, Cross created a misleading study — the kind of study Resource Works, the mining industry and the Clark government evidently need.

Who’s involved?

Perhaps it’s worth probing the relationship between the three.

Stewart Muir has been in the news before because of his close connections to Christy Clark. He’s married to Athana Mentzelopoulos, who’s now deputy minister of jobs, tourism and skills training, and before that was in charge of Clark’s “priority” files. She’s so close to Clark she was bridesmaid at Clark’s wedding.

In 2011, Muir was awarded a $141,000-a-year contract for the job of vice-president of communication at Vancouver Island Health Authority. The job wasn’t posted and tenders were not called. When the news broke, the contract was withdrawn. Now Muir is heading Resource Works.

Another link to the Clark government is provided by Resource Works director Geoff Plant. Plant was attorney general under Gordon Campbell and was appointed by Clark in 2012 as the government’s chief legal strategist for the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel proceedings — resource development writ large. His expertise is aboriginal law, crucial territory for Clark’s resource-exploitation agenda.

Resource Works’ links to mining are just as strong.

Board chair Doug Horswill is a senior vice-president at Teck Resources, B.C.’s mining giant. Before his stint at Teck, Horswill served as B.C.’s deputy minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources. And before that he worked at mining companies Utah International and Inco. It’s B.C.’s version of the revolving door syndrome.

Advisory Council chair Lyn Anglin is the former president and CEO of Geoscience BC, a provincially-funded body whose mandate is to attract mineral and oil and gas investment to the province. Resource Works research could certainly assist this mission.

As to who is funding the research, the organization did volunteer the information that seed funding came from the B.C. Business Council, but did not disclose other sources of funding.

Media give up the mic

No media outlets followed up on these connections. Instead, Resource Works teamed up with the Province newspaper to produce a weekly feature on how important trade, industry and resource development are to the B.C. economy (paid for by whom?).

The paper gave Muir a podium to argue that we can’t have health care without LNG development. And it gave a similar podium to Resource Works adviser Dan Miller two weeks later. Miller, a former Prince Rupert NDP MLA who was briefly premier as the New Democrats imploded in 2000, is a long-time resource industry evangelist and a consultant with PR powerhouse National Public Relations, which has Enbridge as a client.

Miller argues that Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson won’t get his Broadway transit line and the BC Teachers’ Federation won’t get pay raises without increased coal exports.

It’s an effective message. We can’t retain our standard of living without the pipelines, tanker traffic, LNG plants, mining developments and coal export projects that are in the works.

Repeat the message often enough and we’ll soon start believing it. Or if we don’t believe it, we’ll at least accept it as legitimate political discourse. And Christy Clark can get on with the business of re-election.

First published in The Tyee

Last week I wrote about tobacco industry funding for Fraser Institute research that “proved” second-hand smoke doesn’t cause cancer.

You may think that’s ancient history. And in one sense you’re right. The tobacco industry has shifted its doubt-manufacturing operations to countries like Russia, Indonesia and China, where the incidence of smoking—and cancer—continues to rise. But other industries with deep pockets need to manufacture doubt about the health risks of their products.

On Monday the Fraser Institute released a report, “Obesity in Canada: overstated problems, misguided policy solutions,” that casts doubt on the extent of obesity in Canada and questions whether obesity is even that much of a health risk. Call it obesity denial.

Obesity isn’t an epidemic so we don’t need more government regulation, the study concludes, and besides, the obese die younger, saving us precious health care dollars. Nothing to worry about.

If these findings are correct, they’re good news for food and beverage companies that pack their products with sugar’s empty calories.

The institute didn’t say who funded the study. And the news media didn’t bother to ask. Instead, Postmedia papers gave the report royal treatment, putting it on the front page of the National Post and Ottawa Citizen and giving it prominent coverage in the chain’s other papers.

What’s interesting about this  publication is that, along with Nadeem Esmail, the Fraser Institute’s in-house health-care researcher, the people who produced it were also responsible for the Fraser Institute’s cancer-denial work fifteen years earlier.

The letters the Fraser Institute wrote to the British-American Tobacco Co. in 2000 asking for funding reveal that the institute had set up a social affairs centre to promote market solutions to social policy problems like poverty, drug use, smoking and gun control. Anything but government regulation was the centre’s marching orders. Rothman’s International was providing $50,000 a year for this work and Philip Morris, “generous support.”

The social affairs centre was headed by one Patrick Basham back then. Fifteen years later he’s returned as an author of “Obesity in Canada.” Basham has come full circle, his journey guided by tobacco and other industry funding. After he left the Fraser, he went to work at the Cato Institute, another right-wing think tank with substantial tobacco funding. He then set up his own think tank, the Democracy Institute with offices in London and Washington, where he specializes in turning back public health initiatives (like smoke-free zones or taxes on junk foods) that could interfere with the marketing activities of tobacco, alcohol and food companies.

To launch the Democracy Institute, Basham co-wrote a book titled Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, which argues against any government legislation or programs, not only because they’d be too costly and ineffective, but more importantly, they would result “in the sacrifice of so many of our hard-won economic and political liberties on the altar of a misguided, unwinnable crusade.”

Libertarianism über alles. That’s the frame Basham brings to “Obesity in Canada.”

Basham’s Diet Nation co-author was tobacco industry consultant John Luik. Luik, who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Big Tobacco, would have been an author of the obesity study except that he died in 2012. My evidence for this claim is that Luik wrote six obesity-denial articles with Basham that frame the argument in “Obesity in Canada.” Luik wasn’t an unfamiliar face to Fraser Institute staffers, since he co-authored the Fraser Institute’s 1999 book, Passive Smoke: The EPA Betrayal of Science and Policy. The book attacked the US Environmental Protection Agency’s study that found an irrefutable link between second-hand smoke and cancer. It was paid for by Rothman’s and Philip Morris. Luik joined Basham at the Democracy Institute and over the next half-dozen years, they wrote Diet Nation and dozens of articles attacking the “myth” of obesity.

Perhaps they switched from second-hand smoke to obesity-denial because tobacco industry funding for manufacturing doubt dried up.

Unlike the 80-million pages of secret Big Tobacco documents in the public domain, the sugar papers file is much thinner. Documents from the 1970s suggest the sugar companies used Big Tobacco tactics to deflect growing public concerns over the health effects of sugar. They describe industry efforts “to sponsor scientific research, silence media reports critical of sugar, and block dietary guidelines to limit sugar consumption,” as the CBC’s Kelly Crowe reported.

“Obesity in Canada” fits comfortably in this program.

A key claim in the study is that rates of obesity and overweight barely budged between 2003 and 2012 except among adult women. Why did Esmail and Basham pick 2003 as their starting point, one might ask. Perhaps because the dramatic increases in obesity and overweight among the Canadian population occurred before 2003.

Are they lying with statistics? A 2006 Statistics Canada study reviewed the studies on overweight and obesity among Canadian adults and found that “the percentage of Canadians who are overweight or obese has risen dramatically in recent years.” By recent years StatsCan means between 1979 and 2004. Obesity among adult males and females soared from 13.8 to 23.1 percent during those years, an increase of two-thirds.

Somehow the Fraser Institute researchers missed this information. For the atypical time segment they selected they conclude that the rate of growth has been “observable, modest and clearly not exponential,” introducing a requirement that to be classified as an epidemic, growth in the disease or condition must be “exponential.” This is a red herring—there’s no requirement that the spread of a disease must be exponential to qualify as an epidemic—that diverts us from the fact that if you survey the 30-year period, obesity is close to epidemic proportions.

Nonetheless this message was picked up by Postmedia papers: “’There is no epidemic,’ obesity study finds,” “Obesity ‘epidemic’ among Canadian exaggerated: report,” ran the headlines of the two Postmedia front-page stories.

Cheaper than paid advertising.

Having conveyed the message that obesity is not an epidemic, the next task is to demonstrate that the risks and costs associated with overweight and obesity “may be (perhaps significantly) overstated.” Here the authors use a different technique: misquote your sources. The mission is to demonstrate that their findings are “quite different from the often alarmist comments seen and heard in the popular press from those in favour of government intervention.”

But the very first study they cite, a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they claim “found that overweight Americans were less likely to experience premature death than normal weight Americans.” This would be a striking finding, to be sure, but the study reported a more significant result, that obesity was associated with a higher rate of premature death. The Fraser researchers omitted this finding.

Of course, “Obesity in Canada” cites many sources and this first one could be an honest mistake. Nonetheless, the media picked it up as a second key message, that the health consequences of excess weight are being exaggerated.

As the National Post concludes, “That makes the case weak for anti-obesity policies such as calorie counts on menus, tax hikes on sugary drinks and other policies that ‘vilify’ certain foods, given that a ‘sizable portion’ of the population ‘are neither overweight nor obese’ according to their BMI,’ Mr. Esmail said.” Esmail must say “sizable” and not “a majority,” since 60 percent of men and 45 percent of women in Canada are overweight or obese.  But it’s not an epidemic and the health risks are minimal.

There must be smiling faces tonight in Sugarland.

According to this rosy view of the think tank’s mission, Big Oil directors from Calgary, for instance, don’t tell Fraser Institute researcher Kenneth Green to produce studies denying global warming or proving that the Keystone and Northern Gateway pipelines are crucial for Canada’s economic survival. Green does these on his own because that’s what his research indicates.

Or so one would conclude from Walker’s denials.

We’d have to believe Walker’s claim if we didn’t have the Tobacco Papers—a series of letters Walker and his chief fundraiser wrote to a big tobacco company in 2000 asking for financial support for research that would “prove” second-hand smoke didn’t cause cancer.

This rare glimpse into the role of corporate funding in shaping Fraser Institute research was obtained as a result of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between 46 U.S. state attorneys general and Big Tobacco. A condition of the agreement was that the tobacco companies had to make public and post on dedicated websites, (see here and here) every document used in the discovery phase of legal actions brought by the states against the tobacco industry for Medicaid costs associated with smoking-related diseases.

More than 80 million pages of documents were posted. They include letters written by Walker and Sherry Stein, the Fraser Institute’s chief fundraiser, to the British American Tobacco Co., the world’s second-largest tobacco company and owner of Imperial Tobacco (Imasco), which controlled 70 percent of the Canadian market. The letters reveal that the Fraser Institute had set up a social affairs centre to promote free-market solutions to social policy problems like poverty, drug use, smoking and gun control. Tobacco company Rothman’s International was providing $50,000 a year for this work and Philip Morris, “generous support.”

With this funding, the Fraser published a book by two tobacco industry lobbyists titled Passive Smoke: The EPA’s Betrayal of Science and Policy, and held two day-long conferences in Ottawa. This package of initiatives was timed to coincide with bylaws being enacted by municipalities across the country to regulate smoking in public places. Such a bylaw had just come into effect in Victoria.

Big Tobacco was in a panic. Fraser Institute to the rescue.

The Fraser’s book argued that these bylaws were ill-considered because the link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer had not been proven. (Not true.) The book attacked the landmark 1993 decision of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that declared second-hand smoke to be a carcinogen. It was followed by the two conferences, which worked in tandem, the first attacking the need for regulation at all and the second attacking regulation of smoking. Neither the book nor the conferences mentioned tobacco industry funding.

At the end of 1999, Rothman’s was bought by British American Tobacco (BAT), and the Fraser Institute lost this funding. It commenced a campaign to replace, and add to, the money.

Writing to BAT’s chairman Martin Broughton, Sherry Stein asked him to take over Rothman’s funding commitment and consider a new initiative for a risk and regulation centre. She asked for $50,000 a year for each centre. BAT funding for this new centre would help the Fraser “provide the factual information that will seriously counter the risk activists and their misleading and misguided propaganda,” Stein wrote.

Later in the year, Laura Jones, the Fraser’s director of environmental and regulatory studies (i.e., deregulation)—she’s now the executive vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and a deregulation evangelist—thanked Adrian Payne, BAT’s international scientific affairs manager, for “the most enjoyable dinner last week in Toronto.”

Then Michael Walker reiterated these requests in his pitch to Payne. Walker focused on the new Centre for Studies in Risk and Regulation. He railed against the “agitators for a ‘zero-risk’ society [who] have become increasingly successful in advancing their cause, often basing their case on exaggerated junk science scares.” The targets of these nasty agitators were pollution, second-hand smoke, pesticides and genetically modified foods. With BAT financial assistance, the Fraser Institute would set the record straight.

BAT would not be alone in supporting the new centre, Walker reassured Payne. The institute had already:

“met with a number of your colleagues in the industry to discuss this proposal and all are on side and have implied that they will support the Centre with comparable contributions. The companies they represent are Imperial Tobacco Company Ltd., JTI Macdonald Corp., and Rothman’s Benson & Hedges Inc. We have begun discussions as well with Philip Morris International Inc., and Brown and Williamson Tobacco in the U.S. Others we will approach for support are in the food, biotechnology, and chemical industries.”

Later in the year, Stein presented three proposals for BAT’s support. It could contribute: $30,000 for the launch of the centre, featuring guest speaker John Stossel, a well-known television personality and anti-regulation zealot; $42,000 to distribute an anti-regulation book called Safe Enough?; and/or $48,000 for a project that would show regulation was too costly to be effective.

The letters from Stein and Walker don’t indicate which, if any, of these projects BAT did support, but they all took place.

The letters also don’t indicate that Brian Levitt, the CEO of Imasco, BAT’s Canadian subsidiary, was a Fraser Institute director during this period.

Too bad there’s not similar transparency for the Fraser Institute’s work on school choice or privatized health care or any of the dozen other issues the institute beavers away at to prove the market always does better than government.

Its 2012 budget was $10 million. Where does this money come from? The institute won’t say.

There’s something seriously wrong—corrupt?—when an organization wraps its efforts to influence public policy in the deepest secrecy.

Murdoch’s connection to Phillip Morris Co. was revealed through secret industry documents made public as a result of the landmark 1998 U.S. tobacco industry settlement.

The 1981 publication of a Japanese study suggesting that non-smoking wives of smoking husbands were more likely than wives of non-smokers to get lung cancer shocked the industry. Big Tobacco realized that second-hand smoke would be the greatest threat it had encountered, more potentially damaging than earlier studies linking smoking with lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses.

When the victim is the smoker, the industry was able to argue—successfully—that harm caused by smoking was regrettable, but is, after all, a result of personal choice. The individual knows the risks when she smokes. If a person gets cancer even though he doesn’t smoke, but is simply in the presence of smokers, then that is a different matter. Smoking leaps from individual choice to major public policy issue. The industry “calculated bans in work places, aircraft, restaurants and other venues would result in a dramatic plunge in the number of cigarettes smoked,” the South China Morning Post reported after an investigation of industry tactics in Southeast Asia. “People would have less time to puff. And that would lead to billions of dollars in lost revenue.”

To stave off this catastrophe, the industry used every available channel of persuasion and propaganda to cast doubt on the link between second-hand smoke and disease. The channels included supportive media like Murdoch’s News Corp.

A 1985 draft speech for Philip Morris’s CEO for a marketing meeting noted that the media company was already onside. “We plan to build similar relationships to those we now have with Murdoch’s News Limited with other newspaper proprietors,” the memo said. “Murdoch’s papers rarely publish anti-smoking articles these days.”

A second document for the same meeting created two days later asked the question: “how can we change the public’s view towards smoking?” After outlining various strategies to turn back the tide, the memo makes the point that

… we are not using our very considerable clout with the media. A number of media proprietors that I have spoken to are sympathetic to our position – Rupert Murdoch and Malcolm Forbes are two good examples. The media like the money they make from our advertisements and they are an ally that we can and should exploit.

In most societies in the world today public opinion is formed, to a significant extent, by the news media and I believe we should make a concerted effort in our principal markets  to influence the media to write articles or editorials positive to the industry position on various aspects of the smoking controversy.

Philip Morris and News Corp. drew together during the 1970s, driven by ideology, money and a hatred of government, except for those of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In 1975, the companies worked with Australia’s Liberal Party to overthrow the Whitlam Labor government, which had a policy of restricting tobacco advertising. In 1989, Murdoch was invited to join the Philip Morris board, where he remained for a dozen years. And Murdoch invited a succession of company executives to sit on his board. One observer called it “a cozy relationship all around.” It was a coup for Philip Morris, giving the company access to broadcast and print editorial pages and a platform from which to disseminate its view of the benefits of smoking.

Hamish Maxwell, who had worked for Philip Morris since the first studies linking smoking and cancer were publicized in the early fifties, was appointed to the News Corp board three years after Murdoch joined the Philip Morris board. Maxwell helped develop PM’s international tobacco business, which, as director of marketing, he shaped into a major growth engine.

Maxwell left the News Corp. board in 1998, and the following year another senior Philip Morris executive joined it. Like Murdoch, Geoffrey Bible was an Australian. Like Maxwell, Bible was a long-time PM employee. When Bible retired he was treated to an “obsequious valedictory” in Murdoch’s Weekend Australian. No thought was given to the estimated 20.7 million people who would die from the company’s products by 2050. (In 1999, Bible received US $21.2 million from the company, about a dollar for each tobacco death.) Instead, Weekend Australian correspondent Rodney Dalton effused, Bible’s thoughts would be struggling with what he should do: ski in Switzerland where he owned a chalet, swim in Bermuda where he owned a house, or head to the golf course for another lesson? Bible’s friend Murdoch said in the article that Bible had “the single toughest and worst job in America.” But Bible, who was still on the News Corp. board, was “honourable,” Murdoch insisted.

And when Bible left News Corp. in 2004, he was replaced by Peter Barnes, another Australian and former president of Philip Morris Asia. Like Maxwell and Bible, Barnes’ expertise was consumer marketing. “Peter was a senior executive in virtually all of the key markets in which News Corp. operates,” Murdoch said in praising the appointment. Barnes was still on the board in 2011.

Philip Morris senior ranks were crowded with Australians who were friends or relatives of Murdoch. Bill Murray was a close friend of Murdoch’s and, as PR monitor SourceWatch claimed, “chief architect of the company’s dirty tricks and science-corruption campaigns.” Murray was instrumental in promoting Bryan Simpson, who happened to be Murdoch’s nephew by marriage. Simpson later was picked to head Infotab, the international tobacco institute.

The intimate relationship between the companies paid dividends for many years. In 2000, an individual named Steven Milloy became “science columnist” for News Corp. subsidiary FoxNews.com. Milloy had no science background, but wrote columns attacking scientific studies that found links between second-hand smoke and lung cancer. The first piece attacked a study which found that women living with smokers had higher levels of chemicals associated with the risk of lung cancer, accusing it of being nothing more than spin. He also attacked the landmark 1993 Environmental Protection Agency study that linked health risks and second-hand smoke.

In a second column Milloy dismissed 20 years of research on the effects of exposure to second-hand smoke: “Secondhand smoke is annoying to many non-smokers. That is the essence of the controversy and where the debate should lie – the rights of smokers to smoke in public places versus the rights of non-smokers to be free of tobacco smoke.”

Milloy didn’t reveal that he was on the Philip Morris payroll when he wrote the columns, under contract to monitor tobacco studies. But science reporter Paul Thacker exposed the connection in The New Republic.  Milloy received $92,500 for fees and expenses from PM in each of 2000 and 2001 when he wrote his FoxNews.com columns. Fox News didn’t seem to care about the conflict of interest when it found out.

The Murdoch empire continues to support the industry’s claim that the link between second-hand smoke and disease remains unproven. Murdoch’s New York Post, with a long history of industry support, is the attack dog of choice. In the late 1970s, the Post was likely the only newspaper to run “almost daily, cigarette ads in color on its back page  … and in its main news section.”

When New York City brought in a ban on smoking in bars in 2001, the Post fulminated that the “Nicotine Nazis” were basing the ban on the “Big Lie.” When Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed extending the ban to all bars and restaurants, he was accused of being an elitist zealot, spouting nonsense and engaging in a puritanical righteous crusade. “Next he’ll ban smoldering incense at St. Paul’s Cathedral,” the paper snorted.

As recently as 2010, the Post was still raging on about a proposal to extend smoking bans to all parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas in the city. “This ban is not so much about public health as it is another heavy-handed behavior modification scheme cooked up by a fellow who is incapable of minding his own business,” a September 19, 2010 editorial ranted.

As the phone-hacking scandal leaps the Atlantic and settles on Fox News, further connections between the Murdoch empire and Big Tobacco are coming to light.

Former Fox News executive Dan Cooper claims that Fox News chief Roger Ailes had him design a “brain room” deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, the Fox News head office, to house a counter-intelligence and black ops office in which hacking phone records would be “easy pie.” Ailes brought in Scott Ehrlich to run the brain room, Cooper alleges.

Before Ailes set up Fox News for Murdoch in the mid-90s, he ran his own political consulting firm and Ehrlich was a top lieutenant. Ailes helped put Republican candidates into office, most notably Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

He also had a string of corporate clients, including the Tobacco Institute, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds.

Surgeon General Everett Koop’s 1986 report, “The health consequences of involuntary smoking,” decisively portrayed second-hand smoke not just as an annoyance but as a quantifiable health risk. It was estimated that passive smoking contributed to 50,000 deaths a year in the U.S.

The next year Congress banned smoking on all domestic flights under two hours and extended it to all domestic flights two years later. The Environmental Protection Agency was working towards placing passive smoke on its list of major carcinogens.

In response, the Tobacco Institute launched a massive “Enough is Enough” campaign, playing on many people’s concerns that government was reaching too far into their lives.

Roger Ailes and Scott Ehrlich were members of a tobacco industry group tasked with beating back the tide of regulation. Their job was to go after the Clinton administration’s health care reform, which was to be funded in part by a dollar-a-pack tax on cigarettes. Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting the plight of “real people” affected by higher taxes.

In one confidential memo to Philip Morris, Ehrlich proposed an “underground attack” option following a major Hillary Clinton speech. It would be costly, he wrote, but would be “designed to hit hard at the key [Representatives and Senators] through their soft underbelly, while attempting to stay under the radar of the national news media.”

Three years later, Ailes was working for Murdoch, creating what Rolling Stone calls “the most profitable propaganda machine in history.” And Ehrlich, fresh from his dirty tricks for Big Tobacco, was allegedly running Murdoch’s brain room.

Murdoch will have no problem shuttering his British newspapers, which contribute only three percent of News Corp.’s $32 billion in revenue. But Fox News is another matter altogether, responsible for nearly a fifth of the corporation’s $5 billion in profit.

With FBI and Department of Justice investigations under way, further Fox News revelations will likely follow. Big Tobacco’s murderous rampage is on the wane, at least in North America. Will Murdoch go down too?

Case in point, the annual meeting of the Bank of Montreal in Vancouver on March 22.

The bank has become a major target of public hostility in Wisconsin, where last December it bought the Marshall and Ilsley Bank for $4.1 billion.

While BMO shareholders listened to CEO Bill Downe present his rosy forecasts for profits from this acquisition, public and private sector workers and their supporters protested in front of the M&I branch in Madison, Wisconsin, ground zero in the corporate attack on public sector unions.

It turns out that the bank and its top executives led the list of contributors to Republican Governor Scott Walker’s campaign fund in 2010.

After Walker pushed through the so-called budget repair bill that eliminated public sector bargaining rights for many Wisconsin public workers, protestors assembled outside the bank.

None of this information was included in Sun reporter Derrick Penner’s account of the meeting, which was little more than President Bill’s corporate messaging.

Nor did Penner mention that the M&I bank, whose name he misspelled, had received $1.7 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds from the George W. Bush administration. Nor that, as part of the deal, BMO would pay back that sum to the U.S. government, bringing the actual acquisition price to $5.8 billion.

It was all about the sterling profits this investment would return to shareholders.

And, of course Penner neglected to mention the fact that M&I CEO Mark Furlong would received an $18-million bonus when the deal closes on July 31, 2011 and BMO moves the headquarters to Chicago, where Furlong will take over as CEO.

Nor did Penner mention the delegation of Canadian workers that showed up at the Vancouver meeting asking questions about the unseemly nature of the takeover.

All in all, not a very informative story, even for Bank of Montreal shareholders, who’d like to know more about the risks associated with their investment.

Penner wasn’t alone in his selective reporting. The Globe and Mail’s Boyd Erman left the same gaps in his Report on Business story.

The censoring of this issue by corporate media points out the crucial role played by alternative media in ensuring citizens get the whole story.

See here and here for more information from alternative sources.

Erman did include a revealing quote from President Bill, who said the bank was looking for more American acquisitions.

“The model is to integrate North America,” Downe said.

Was BMO supporting the Harper agenda of deeper Canada-U.S. integration?