Posted on 04/17/2003 1:03:26 AM PDT by WaterDragon
America’s anti-alcohol movement is composed of dozens of overlapping community groups, research institutions, and advocacy organizations, but they are brought together and given direction by one entity: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Based in Princeton, New Jersey, the RWJF has spent more than $265 million between 1997 and 2002 to tax, vilify, and restrict access to alcoholic beverages. Nearly every study disparaging alcohol in the mass media, every legislative push to limit marketing or increase taxes, and every supposedly “grassroots” anti-alcohol movement was conceived and coordinated at the RWJF’s headquarters. Thanks to this one foundation, the U.S. anti-alcohol movement speaks with one voice.
For the RWJF, it is an article of faith that diminishing per capita consumption across the board can contain the social consequences of alcohol abuse. Therefore, it has engaged in a long-term war to reduce overall drinking by all Americans. The RWJF relentlessly audits its own programs, checking to see if each dollar spent is having the maximum impact on reducing per capita consumption. Over the past 10 years, this blueprint has been refined. Increased taxes, omnipresent roadblocks, and a near total elimination of alcohol marketing are just a few of the tactics the RWJF now employs in its so-called “environmental” approach.
The environmental approach seeks to shift blame from the alcohol abuser to society in general (and to alcohol providers in particular). So the RWJF has turned providers into public enemy number one, burdening them with restrictions and taxes to make their business as difficult and complex as possible. The environmental approach’s message to typical consumers, meanwhile, is that drinking is abnormal and unacceptable. The RWJF seeks to marginalize drinking by driving it underground, away from mainstream culture and public places.
The RWJF funds programs that focus on every conceivable target, at every level from local community groups to state and federal legislation. Every demographic group is targeted: women, children, the middle class, business managers, Hispanics, Blacks, Whites, Native Americans. Every legal means is used: taxation, regulation, litigation. Every PR tactic: grassroots advocacy, paid advertising, press warfare. Every conceivable location: college campuses, sporting events, restaurants, cultural activities, inner cities, residential neighborhoods, and even bars.
The RWJF scored a major victory in 2000 with a federal .08 BAC mandate, and can claim credit for restrictions on alcohol in localities all over the country. But its $265 million has accomplished much more: it has put in place all the elements required for more sweeping change. This includes a vast network of local community organizations, centers for technical support, a compliant press, and a growing body of academic literature critical of even moderate alcohol consumption. The next highly publicized study or angry local movement may now reach the “tipping point” where the RWJF-funded anti-alcohol agenda snowballs into the kind of orchestrated frenzy the tobacco industry knows well.
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Don't you remember when they tried to eliminate the DOEd and reduce PBS/NPR funding? Of course you do. We have go round and round on this before. They were taken apart by the liberal media. Gingrich became the frontpage "Grinch that stole Xmas". Get a life.
Then you should remove this "irrelevant" link from your home page.
Certainly a pair of DEA agents wouldn't 'misinterpret' the girl's driving manner just to cover their butts?
Do you think you'd be scared if you were 14 years old and strange men with guns came bursting onto your property? Would you try to run away or would you take lollipops out to them?
Bass had his homepage linked to it so my queries were directed to him. Anyothers today were to those that jumped in.
Your statement has no factual basis. It's your opinion, based on your world view that it's OK for government to impose morality on everyone else at the point of a gun, regardless of whether they accept the premises that you state.
So you are ok with druggies killing chidren?
Druggies don't kill children. Explain to me how they do.
Yep. Everyone in favor of legalizing drugs is a big-L Libertarian.
But when they're caught in an unsupportable position, they become small-l libertarians.
And when association with that group becomes awkward, they become small-l libertarians "except for that issue".
I didn't say the finger, I said curve balls. Seems like during the last 12 years you mentioned we had a democratic president for eight. and a democratic senate for most.
Dept of Education, SEC, FCC -- all still there! Give me MORE government PLEASE! Whoops, here we go...Dept of 'Homeland Security'.
And with actions like you want, they would probably have more defections and Gore would be president, we would have a democratic senate and congress, a gun grabbing AG and more terrorist attacks.
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