December 1998 January 1999 Stories
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from Common Sense Legislative Update The details of the apparent national settlement between state attorneys general and the tobacco industry are still filtering out. North Carolina Attorney General Mike Easley now says that tobacco growers and allotment holders could divide up $2 billion if the settlement dries up demand for their crop. There is also discussion about setting up a foundation run by the state's top elected officials who would determine how to use money from the settlement to help growers, allotment holders, and communities who rely on tobacco as major part of their economy. The whole settlement is very complicated and its not yet clear if it goes far enough in compensating people affected by the lies and distortions of the tobacco industry over the last 30 years. Progressives would do well to enter this fray for those people and another group often ignored in the discussions -- the workers in the tobacco industry who hold the manual labor jobs in the fields and the warehouses and the factories. Instead of heavily compensating allotment holders, many of whom are wealthy politicians and corporate leaders, a substantial part of the settlement resources of the should go to the people who harvested, graded, stacked and hauled the product for a few dollars an hour while the allotment holders sat back and collected their profits. State kills again The State of North Carolina killed another human being in our name this year, 50-year old John Thomas Noland, who was convicted of killing his father-in-law and sister-in-laws in 1982. The grisly executions and their macabre ceremony are becoming frighteningly almost routine in North Carolina. Death penalty opponents protest, ask Gov. Hunt for clemency which he always denies, the media show up looking to shine a light in the face of the inmates family to inquire how they feel, the Department of Correction puts out its media packet with the appalling history of executions in North Carolina, briefs reports on the inmate's last meal and last statement, witnesses parade into the prison, then emerge at 2:30 a.m. to describe in gruesome detail how the human being the state just killed looked when the executioner released his poison into the inmates veins. The protesters, decreasing in number somewhat, grow hauntingly silent as the execution hour approaches. Their candles in the Central Prison shadows are the only dissent from this inhuman ritual that separates our country from the rest of the Western World. It is almost beyond belief that our state continues to premeditatedly kill people for us and only a small of people protest. As the last political campaign demonstrates, it is what our elected officials believe we want. The offensive ritual will continue until more candles and more voices and more protests show them it's not what we want, that it is time the killing ends. The CSLU is a weekly report of NC politics available by e-mail. For more info call the Common Sense Foundation at (919) 821-9270 or email CSLU@common-sense.org. |
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