CAIN THE LOBBYIST
PROMOTES DRINKING AND SMOKING..
As Top Restaurant Industry
Lobbyist, Herman Cain Partnered With Big Tobacco To Promote Indoor Smoking...
As a
lobbyist for the NRA, Cain represented a trade association for McDonalds,
Burger King, and other fast food establishments. But a little known history,
uncovered by ThinkProgress using the University of California, San Francisco
archives, shows that Cain also lobbied on behalf of tobacco industry giants
like R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris
Herman
Cain might be known best as the former CEO of Godfathers Pizza, but he served
an equally substantial role as a lobbyist for the restaurant and fast food
industry. As reporter Mike Elk notes at In These Times magazine, Cain, as
head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA) in the ’90s, led an
aggressive campaign to stop a hike in the minimum wage; and was successful in
exempting servers from being included in the 1996 minimum wage law. Although
Cain avoids explicitly calling attention to his role as a lobbyist on the
campaign trail, he does cite his work as a restaurant association
representative in fighting against President Clinton’s health reform plan as
his most formative political experience.
Herman
Cain the guy that keeps decrying I'm an outsider, I'm a problem solver I look
for the problem then find the solution..True as a problem solver he did
everything he could to insure the Food and Beverage Industry could still sell a
drunk another drink and get on the road and drive..
Far from being an outsider Cain was the National
Restaurants leading lobbyist against
stopping stricter drunk driving laws that could have harmed the food industry.
On the
pages of the Omaha World-Herald in 1998, where Godfather’s Pizza is
headquartered, to state his case with the paper’s editorial board against
efforts to impose a federal law. In gallops the restaurant industry, whose
members with liquor licenses faced a loss of business as a result of the
changes. The Leader and problem solver Cain, lobbied for all he was worth
against .08 changes at the state and federal level, claiming that research showed little improvement in states
that had made the switch already.
When Cain took over as CEO of the NRA in 1996, anti-drunk driving groups were leading a campaign to lower the blood alcohol limit for a DUI to .08 across the country: the equivalent for a 170 pound-man of about five beers in two hours. The majority of states used a .10 limit as their standard, which advocates argued was an insufficiently tough deterrent and left plenty of still-dangerous drivers on the road.“The problem is not the responsible drinker,” Cain wrote in one letter to the editor.”It is the alcohol - abuser who gets behind the wheel of a car. In fact, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, two-thirds of all alcohol-related fatalities are caused by drivers with a BAC of 0.15 or higher.”MADD Vice President Diane Riibe responded with her own op-ed.“Mr. Cain suggests going after the ‘alcohol abuser’ rather than the ‘responsible drinker,’” she wrote. “In 1996, 17,126 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes. More than 3,700 people were killed in crashes in which the drivers’ blood-alcohol levels were under 0.10 percent - Nebraska’s limit. Does Mr. Cain think that ‘responsible drinkers’ killed those 3,700 people?”This prompted an angry response from Cain, who took offense at Riibe for impugning his industry’s motives. “It’s a shame that an organization that has done so much to save lives resorts to personal attacks and accuses the other side of using fudged numbers and having ill intentions,” he wrote. “MADD should channel its energy toward alcohol abusers, not people who respectfully and politely disagree with MADD.”It was good enough for Congress at least, which sent a federal .08 law to, President Clinton for his signature with strong bipartisan support in 2000. It’s now the limit in all 50 states. The NRA claimed vindication the next year when a report by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office determined that several studies cited to demonstrate the effectiveness of .08 laws relied on flawed methodology. But the report didn’t exactly shoot down the .08 idea either, concluding that it “can be an important component of a state’s overall highway-safety program, but a 0.08 BAC law alone is not a ‘silver bullet.’”Riibe, who is still an anti-drunk driving activist today with Project Extra Mile, told TPM that he law would have passed much sooner without the restaurant industry’s interference. “The industry fought hard and consistently to make sure it never happened,” Riibe said over the phone. “It took a number of years to get it because of the opposition.”
So far, Cain hasn't responded to request
on his position as he tours the country promoting his book and espousing his
9-9-9-plan along with his latest Americans need to learn how to joke.
Omaha World-Herald
