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SW: fixing minor bits
==Biography==
Peter L. Berger is an academic social philosopher and sociologist who served as a consultant to the tobacco industry starting with the industry's original 1979 Social Costs/Social Values (SC/SV) Project.[http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/yvp87e00] According to a 1980 [[International Committee on Smoking Issues]]/[[Social Acceptability Working Party]] ([[ICOSI]]/[[SAWP]]) progress report, Berger’s primary assignment was "to demonstrate clearly that anti-smoking activists have a special agenda which serves their own purposes, but not necessarily the majority of nonsmokers."[http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/uhe29d00]
Berger assisted the industry by developing non-health based arguments in defense of tobacco. He specifically developed the argument that the anti-smoking movement is a class struggle of the richer, more educated groups against the poorer and less-educated groups, that public health advocates are elitists who are driven by quasi-religious, messianic urges and seek to punish non-believers (smokers) through the application of taxes and fines.[http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/fgz39d00]
===Ideology and Activities===
Berger reminds you of the immortal line in ''Casablanca'' where the crooked cop orders his subordinates to "Line up the usual suspects."
In Bergers life, his associates are the usual suspects, and like Berger since 1982, they have received grants paid through the lawyers [[Special Account #4]] which was designed to hide any payments and block court-room disclosure. [http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/yev99d00/pdf]
* [[American Enterprise Institute]] (AEI) [http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/fuo83c00/pdf]
He also appeared in a "denial" film for Philip Morris [http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/mnw39e00/pdf] and reported back to the company Philip Morris on the (WHO's) Winnipeg 5th World Conference on Smoking and Health and he says: <blockquote><i>" I understood my assigment to be an overall assessment of the conference, with special emphasis on institutional dynamics [ie. how well the anti-s wee smokers were organised] and ideological themes, using my report on the Stockholm conference (1979) as a "base line."</i></blockquote>He then reveals that "the conference was exhaustively monitored by industry observers..." indicating that he was personally acquainted with most of the 50 or so tobacco staff who infiltrated the main meetsing snd meetings and the various work-group sessions.
His article on smoking regulation [http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/mwr84f00/pdf] reveals a strong conservative ideology, and he says that <blockquote><i>"the Clinton health plan represen represents the most ambitious power grab yet in the short history of this rising class </i> [which he defines as the "knowledge elite].</i></blockquote>
He sees it as his task to psychoanalyse the anti-tobacco forces and impute motives to the various organisational forces: WHO, government regulators and anti-smoking groups are lumbered together as "bureaucratic interests" (implying that they do it for money or merely as part of the government workforce), and he also sees the <u>"ideological linkage in the case of women is with feminism"</u> which was the standard American Red-neck mantra at that time.
