While we are watching other events: Phillip Morris files suit in Uruguay for unfair cigarette law

[Are_grits_groceries]

Philip Morris International believes Uruguay is Marlboro Country. On February 19, the tobacco giant filed a lawsuit against that country, charging that new health measures involving cigarette packaging amount to unfair treatment of the company.

Uruguay’s new legislation, submitted in June 2009 and expected to go into effect in March 2010, requires that 80 percent of each side of cigarette boxes be covered by graphic images of the possible detrimental health effects of smoking. The company argues that the law limits the space for branding and thus infringes on its intellectual property rights.
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This case echoes many others currently underway in developing regions, where powerful corporations from the developed north seek to take advantage of “investor protections,” under trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties, to ensure profits at any cost. Such claims are decided by international arbitration tribunals that cannot force a country to repeal its laws but can award massive compensation to the foreign investor.

Philip Morris’s lawsuit is a logical step in the tobacco industry’s aggressive push toward new markets, at a time when traditional markets in the developed world are drying up. The World Health Organization reported that “smoking is on the rise in the developing world but falling in developed nations. Among Americans, smoking rates shrunk by nearly half in three decades (from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s), falling to 23 percent of adults by 1997. In the developing world, tobacco consumption is rising by 3.4 percent per year.”
There's more:http://www.truthout.org/philip-morris-vs-uruguay57389

The bastids don't change. They just scuttle around to other places trying to damage the whole world for money.