Tag: corporations

Cereal InfoWars: Corporate ‘Nutritionists’ Launder Industry Propaganda Through ‘News’ Media

(*The use of “nutritionists” and “news” here is intended in the loosest sense possible.)

The EBT serfs haven’t been purchasing their techno-slop chock full of food dyes and preservative chemicals banned in every other advanced nation on Earth with government cash in sufficient quantities of late, which has no doubt worked Kellogg’s™ and General Mills™ management up into a tizzy.

Related: ‘Critical Disability Studies’ Professor: Fatphobia ‘Undergirds’ Ozempic Craze

Via The Takeout (emphasis added):

“Sales of breakfast cereal have been falling for quite some time. Although the category actually experienced an uptick in popularity during the pandemic, it was a spike that didn’t last: As the world shifts away from the pandemic-induced lifestyle of never leaving the house, people are opting for more on-the-go breakfast foods such as granola bars, protein shakes, or even fast food breakfast sandwiches. This might be why you’re seeing Kellogg’s just-add-water cereal popping up at convenience stores, positioning itself as a similarly portable option…

“In recent weeks, executives from Kellogg and Post both separately said that they expect the cereal industry to return to its prepandemic trend of gradual decline, with sales ranging from flat to down by a low single-digit percentage a year,” WSJ reports.”

Their solution — if the deluge of listicle articles into my news feed daily citing “registered dietitians” is any indication — is to repackage industry propaganda as “news” and distribute it to people like the retarded feminist women who read HuffPost who will literally believe anything so long as a bona fide Expert™ lends their seal of approval.

From “Nutritionists Pick The Best (And Worst) Breakfast Cereals For Your Health,” via HuffPost (emphasis added):

“According to RD Kelly Toups LeBlanc, the VP of Nutrition Programming at Oldways, not all ultra-processed foods are created equal. “Some ultra-processed foods, like whole grain breakfast cereals, contain important food groups recommended in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Other ultra-processed foods, like candy bars and soft drinks, do not.”

She takes issue with the way the NOVA [food classification] list categorizes foods, especially whole-grain cereals…

The truth is that whole grain cereals can be an important part of nutrition assistance programs, providing valuable nutrition to vulnerable populations. “In a 2023 study from the USDA, government scientists designed a nutritious seven-day, 2,000-calorie diet in which 91% of calories came from ultra-processed foods,” LeBlanc said.”

HuffPost’s Top 10 healthiest cereals for “vulnerable populations” list includes Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch —bottom-of-the-barrel garbage that no sane person would make a breakfast staple unless they had a masochistic wish for cancer and a slow, painful death.

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California Democrat Proposes Legislation to Sue Oil Companies Over Wildfires That Had NOTHING to Do With Them

Scott Weiner, a Democratic State Senator in California, is introducing legislation that would allow people to sue oil companies over the wildfires that have ravaged the state in recent weeks.

This is typical Democrat political sleight of hand.

Oil companies had NOTHING to do with the destructive nature of these fires. If people want to sue someone, they should sue the Democrats who run the state and completely dropped the ball on being ready for these entirely predictable fires.

It’s amazing that this is even real.

From CBS News:

A newly proposed California state law would create a new pathway for victims of wildfires and insurance companies to sue oil companies over climate change.

Democratic State Senator Scott Weiner introduced the bill directly linking the wildfires to climate change caused by oil companies, as part of the statewide response to the Los Angeles-area wildfires.

“Absolutely catastrophic wildfires happening in the middle of winter,” Weiner said. “For insurance companies, they’re going to have to, if this bill passes, they’re going to have to take a very hard look at seeking compensation from the oil companies.”

Republican State Senator Roger Niello is opposed to the bill.

“It will be an invitation for lawsuits,” Niello said. “This furthers the narrative, the false narrative that this is all about climate change. It is of course much more complicated than that.”

This is Weiner. He is trying to place all of the blame for this on climate change and oil companies.

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Automation in Retail Is Even Worse Than You Thought

Brianna Bagley’s favorite hobby is playing Horizon Zero Dawn, a role-playing game featuring a young hunter who battles murderous robotic organisms on a postapocalyptic planet overrun by machines. When she isn’t leveling up in the game, Bagley is hard at work in the produce department of a chain supermarket in Salt Lake City, Utah. Seven years in the grocery industry has given her plenty of experience with the real-world technology that is automating stores.

During the pandemic, Bagley earned about $15 per hour in a supermarket e-commerce department dedicated to filling online orders and preparing them for delivery. The department was unable to fill the flood of orders that came in each day. Managers pulled employees from other parts of the store to double the department’s staff—but only about half were actually employed in the e-commerce department. The rest were cashiers, baggers, and others conscripted into emergency service. Bagley was grateful for the help, but recognized that it came at others’ expense. “It was harder for those departments to provide customer service with fewer employees,” the 26-year-old said.

Bagley’s experience is of a piece with the broader trend in retail toward automation and other technological shortcuts. From self-checkout machines to payment by app, technology is rapidly changing the way we buy groceries. Progressive members of Congress are sounding the alarm: Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and 13 colleagues wrote to the CEO of the supermarket behemoth Kroger in November about electronic price tags (often called electronic shelf labels or ESLs). These digital displays allow companies to change prices automatically from a mobile app. Tlaib warned that this so-called “dynamic pricing” permits retailers to adjust prices based on their whims. Just as Uber raises prices during storms or rush hour, retailers like Kroger use ESLs to adjust prices based on factors like time of day or the weather. Supermarkets could conceivably mine a shopper’s personal data to set prices as high as possible. “My concern is that these tools will be abused in the pursuit of profit, surging prices on essential goods in areas with fewer and fewer grocery stores,” Tlaib wrote.

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Go Figure: Walgreens CEO Admits Locking Up Merchandise Makes It Hard To Sell

What genius retail executive mind could have figured this one out – that locking up merchandise in stores actually makes its more difficult for honest, paying customers to get to, and buy what they want?

Walgreens – facing a significant drop in year-over-year earnings – just announced plans to close 450 more stores nationwide, according to Futurism/The Byte. These closures exhibit the broader challenges faced by Walgreens.

Efforts to curb “shrink” — losses from theft or fraud — included increased security measures, such as locking merchandise in containers requiring staff assistance at Walgreens.

However, these measures proved ineffective and counterproductive, frustrating customers.

CEO Tim Wentworth said on the company’s earning’s call: “It is a hand-to-hand combat battle still, unfortunately.”

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Why Aren’t Hospitals Incentivized To Save Lives?

•Throughout COVID-19, abysmal hospital care and the suppression of effective off-patent therapies killed approximately a million Americans. Much of this originated from Obamacare pressuring hospitals to aggressively treat patients so they could quickly leave the hospital and reduce healthcare costs.

•More frail patients respond poorly to aggressive protocols, resulting in them frequently being pushed into palliative care or hospice. Sadly doctors are no longer trained to gradually bring their patients back to health, and hence view many of those deaths as inevitable.

•In this article, we will review some of the forgotten medical therapies that dramatically improve hospital outcomes and highlight some of the key strategies patients and lawmakers can use to reduce hospital deaths.

During COVID-19, we witnessed something previously unimaginable. A national emergency hospitalized thousands of Americans, where they were cut off from their loved ones and inevitably died. It soon became clear that the hospital protocols did not work, but regardless of how futile conventional care was, patients in our hospitals could not get the alternative therapies they needed.

This led to a sobering realization throughout America—what many of us believed about our hospitals was utterly incorrect. Rather than help patients, hospitals effectively functioned like assembly lines that ran disastrous protocols (e.g., remdesivir), denied patients access to their loved ones and refused to use alternative therapies even when it was known the patients were otherwise expected to die.

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AT&T kills home Internet service in NY over law requiring $15 or $20 plans

AT&T has stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York instead of complying with a new state law that requires ISPs to offer $15 or $20 plans to people with low incomes.

The decision was reported yesterday by CNET and confirmed by AT&T in a statement provided to Ars today. “While we are committed to providing reliable and affordable Internet service to customers across the country, New York’s broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state,” AT&T said. “As a result, effective January 15, 2025, we will no longer be able to offer AT&T Internet Air, our fixed-wireless Internet service, to New York customers.”

New York started enforcing its Affordable Broadband Act yesterday after a legal battle of nearly four years. Broadband lobby groups convinced a federal judge to block the law in 2021, but a US appeals court reversed the ruling in April 2024, and the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case last month.

The law requires ISPs with over 20,000 customers in New York to offer $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds. The plans only have to be offered to households that meet income eligibility requirements, such as qualifying for the National School Lunch Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Medicaid.

AT&T’s Internet Air was launched in some areas in 2023 and is now available in nearly every US state. The standard price for Internet Air is $60 a month plus taxes and fees, or $47 when bundled with an eligible mobile service. Nationwide, AT&T said it added 135,000 Internet Air customers in the most recent quarter.

AT&T has pitched Internet Air as a long-term replacement for DSL Internet in areas where it doesn’t plan to build fiber. AT&T has said it won’t build fiber home Internet in over half of its wireline footprint and will focus its fiber builds on more densely populated areas.

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The Glaring Hypocrisy and Embedded Deceptions of the Global Food Giants

Bryce Martinez (18) from Pennsylvania is mounting a legal challenge against major food companies, alleging that their ultra-processed foods (UPFs) led to his development of Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease at the age of 16.

The 11 firms listed in the lawsuit are Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Coca-Cola, Post Holdings, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle’s (US), WK Kellogg, Mars, Kellanova and Conagra.

UPFs have undergone multiple processing steps and often contain additives, preservatives and artificial ingredients. These UPFs have become staples in many households. Examples of UPFs are prepackaged soups, many breakfast cereals, sauces, frozen pizza, ready-to-eat meals, hot dogs, sausages, sodas, ice cream and store-bought cookies, cakes, candies and doughnuts.

Martinez’s legal team contends that the big food corporations have deliberately engineered their products to trigger addictive responses. His lawyers at Morgan & Morgan, a major US law firm, says the case is unprecedented and includes claims for conspiracy, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation and unfair business practices.

Martinez had regularly consumed popular UPFs throughout his childhood. The lawsuit challenges the food industry’s argument that consumers have free choice in their dietary decisions. It argues that the notion of free choice is compromised by aggressive marketing tactics, especially aimed at children, and the addictive nature of these products.

UPFs are highly profitable for corporations. The same companies that dominate the UPF market are intertwined with investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard, which also hold stakes in the pharmaceutical industry. This dual investment creates a cycle where investment firms profit from both the sale of harmful foods and the treatment of diseases associated with these products.

Furthermore, the prevailing economic system creates a paradoxical situation where workers, whose pension funds are often managed by these same investment giants, find themselves financially tethered to a cycle that undermines their own health and well-being.

There is a famous quote often attributed to farmer, poet and campaigner Wendell Berry:

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.”

For a long time, that has served both industry’s interests very well.

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Corporate America Goes From Disowning Trump to Lavishing Him With Cash: Here’s What They Want

Donald Trump’s inauguration fund is set to top the $107 million it raised in 2017 – which was nearly double the $61 million raised by Joe Biden in 2021. Corporate America is lavishing the president-elect with cash, hoping he’ll support their interests, and let bygones be bygones regarding statements and actions against him over the past four years.

Major companies that walked lockstep with the establishment in denouncing Donald Trump after the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 chaos at the Capitol have pulled a major about-face amid his comeback, giving generously to his inauguration fund and hoping he’ll forget their statements about the “threat to democracy” he and his supporters purportedly posed just four years ago.

Who are the biggest corporate flip-floppers, and what do they want from Trump? Here’s a breakdown:

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: Big Pharma trade group donating $1 million (which means access to exclusive VIP events, including black tie ball and personal “candlelight dinner” with the Trumps). In 2021, PhRMA CEO Steve Ubl said the events of January 6 “violate the values of our nation” and canceled donations to Republicans rejecting the 2020 vote’s outcome.

Ford and Toyota: Ford briefly froze political donations after January 6, and promised to vet politicians supporting Trump. Now they’re giving him $1 million. Toyota, also pledging $1 million, similarly halted donations to those refusing to certify Biden’s 2020 victory.

Stanley Black & Decker: Giving Trump $1 million this time around, up from a paltry $25,000 in 2017.

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Which US Companies Receive The Most Government Subsidies?

This chart, via Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao, ranks the companies which have received the most American taxpayer support (in the form of government subsidies) since the year 2000.

Government subsidies take a variety of forms: tax credits, abatements, training reimbursements and direct grants.

Ranked: Companies Receiving the Most Government Subsidies

Over the last quarter of a century Boeing has received nearly $16 billion in government subsidies, putting it at the top of this list.

RankCompanyIndustrySubsidy Value (2000–2024)
1BoeingIndustrial$15.5B
2IntelTech & Media$8.4B
3Ford MotorAutomotive$7.7B
4General MotorsAutomotive$7.5B
5Micron TechnologyTech & Media$6.8B
6AmazonTech & Media$5.9B
7AlcoaIndustrial$5.7B
8Cheniere EnergyEnergy$5.6B
9Foxconn Technology GroupTech & Media$4.8B
10Venture Global LNGEnergy$4.3B
11Texas InstrumentsTech & Media$4.3B
12VolkswagenAutomotive$4.1B
13Sempra EnergyEnergy$3.8B
14NRG EnergyEnergy$3.4B
15NextEra EnergyEnergy$3.4B
16SasolEnergy$2.8B
17TeslaAutomotive$2.8B
18StellantisAutomotive$2.8B
19Walt DisneyTech & Media$2.6B
20NucorIndustrial$2.6B

Most of the subsidies have come from Washington State, which has nine preferential tax rates that benefit the aerospace industry.

Boeing has an assembly plant in the city of Everett—reportedly the largest manufacturing facility in the world—where it makes the 747, 767, 777, and the 787 airplanes.

There’s more to this Boeing story—but we cover that in the next section.

Ranked second, Intel’s received more than $8 billion from the government since 2000.

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Workers Can’t Sue Employers Who Violate New Jersey’s Marijuana Anti-Discrimination Law, Federal Court Says, Siding With Walmart

A federal appeals court panel sided with Walmart this week, ruling that although New Jersey explicitly forbids employment discrimination against marijuana users, private individuals are unable to sue employers under that law because it failed to create any specific remedies.

“The lack of an express remedy is better understood as a deliberate choice not to provide a remedy rather than an oversight of an intended remedy,” Judge Peter Phipps, a Trump appointee, wrote in the new opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

That interpretation, Phipps continued, “is reinforced by the New Jersey Legislature’s comparative responsiveness in enacting safeguards against other forms of employment discrimination.”

The case stems from a 2022 lawsuit filed by Erick Zanetich, whom Walmart denied a job as a security guard after he tested positive for marijuana. Zanetich asserted that the drug screening policy was unlawful under New Jersey’s anti-discrimination law, which is included in the Cannabis Regulatory Enforcement Assistance and Marketplace Modernization Act (CREAMMA).

CREAMMA was passed by New Jersey lawmakers after citizens voted in 2020 to amend the state constitution to legalize marijuana.

At the district court level, Judge Christine O’Hearn, a Biden appointee, had dismissed Zanetich’s case, ruling that only a state cannabis board can enforce the law and that private individuals don’t have a right of action to sue. Zanetich appealed.

The appeals panel’s 2–1 ruling, handed down on Monday, also denied Zanetich’s request to ask the New Jersey Supreme Court to decide the issue.

Phipps wrote that sending the matter to the state’s high court “is an act of judicial discretion…and here none of the common considerations associated with the exercise of that discretion counsels strongly in favor of the certification.”

As for the importance of the case, he said the issues neither “involve questions of state constitutional law, nor are they particularly transcendental.”

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