Kraft

=altria political donations done under kraft?  see abby blunt =<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-corporate-profiteers-use-the-ideology-of-greed-to-win-big-while-killing-our-jobs-and-livelihoods/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-corporate-profiteers-use-the-ideology-of-greed-to-win-big-while-killing-our-jobs-and-livelihoods/</a>no lnx
How corporate profiteers use the ideology of greed to win big — while killing our jobs and livelihoodsMike MozartWritten by Jim Hightower October 9, 2019Here’s a recipe for you: Chop up 6 Oscar Meyer wieners, stir in 1 cup of Heinz ketchup, blend with 1/2 cup each of Cool Whip and Maxwell House Coffee, sprinkle a 1/2 cup of Planters peanuts over the mixture, add 3 spoonfuls of A.1. Steak Sauce and then top it off with a jar of Cheez Whiz and blast it in the microwave.
Sound like a gloppy mess? It would be if anyone could stomach the idea of making it, but an even messier version of the glop was cooked up in 2015 by corporate profiteers. That’s when Kraft Foods Group was merged with H. J. Heinz, thus conglomerating more than 200 brand-name food products — including all of the above — into one $28 billion-a-year behemoth. The combination was hailed at the time as a whiz-bang deal, a product of sheer corporate and financial genius that would generate extraordinary efficiencies, growth and profits, proving that bigger is always better.
Um … apparently not. Four years later, Kraft Heinz’s sales have slumped, profits are tumbling, its stock price has plummeted by half in the last year, investors are bailing out, its products are losing market share, shareholders are suing, regulators are investigating, employees are increasingly dispirited, and … well, as some business journalists have put it, the megamerger is a megamess.
This is not the work of inexperienced, incompetent corporate managers inside Kraft or Heinz but of a couple of highly touted Wall Street “geniuses” who’ve amassed personal fortunes in the global corporate merger game. The Kraft Heinz consolidation was engineered from outside by a Brazilian corporate takeover outfit named 3G, in cahoots with U.S. buyout buccaneer Warren Buffett. They are ideological disciples of the old orthodoxy that the sole responsibility of corporate executives is to jack up the stock price and profits for big shareholders — in this case, themselves. Their self-serving approach to increasing Kraft Heinz’s profits was to squeeze “costs,” meaning squeezing out experienced managers, workers, product development and the vibrancy of the corporation itself — which has steadily squeezed out their own profits.
This old model of self-enrichment through corporate takeover, consolidation and contraction turns out to be not just bad morals but bad business. It’s time for us, the media and public officials to start saying “NO!” to merger mania.Last spring, a lawn care company advertised a special deal: “$50 OFF.” Off of what? In small print, the ad explained: “Off of free services.”
I think of that twisted advertising hustle when I see yet another corporate megamerger being announced with great hoopla.
The grinning CEOs of the merging giants promise everything, but — as we’ve learned from promises made by merging airlines, banks, drugmakers, etc. — they’ll most likely deliver less than nothing. Four years after the Kraft Heinz colossus merged, it has become a shamble, far less than either had been separately. What happened? Greed and Wall Street’s cost-cutting BS took over the executive suite.
3G had been the primary driver of the Kraft Heinz merger, and its top honchos quickly replaced the previous managerial teams with their own financial hotshots, who imposed a rigid bit of business school humbuggery called “zero-based budgeting.” It amounted to the practice of corporate thuggery — cut employees, slash expenses, divert revenues to the new owners, buy up other corporations … and repeat the plunder.
Suddenly, instead of focusing on improving products and customer satisfaction, Kraft Heinz employees were riveted on the minutia of cost-cutting. (The regime’s miserliness was exemplified by its removal of company-made nut and cheese snacks that had been offered for free at employee meetings). Research and new-product development budgets were whacked, seven processing plants were closed, thousands of workers were offed, and employee morale plummeted.
Also, 3G’s money manipulators had no clue about sweeping changes that were remaking the packaged food industry, especially the rise of smaller, more innovative companies that were delivering the healthier, less processed, better-tasting products consumers wanted. So Kraft Heinz’s “iconic” brands soon became perceived as simply old, losing consumer appeal, market share and profits. Adding insult to injury, last month, 3G started bailing out of its disastrous corporate creation, selling 25 million of its shares at a loss.
In June, 3G installed a new CEO, promising to right the ship, but he seems to be offering more of the same old corporate BS. “To truly change the direction of a business like ours,” he recently babbled, “we need to understand the future.”
Hey, chief. First, look to your past and try to learn that you don’t build by mindlessly destroying.
Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM==

<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> Kraft was implicated in a scandal where there was genetically engineered corn that was not approved that made it into Taco Bell related product. So, Friends of the Earth and Center for Food Safety pointed this out . Kraft got very alarmed about the whole thing, and so they sent — apparently, they contracted with a really very intrusive private investigative firm called <span class="caps" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">BBI<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> — the same one that did the espionage against Greenpeace — to do physical intrusion and to do dumpster diving, including dumpster diving where they would actually have an active duty police officer to get into the private areas of — to the private property of these nonprofits and obtain their memos and their garbage so that they could figure out what it is that these<span class="caps" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">GMO<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> — <span class="caps" style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">GMO<span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 19.5938px; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); float: none; display: inline !important;"> activists were working on. So, that’s Kraft. spooky biz

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There's a reason that Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is bright orange when it's ready to eat. Kraft uses chemical colorings that serve no purpose for flavoring or nutrition. Those chemicals -- known as Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 -- have been linked by experts to serious health issues like asthma, skin rashes, migraines, and hyperactivity in children.

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was owned by PM?

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drops alec membership (confrim? said they would not?

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labor:  In July 2010, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill to give farmworkers overtime pay after eight hours a day or 40 hours a week (New York passed such a bill in 2009). This February, after lobbying from Kraft Foods, the American Meat Institute and others, the USDA withdrew a proposed rule requiring companies doing business with the agency to prove that their subcontractors--including growers--are complying with labor laws.

<a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/154775/why_are_people_dying_to_bring_you_dinner_the_shocking_facts_about_our_food_system">http://www.alternet.org/story/154775/why_are_people_dying_to_bring_you_dinner_the_shocking_facts_about_our_food_system</a>

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owns taco bell, gmo corn problem?

In 2000, the firm—which had changed its name to S2i after Richard Beckett left the company—was targeting a group of activist organizations opposed to genetically engineered food that had formed a coalition called GE Food Alert. In the fall of 2000, with these groups poised to assail Taco Bell, S2i operatives got on the case.

Their thoughts soon turned to garbage.

On September 26, Jay Bly, a former Secret Service agent working for S2i, sent an <a href="http://motherjones.com/files/legacy/news/feature/2008/04/Glow-In-Dark-Tacos-Emails.pdf">email</a> [6] to Tim Ward, the former Maryland state trooper on the payroll:

<blockquote>Received a call from Ketchum yesterday afternoon re three sites in DC. It seems Taco Bell turned out some product made from bioengineered corn. The chemicals used on the corn have not been approved for human consumption. Hence Taco Bell produced potential glow-in-the-dark tacos. Taco Bell is owned by Kraft. The Ketchum Office, New York, has the ball. They suspect the initiative is being generated from one of three places:</blockquote>

<blockquote>1.Center for Food Safety, 7th & Penn SE</blockquote>

<blockquote>2.Friends of the Earth, 1025 Vermont Ave (Between K & L Streets)</blockquote>

<blockquote>3.GE Food Alert, 1200 18th St NW (18th & M)</blockquote>

<blockquote>#1 is located on 3rd floor. Main entrance is key card. Alley is locked by iron gates. 7 dempsters [sic] in alley—take your pick.</blockquote>

<blockquote>#2 is in the same building as Chile Embassy. Armed guard in lobby & cameras everywhere. There is a dumpster in the alley behind the building. Don't know if it is tied to bldg. or a neighborhood property. Cameras everywhere.</blockquote>

#3 is doable but behind locked iron gates at rear of bldg.

</blockquote>

In this email, Bly explained the urgency and the goal: "Apparently there is an article or press release due out next week and [Ketchum] would like some pre release information." He then turned practical: "I want to send Sarah [another BBI employee] to site #1 for a job inquiry. She can see how big the offices are and get the lay of the land. Maybe this will narrow the field. If they have a job opening could she work there for two or three days to find out what's going on?" The Friends of the Earth site, he noted, would be tougher to penetrate. As for the garbage of GE Food Alert, Bly had a plan: "if we can get some help from our friends who ride the truck. The alley is tight. I think the truck can drive down the alley but the container probably is rolled out and dumped. Looks like one dumpster for the building. I'm sitting on the building at 4:00 am tomorrow morning (if Ketchum gives us a budget)." And Bly noted that there were other possible opportunities: "we have found some other affiliates with the above groups. We are looking for their locations in [Washington, D.C.] and hopefully a more S2i friendly site."

The following day, Bly emailed Ward about his early morning surveillance:

<blockquote>Re: Dumpster Dive.</blockquote>

I got hold of Jim Daron [a Washington police officer working for BBI] yesterday. He was supposed to do Vermont Ave and Penn Ave SE last night. I have not heard from him today—what's new. I did 18th St. Weard [sic] set up—the dumpster is behind locked gates. The truck drives down the alley and rings for the night guard to open the gate. The guard comes out, unlocks and goes back into the building (probably pissed off because they woke him up), the guys walk the bags out to the truck one at a time. When they finish they locked the gate behind them. There was so much trash they had to compact the truck two times while they were there. I did not find anything from the 5th floor, but the good news is it's doable.

</blockquote>

On September 28,Ward responded:

<blockquote>Good news! Think that once Jim [Daron] calls you back we will know where we stand. If he can't get in with the shield, it will be difficult at sight #1. I think #2 we can do regardless. The issue is a hot one in general. I've been following it from here. Don't forget our GP [Greenpeace] boy in Baltimore has been handling the work for GP. It may be worth a check in the city. Maybe one of our BPD [Baltimore Police Department] guys can hit that one. When you talk with the client push the fact that their client (the cheese people)…should put together a trend tracking program for the future. The anti's now have found an exposed corporate target and they will be back for more blood.</blockquote>

This email appears to suggests that the Beckett Brown operatives were considering using a Washington police officer's badge to gain access to the garbage of the Center for Food Safety. And Ward was apparently hoping that Beckett Brown could persuade Ketchum to hire the company to monitor the ongoing activity of the activists opposed to genetically-engineered food.

These emails do not indicate whether Beckett Brown succeeded in scooping valuable intelligence from the garbage at these three sites. But Beckett Brown had already managed to penetrate the anti-GE food network. In a 1999 report to Ketchum—entitled "Intelligence Analysis for Dow Global Trends Tracking Team" —BBI described in detail a strategy session held by 35 representatives of various environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, US PIRG, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. The report noted the targets the coalition was considering (Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, the Grocery Manufacturers of America) and listed various tactics the group had discussed. Such strategy meetings of this coalition were confidential, according to Dale Wiehoff of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy