If you haven't been boycotting Nestlé already...

Were you ever forced to eat puffed rice?  It comes in a long plastic bag and tastes like soggy styrofoam.  Yuck! 

Wow, irony sensors malfunctioning. Return to manufacturer for immediate refund.

Nice cop out.

I'm honestly curious: is there some connection between breakfast cereal and cluster bombs, as you clearly allege in the OP, that I, in my ignorence, just can't see?  If there is, please explain it to me.  I would greatly appreciate to learn what this connection is.

You're not a liar, and you're not trying to make this up out of whole cloth, so surely you have something to support your claim that "they got the idea of the shape from cluster bombs", or you obviously wouldn't have made it in the first place.

Cueball wrote:

The connection is that Israel wantonly used cluster bombs during its invasion of Lebanon. It is a snide joke.

I know about Israel's use of cluster bombs, but what is the connection between the cereal and the cluster bombs - or, more specifically, the evidence that the cereal is based on, or inspired by, cluster bombs?  I highly doubt that everything manufactured in Israel is somehow based on, or inspired by, cluster bombs - so why is this breakfast cereal singled out?

Isreal also used white phosphorus - did they get the idea for the cereal from that too?

Good Good whole white phosphorus shreddies.

What a waste of time.

A_J wrote:

Cueball wrote:

Now they are making candy that look like small bombs.

So if I see something that is cylindrical (because that's the only description we have of the cereal in question), I can safely make the assumption that it was intended to mimic a small bomb?

 

 

Or does this only apply to something that is cylindrical and made in Israel?

muthafucc israel happy?

Cueball wrote:

. . . one might make such an inference, metaphorically speaking.

Ah, metaphorically.

I was confused because the OP's statement:

al-Qa'bong wrote:

They got the idea of the shape from cluster bombs.

Is pretty literal, and makes it sound like "they" sat down, brainstormed for a bit and decided that their product would intentionally mimic cluster bombs.

I thought there was a real story there about racist, jingoist, cereal designers and marketers, but in reality it's merely a coincidence that they're both cylindrical and any relationship between the cereal and cluster bombs is merely metaphorical and/or imagined.

You really nailed it there.

However the subtle subtext here is that the crap will be made in Sderot, a town which appears in the media very often because it is very close to Gaza zone, and as a consequence is one of the primary targets of the toy rocket barrage launched at Israel. Nestle's choice of location is interesting, both because it makes one wonder at how serious the threat of the Hamas rocket attacks are overplayed in the media, since it would be suprising for a company of Nestle's stature to risk real assets in a war zone. Evidently, Nestle does not evaluate the threat as very high.

That said, there has also been a serious effort to bolster the willingness of residents of Sderot, (prior to 1948 an Arab farming village called Najd), to stay, despite the rockets, and also apparently some efforts to increase settlement by many international agencies, and good samaritans eager to show their support for the beleaguered community. The "humanitarian" nature of the decision to invest in Sderot is hard to overlook.

The more cynical among us might consider the possibility, even, that the interest in making Sderot a particularly desireable place to live in indicates a distinct willingness to lure people to Sderot and make them targets for the occassional lethal rocket attack that does so much for bolstering the Israeli case for never ending war, since it would really make sense to discourage people from living there, if indeed the threat is as great as people like to make it out.

But Nestle thinks otherwise apparently. They think it is desireable to put your manufacturing plant in a target zone, and one really has to ask why, if there is such a great threat there? So much to say, Nestle's decision has serious political overtones, which fit hand and glove with the agenda of those who were more than happy to unleash thousands upon thousands of lethal Snausage-like cluser bomblets upon the children of Lebanon.

Damn. Puffed rice. My mother used to feed me that bland tasteless crap. Blah! Never again. I always liked shreddies.

Brought to you by a Liberal government in your country.

Nestle Pays $2.25 to Bottle and Sell a Million Litres of BC Water

I repeat: Nestle pays $2.25 to bottle and sell a million litres of BC water.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-Bottle-Water/

Nestlé cannot claim bottled water is 'essential public service', court rules

Michigan’s second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestlé’s Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company’s commercial water-bottling operation is “not an essential public service” or a public water supply.

The court of appeals ruling is a victory for Osceola township, a small mid-Michigan town that blocked Nestlé from building a pumping station that doesn’t comply with its zoning laws. But the case could also throw a wrench in Nestlé’s attempts to privatize water around the country.

If it is to carry out such plans, then it will need to be legally recognized as a public water source that provides an essential public service. The Michigan environmental attorney Jim Olson, who did not represent Osceola township but has previously battled Nestlé in court, said any claim that the Swiss multinational is a public water utility “is ludicrous”.

“What this lays bare is the extent to which private water marketers like Nestlé, and others like them, go [in] their attempts to privatize sovereign public water, public water services, and the land and communities they impact,” Olson said.

The ruling, made on Tuesday, could also lead state environmental regulators to reconsider permits that allow Nestlé to pump water in Michigan.

The Osceola case stems from Nestle’s attempt to increase the amount of water it pulls from a controversial wellhead in nearby Evart from about 250 gallons per minute to 400 gallons per minute. It needs to build the pump in a children’s campground in Osceola township to transport the increased load via a pipe system.

Nestlé has received extreme sweetheart deals from provincial Liberal governments in Ontario and BC. 

Nestle Waters Canada—a subsidiary of the multi-billion dollar Swiss company Nestle Group actually has a pretty long history of extracting clean groundwater from all across Canada, specifically British Columbia. Nestle Waters has two plants in Canada—one in Hope, BC, the other in Aberfoyle, near the city of Guelph, Ontario. There have been ongoing water disputes between the community and Nestle in both those regions.

Kawkawa Lake, District of Hope, BC

Nestle and the residents of the District of Hope have been at loggerheads over water supply from the Kawkawa Lake since 2000, when Nestle opened a water-bottling facility in Hope, using water from only one source, the Kawkawa Lake. Nestle vehemently defends its operations, stating that they withdraw less than 1 percent of the available groundwater in the Kawkawa Lake aquifer. But the issue arises when a drought hits and the residents of Hope are forced to restrict water use, while Nestle is allowed to continue the same pace of production.

Nestle bottles approximately 265 million litres of water from BC. Up until the beginning of this year, Nestle paid absolutely nothing for water it took from Kawkawa Lake. It was only in 2016 after much pressure primarily from the residents of Hope, that the province instituted regulations requiring any company extracting clean drinking water to pay $2.25 per million litres of water. According to activist group The Council of Canadians, the $2.25 rate is low compared to other provinces. In Ontario, for instance, companies have to pay up to $15 to extract a million litres of clean drinking water.

The BC [Liberal] government takes a different stance on the issue of payment. ...

Clean groundwater is up for bids in most of BC, with corporations like Nestle often having the upper hand because of their scale of production, and ability to ensure that extraction methods do not hurt the environment. Now however, the provincial government has the authority to step in with mandatory restrictions in the case of a drought.

Hillsburgh, Ontario

In 2005, the former CEO of Nestle, Peter Brabeck was quoted as saying that water should not be considered a human right and be instead treated as a "foodstuff commodity." That video was leaked and went viral in 2013—the same year that Nestle was in the middle of another dispute with the town of Hillsburgh, Ontario, near Guelph. Nestle withdraws as much as 1.1 million litres of water daily from a well in Hillsburgh, which has suffered three major droughts since 2007. 

2013 was one of the driest years in Hillsburgh, yet Nestle continued to extract the same amount of water from that one well. Public pressure caused the province to intervene, and when it renewed Nestle's contract on the Hillsburgh Well, it made it mandatory for Nestle to reduce the amount of groundwater it extracts during times of drought. The story didn't end there, unfortunately. Nestle aggressively appealed the new permit's restrictions and a few months later, the Ontario's Environment Ministry agreed to remove the restrictions.

Wellington, Ontario

[In 2016] Nestle outbid the Township of Centre Wellington, Ontario, for it's only new source of clean drinking water—a local well. The Township sits entirely on what is called glacial moraine, an unconsolidated accumulation of soil and rock that once used to be a glacier. This unique geological formation makes it particularly difficult for residents of the town to have access to a safe supply of drinking water. In fact, there is only one new source of clean drinking water in Centre Wellington—the local well that Nestle now owns.

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/zn85qw/a-look-into-nestles-controvers...

Here's a list of controversies involving Nestlé:

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Baby formula marketing

Concern about Nestlé's "aggressive marketing" of their breast milk substitutes, particularly in less economically developed countries (LEDCs), first arose in the 1970s.[113] Critics have accused Nestlé of discouraging mothers from breastfeeding and suggesting that their baby formula is healthier than breastfeeding, while the reverse is true. This led to a boycott which was launched in 1977 in the United States and subsequently spread into Europe.[114] The boycott was officially suspended in the US in 1984, after Nestlé agreed to follow an international marketing code endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO),[114][115][116] but was relaunched in 1989.[117] As of 2011, the company is included in the FTSE4Good Index designed to help enable ethical investment.[118][119][120][121]

In May 2011, nineteen leading Laos-based international NGOs, including Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE International, Plan International, and World Vision launched a boycott of Nestlé with an open letter.[122] Among other unethical practices, they criticised a failure to translate labelling and health information into local languages and accused the company of giving incentives to doctors and nurses to promote the use of infant formula. ...

Nestlé has been under investigation in China since 2011 over allegations that the company bribed hospital staff to obtain the medical records of patients and push its infant formula to increase sales. ...

Slavery and child labour

Multiple reports have documented the widespread use of child labour in cocoa production, as well as slavery and child trafficking, throughout West African plantations, on which Nestlé and other major chocolate companies rely.[128][129][130][131][132][128] According to the 2010 documentary The Dark Side of Chocolate, children are usually 12 to 15 years old.[133] The Fair Labor Association has criticised Nestlé for not carrying out proper checks. ...

A 2016 study published in Fortune Magazine concluded that approximately 2.1 million children in several West African countries "still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa", noting that "the average farmer in Ghana in the 2013–14 growing season made just 84¢ per day, and farmers in Ivory Coast a mere 50¢ [...] well below the World Bank’s new $1.90 per day standard for extreme poverty". ...

In 2019, Nestlé announced that they couldn't guarantee that their chocolate products were free from child slave labour, as they could trace only 49% of their purchasing back to the farm level. The Washington Post noted that the commitment taken in 2001 to eradicate such practices within 4 years had not been kept. ...

Water

At the second World Water Forum in 2000, Nestlé and other corporations persuaded the World Water Council to change its statement so as to reduce access to drinking water from a "right" to a "need". Nestlé continues to take control of aquifers and bottle their water for profit.[143] Peter Brabeck-Letmathe later changed his statement.

Plastic bottles

A coalition of environmental groups filed a complaint against Nestlé to the Advertising Standards of Canada after Nestlé took out full-page advertisements in October 2008 claiming, "Most water bottles avoid landfill sites and are recycled", "Nestlé Pure Life is a healthy, eco-friendly choice", and, "Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world."[145][146][147] A spokesperson from one of the environmental groups stated: "For Nestlé to claim that its bottled water product is environmentally superior to any other consumer product in the world is not supportable." ...

Water bottling operations in California, Oregon and Michigan

Considerable controversy has surrounded Nestlé's bottled water brand Arrowhead sourced from wells alongside a spring in Millard Canyon situated in a Native American Reservation at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains in California. While corporate officials and representatives of the governing Morongo tribe have asserted that the company, which started its operations in 2000, is providing meaningful jobs in the area and that the spring is sustaining current surface water flows, a number of local citizen groups and environmental action committees have started to question the amount of water drawn in the light of the ongoing drought, and the restrictions that have been placed on residential water use. ... 

In April 2015, the city of Cascade Locks, Oregon and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is using water for a salmon hatchery, applied with the Oregon Water Resources Department to permanently trade their water rights to Nestlé; an action which does not require a public-interest review. ...

 The plan has been criticized by legislators and 80,000 citizens.[156] The 250,000-square-foot, $50 million Nestlé bottling plant in Cascade Locks with an unemployment rate of 18.8 percent would have 50 employees and would increase property-tax collections by 67 percent.[157] In May 2016, voters of Hood River County voted 69 percent to 31 percent for the ballot measure to ban large bottling operations in the area, but in Cascade Locks, the one precinct in Hood River County, voters decided against the ballot measure, 58 percent to 42 percent. As a result, the Cascade Locks city council voted 5-to-1 to keep up the fight. Soon after, Governor Kate Brown directed state officials to stop an exchange of water rights that was crucial to the deal, citing fiscal rather than environmental reasons. ...

Although a 2005 court settlement gave Nestlé the right to pump 250 gallons per minute (GPM) from a well in unincorporated Osceola Township, Osceola County, Michigan, Nestlé has tried to increase that rate to 400 GPM. Its bottled water is sold under the Ice Mountain Spring label. ...

Local citizens mounted considerable grassroots opposition to the plan, with 55 opponents testifying against the proposal at a meeting attended by almost 500 people in July 2017. ...

Chocolate price fixing

In Canada, the Competition Bureau raided the offices of Nestlé Canada (along with those of Hershey Canada and Mars Canada) in 2007 to investigate the matter of price fixing of chocolates. It is alleged that executives with Nestlé (the maker of KitKat, Coffee Crisp, and Big Turk) colluded with competitors in Canada to inflate prices. ...

Nestlé and the other companies were subject to class-action lawsuits for price fixing after the raids were made public in 2007. Nestlé settled for $9 million, without admitting liability, subject to court approval in the new year. A massive class-action lawsuit continues in the United States.[163]

Ethiopian debt repayment

In 2002, Nestlé demanded that the nation of Ethiopia repay US$6 million of debt to the company at a time when Ethiopia was suffering a severe famine. Nestlé backed down from its demand after more than 8,500 people complained via e-mail to the company about its treatment of the Ethiopian government. ...

Ukraine

In August 2015, the Ukrainian TV channel Ukrayina refused to hire a worker of the weekly magazine Krayina, Alla Zheliznyak, as a host of a cooking show because she speaks Ukrainian. The demand to only hire a Russian-speaking host was allegedly set by a sponsor of the show – Nesquik, which is a brand of Nestlé S.A.[166][167] Activists of the Vidsich civil movement held a rally near the office of the company in Kiev, accusing Nestlé of discriminating against people who speak Ukrainian and supporting the Russification of Ukraine.

Forced labour in Thai fishing industry

At the conclusion of a year-long self-imposed investigation in November 2015, Nestlé disclosed that seafood products sourced in Thailand were produced with forced labour. ...

Deforestation

In September 2017, an investigation[172] conducted by NGO Mighty Earth found that a large amount of the cocoa used in chocolate produced by Nestlé and other major chocolate companies was grown illegally in national parks and other protected areas in Ivory Coast and Ghana.[173][174][175] The countries are the world's two largest cocoa producers. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé

Damn cats, siding with the Corporate bastards. I hope you gave him a stern talking to and made him watch a few documentaries to educate him ;o)

..just want to clarify that i reopened this thread not so much for the boycott campaign but for a place to report on this ruling. and then jerrym took advantage of the opening to update us on the latest nestle activities. txs jerrym. 

epaulo13 wrote:

Nestlé cannot claim bottled water is 'essential public service', court rules

Michigan’s second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestlé’s Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company’s commercial water-bottling operation is “not an essential public service” or a public water supply.

The court of appeals ruling is a victory for Osceola township, a small mid-Michigan town that blocked Nestlé from building a pumping station that doesn’t comply with its zoning laws. But the case could also throw a wrench in Nestlé’s attempts to privatize water around the country.

If it is to carry out such plans, then it will need to be legally recognized as a public water source that provides an essential public service. The Michigan environmental attorney Jim Olson, who did not represent Osceola township but has previously battled Nestlé in court, said any claim that the Swiss multinational is a public water utility “is ludicrous”.

“What this lays bare is the extent to which private water marketers like Nestlé, and others like them, go [in] their attempts to privatize sovereign public water, public water services, and the land and communities they impact,” Olson said.

The ruling, made on Tuesday, could also lead state environmental regulators to reconsider permits that allow Nestlé to pump water in Michigan.

The Osceola case stems from Nestle’s attempt to increase the amount of water it pulls from a controversial wellhead in nearby Evart from about 250 gallons per minute to 400 gallons per minute. It needs to build the pump in a children’s campground in Osceola township to transport the increased load via a pipe system.

LOL, I just realized that our decades of boycotts on these corporate giants didn't even make the tiniest of dents on their profits or thei ability to become even huger.

They were also diluting the formula due to lack of funds. While breast milk comes sterile unless the mother has a nipple infection or something else she could transmit to the baby. It was a criminal act by Nestlé.

How about house brands, such as PC? Is it possible to find which company actually made them?

Boycotts have been more successful at the political level, such as the civil rights struggle in the US, the fight against apartheid, and in the very first one to be called a boycott in Ireland in the fight against land evictions in Ireland that led to reform of land laws, when eviction often meant starvation and death. The first s0-called boycott was against an English land agent, Captain Boycott, who even with 50 volunteers cutting the crops on outside the community and 1,000 police and soldiers present to protect the volunteers, could not succeed in breaking the boycott. 

The word boycott entered the English language during the Irish "Land War" and derives from Captain Charles Boycott, the land agent of an absentee landlord, Lord Erne, who lived in Lough Mask House, near Ballinrobe in County Mayo, Ireland, who was subject to social ostracism organized by the Irish Land League in 1880. As harvests had been poor that year, Lord Erne offered his tenants a ten percent reduction in their rents. In September of that year, protesting tenants demanded a twenty five percent reduction, which Lord Erne refused. Boycott then attempted to evict eleven tenants from the land. Charles Stewart Parnell, in a speech in Ennis prior to the events in Lough Mask, proposed that when dealing with tenants who take farms where another tenant was evicted, rather than resorting to violence, everyone in the locality should shun them. While Parnell's speech did not refer to land agents or landlords, the tactic was first applied to Boycott when the alarm was raised about the evictions. Despite the short-term economic hardship to those undertaking this action, Boycott soon found himself isolated – his workers stopped work in the fields and stables, as well as in his house. Local businessmen stopped trading with him, and the local postman refused to deliver mail.[1]

The concerted action taken against him meant that Boycott was unable to hire anyone to harvest the crops in his charge. Eventually 50 Orangemen from Cavan and Monaghan volunteered to do the work. They were escorted to and from Claremorris by one thousand policemen and soldiers, despite the fact that the local Land League leaders had said that there would be no violence from them, and in fact no violence happened.[2] This protection ended up costing far more than the harvest was worth. After the harvest, the "boycott" was successfully continued. Within weeks Boycott's name was everywhere. The New-York Tribune reporter, James Redpath, first wrote of the boycott in the international press. The Irish author, George Moore, reported: 'Like a comet the verb 'boycott' appeared.'[3] It was used by The Times in November 1880 as a term for organized isolation. According to an account in the book The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland by Michael Davitt, the term was promoted by Fr. John O'Malley of County Mayo to "signify ostracism applied to a landlord or agent like Boycott". The Times first reported on November 20, 1880: "The people of New Pallas have resolved to 'boycott' them and refused to supply them with food or drink." The Daily News wrote on December 13, 1880: "Already the stoutest-hearted are yielding on every side to the dread of being 'Boycotted'."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott