Who is pulling the strings

Let us close our list of companies with the largest Food companies in the USA.  Largest at top, smallest at bottom.

Pepsi  

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 1,2 & 3.

Tyson Foods  

Vanguard, BlackRock, T. Rowe Price, State Street 1,2,3, & 4.

Nestle' 

This is a subsidiary of the Swiss company Nestle'. 

JBS 

This is a subsidiary of a Brazilian company. I believe it is the largest meat packer in the world. 

Kraft Heinz Co.   

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 2, 3 & 4. 

Smithfield Foods

This is owned by a mainland Chinese company.

Anheuser Busch

This is a subsidiary of a Belgian-Brazilian company.

Coca Cola

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 2, 3 & 4. 

Mars Inc. 

Is a privately held company owned by the Mars family. 

Conagra

Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street and T. Rowe Price 2, 3, 4 & 5. 

Hormel  

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 1,2 & 3. 

Cargill

This is a private company controlled by the Cargill family.

Molson Coors  

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 2, 3 and 4.  

Kellogg Co.  

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 2, 3 and 6.

J.M. Smucker  

Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street 1, 2 & 3.


Largest food processors

Good luck with the TV. My brother's computer monitor shut off. He thought it was the computer, as did I. A little trouble shooting and we found out that it was the monitor cable that was the problem. I have no idea why the cable should suddenly go bad. But I happened to have an extra DVI cable sticking around and it fixed the problem.

If this passes, and I think it is a big IF. The IRS will be flooded with so much paper that it will be impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, the trend is already in place. Banks regularly report transactions in excess of $10,000 reducing to $600 just makes the system irrelevant in most cases. Additionally, the tax code is already so complex that every American is in violation just about every day, as is every corporation, non-profit and NGO. 

All that said, it it is an intrusion into our 4th amendment rights and government is supposed to defend those rights not supersede them. There are methods around the the reporting rules and still keep a banking relationship, but even those are closing. Given the intrusion in our privacy by NSA, FBI, CIA, and others anytime you consider a transaction, legal or not, assume it is monitored regardless of the amount of money involved. 

It seems others basically agree with my conclusions on the "Meta-verse."

Data wishes to monetize everything

Because the strong resemblance, (physically and emotionally) from now on, I have decided to call Zuckerberg "Data." 

Hard to argue with that. Offhand, it doesn't sound as if Jonathan Kanter is a whack job.

It's a difficult subject. What a quagmire. Interesting that there was no mention of the largest company in the world, Apple. It buys up companies all the time and integrates their technology. One could say in the case of Apple, they've made a lot of smaller entrepreneurs rich. But still.

I'm also of the mind that consumers should vote loud and often with their choices. But the mindless masses are so addicted to distractions 24/7, they seem not to care that the all-beef hamburger they were eating 50 years ago has almost no nourishment in it today. But still they incessantly munch.

The ideological problem with anti-trust is that our government right now is full of anti-capitalist Communist types. At first glance, that doesn't seem the motivating factor of Kanter. But there is something to be said for the Reagan-era idea of letting the market decide because, god knows, the idiot bureaucrats in Washington sure don't know what the hell is best. The Wuhan Flu mess if evidence of this.

So the question becomes: Do we need the anti-trust officials in government to protect us from ourselves? Can't we unplug Disney by our own volition? In fact, there is apparently a "dump Facebook" movement which contributed to the yuge losses of Meta recently. Might not the market work?

And what is the guiding principle of the trust-busters? Do they mean to break up companies (such as YouTube, Meta, Google, etc.) because they persecute any opinion that isn't "woke"? That would be fine by me. To me, this is a far bigger threat than AT&T merging and firing a few employees and/or the end prices for consumers actually going up.

To me, the "soft totalitarianism" is the main threat. To the elite and others, it may just stick in their craw that some capitalists somewhere are getting rich. It should be noted that Standard Oil was basically a criminal organization way back when. But their victims were the competition. The end consumer bore no grudge because oil-product prices plummeted because of the efficiencies of Standard Oil.

So whose ox are trust-busters goring, and why? I need this or any article to be clear on this point. There was zero mention in that article about what I think is the starkest threat: The soft totalitarianism of the "woke" mindset.

True, but who is enforcing this mind set? The big corporations' human resources departments. As I believe I, at least, hinted at the beginning of this string, the big financial companies like Black Rock and State Street include "woke" dictates in their contracts. Take our money and you must follow our rules.  This would not be possible if the mergers and acquisitions model of business had not been green lighted by government. 

The Singapore model is what these globalists are aiming at. Consolidate people into large units. Place the right people at the top positions in these units and they will control the rest of those employed by the unit. A government finds it much easier to control 10,000 people working for one company than 10,000 entrepreneurs running 10,000 companies. This is one reason I am so anti-gigantism.  Stopping the never-ending concentration and abuse of power should be worth paying a few cents more for a soft drink or gallon of gas. 

To give you an example of how deeply "wokeism" has burrowed into our lives, let me use my doctor's practise as an example. 

I logged into my personal account a couple of days back, only to notice that the medical practice has a new software system.  When I perused the page on my personal details I noticed that the form now has a new blank to fill. "Gender at Birth"  which is next to "Gender." What a load of garbage. I have decided to ask my doctor about this the next time I visit the clinic. 

Yeah. Me too. That's why I continue to espouse federalism and the subsidiary principle. Let's keep decisions as local as possible and make sure we do not become a unitary state (aka, let's have true "diversity").

How that is applied to which giant companies to break up (or keep from merging), I don't know.

As for soft totalitarianism, we could be nearing the time when such considerations are either enacted into anti-trust law or current anti-trust law is interpreted to go after the woke Nazis. The problem is how deep this "woke" stuff goes in the deep state. Can we really ask the foxes to guard the hen house?



Through the past five years or so, I've amended many office forms for clients to include this "gender" nonsense. All I can do is roll my eyes and quip to my brother, "If I had fuck-you money, I would print something outlandish on those forms to show my disapproval." Not that I'd want to embarrass a client. But, sheesh, this stuff is so ridiculous. But imagine when it came time to fill out the form that the general public read:

Name ___________. Address______________
Gender_________. If trans, do you still have your testicles?  ( ) Yes ( ) No.

Etc. Don't quite have fuck-you money yet so I dutifully make the changes as requested.

In this day and age, with so much "cancel culture" going on, why does Ron DeSantis' advice need expressing (although he did so well)? But it apparently does need expressing. Often:



This guy is what Trump never was: Intelligent.