McDonald’s – Page 4 – Infinite Unknown

American Doctors’ TV Targets McDonald’s: Health Ad Features A Corpse Holding A Hamburger And The Line ‘I Was Lovin’ It’

September 17, 2010September 17, 2010 by Infinite

I would prefer: ‘I Was Addicted To It’ (MSG, Aspartame etc.)

Article in German by F. William Engdahl:

– Junk Food macht genauso süchtig wie Heroin

“Junk food as addictive as heroin or cocaine”

Unhappy meals: American doctors’ TV ad features a corpse holding a hamburger and the line ‘I was lovin’ it’. McDonald’s, which has thrived in the recession, isn’t laughing

McDonald’s fast food is graphically linked to health problems in this ad from a doctors’ group urging viewers: ‘Tonight, make it vegetarian ‘

It is an image to sap the flabbiest of appetites. An overweight, middle-aged man lies dead on a mortuary trolley, with a woman weeping over his body. The corpse’s cold hand still clutches a half-eaten McDonald’s hamburger.

A hard-hitting US television commercial bankrolled by a Washington-based medical group has infuriated McDonald’s by taking an unusually direct shot at the world’s biggest fast-food chain this week, using a scene filmed in a mortuary followed by a shot of the brand’s golden arches logo and a strapline declaring: “I was lovin’ it.”

The line is a provocative twist on McDonald’s long-standing advertising slogan, “I’m lovin’ it” and a voiceover intones: “High cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks. Tonight, make it vegetarian.”

McDonald’s to be sued for ‘enticing children with toys’

June 23, 2010 by Infinite

‘McDonald’s use of these techniques raises troubling questions, for health professionals, parents, and policy makers.’

Slammed: U.S. consumer group says using popular characters to promote unhealthy food is ‘creepy and predatory’

As far as many children are concerned, they are the most appealing things on the menu.

But not everyone is so keen on the merchandising toys used by McDonald’s to entice youngsters to buy its Happy Meals.

A powerful American consumer group is threatening a lawsuit and has given the chain 30 days to drop the ‘creepy and predatory’ ploy it says undermines the efforts of parents to encourage a healthy diet.

The merchandise, which is also given to customers in Britain, includes toys related to the latest Shrek movie. Earlier this year it also had tie-ups with Alvin and the Chipmunks and Scooby Doo.

The Centre for Science in the Public Interest says using the items to promote its Happy Meals is ‘unfair, deceptive and illegal’ under American state laws.

Injecting Beef With Ammonia; Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned

January 2, 2010 by Infinite

Carl S. Custer, a former U.S.D.A. microbiologist, said he and other scientists were concerned that the department had approved the treated beef for sale without obtaining independent validation of the potential safety risk. Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

Toxic zombie food!

A Beef Products Inc. processing plant in South Sioux City, Neb. The company injects fatty beef trimmings with ammonia to remove E. coli and salmonella.

Both McDonald’s and Burger King use Beef Products’ processed beef as a component in ground beef.

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

What’s really in your burger? E.coli and chicken feces both allowed by USDA

November 8, 2009 by Infinite

McDonald’s: “We do not condone the feeding of poultry litter to cattle.”

(NaturalNews) There are 14 billion hamburgers consumed each year in the United States alone. The people who eat those burgers, though, have little knowledge of what’s actually in them. Current USDA regulations, for example, openly allow beef contaminated with E. coli to be repackaged, cooked and sold as ready-to-eat hamburgers.

This simple fact would shock most consumers if they knew about it. People assume that beef found to be contaminated with E. coli must be thrown out or destroyed (or even recalled), but in reality, it’s often just pressed into hamburger patties, cooked, and sold to consumers. This practice is openly endorsed by the USDA.

But E. coli may not be the worst thing in your burger: USDA regulations also allow chicken feces to be used as feed for cows, meaning your hamburger beef may be made of second-hand chicken poop, recycled through the stomachs of cows.

Chicken poop in your burgers?

I remember writing about this two years ago. People sent accusatory hate mails to NaturalNews, saying things like, “Stop making things up and scaring people!” Few people believed that chicken feces was being widely used as cattle feed.

According to the FDA, farmers feed their cattle anywhere from 1 million to 2 million tons of chicken feces each year. This cross-species crap-as-food practice worries critics who are concerned it may lead to increased risk of mad cow disease contaminating beef products. So they want to ban the practice and disallow the feeding of chicken litter to cows.

Believe it or not, McDonald’s has joined the fight seeking to ban the practice, saying “We do not condone the feeding of poultry litter to cattle.” Apparently, even they don’t want their customers looking at a Big Mac and thinking, “Wow, this is made out of second-hand chicken crap.”

McDonald’s pulls out of Iceland, has no plans to return

October 27, 2009 by Infinite

McDonald’s is seen as a part of most developed economies

McDonald’s is to close its business in Iceland because the country’s financial crisis has made it too expensive to operate its franchise.

The fast food giant said its three outlets in the country would shut – and that it had no plans to return.

Besides the economy, McDonald’s blamed the “unique operational complexity” of doing business in an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000.

Iceland’s first McDonald’s restaurant opened in 1993.

‘No sense’

For a kilo of onion, imported from Germany, I’m paying the equivalent of a bottle of good whisky

Jon Gardar Ogmundsson
McDonald’s Icelandic franchisee

The franchises are run by a firm called Lyst, with owner Jon Gardar Ogmundsson saying the decision was “not taken lightly”.

He said that the restaurants imported the goods from Germany, but that costs had almost doubled, with the falling krona making imports prohibitively expensive.

Britain worse credit risk than McDonald’s

December 10, 2008 by Infinite

Britain has become a worse credit risk than McDonald’s and a host of other large companies, figures produced for The Independent reveal.

The collapse in Britain’s credit rating has taken place over the past two and a half months, since the Government underwrote the banking system and decided to spend its way out of recession. Investing in UK government debt is now almost twice as risky as buying McDonald’s corporate bonds, according to the market in credit default swaps (CDS), which provides insurance for the buyers of such debt.

The government debt of large economies such as the UK would normally be considered far more secure than corporate bonds. However, on 29 September, the cost of buying insurance against default on UK five-year government debt became more expensive than the equivalent cover for the US burger chain and has since overtaken Kellogg’s and Coca-Cola, according to data from Bloomberg.

The cost of insuring British debt soared on that day, as the Government nationalised Bradford & Bingley, increasing fears that the state would have to bail out the banking system.

The cost of insuring for a year against default on £10m of five-year UK debt has jumped from less than £30,000 to £120,000, compared with the current price of £77,000 to protect against a similar McDonald’s default.

China: Police State 2.0 is Ready for Export

May 20, 2008May 20, 2008 by Infinite

Excerpts from the long but excellent article:

“Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts.”

“The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as “Golden Shield.” The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon:”

“Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.”

“This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.”

“Here is a small sample of what the company (L-1) does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.””

“It is L-1’s deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn’t just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it’s U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1’s China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.”
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Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn’t exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it – thanks to its location close to Hong Kong’s port – to be China’s first “special economic zone,” one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis.

The theory behind the experiment was that the “real” China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture – the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well.

Companies use scans to track employees

April 3, 2008April 3, 2008 by Infinite

Some workers are doing it at Dunkin’ Donuts, Hilton hotels, even at Marine Corps bases. Employees at a growing number of businesses around the nation are starting and ending their days by pressing a hand or finger to a scanner that logs the precise time of their arrival and departure – information that is automatically reflected in payroll records.

Manufacturers say these biometric scanners improve efficiency and streamline payroll operations. Employers big and small buy them with the dual goals of curtailing fraud and automating outdated record keeping systems that rely on paper time sheets.

The new systems, however, have raised complaints from some workers who see the efforts to track their movements as excessive or even creepy.

“They don’t even have to hire someone to harass you anymore. The machine can do it for them,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO. “The palm print thing really grabs people as a step too far.”