Free Republic

Let’s stipulate: Activists on the left are free to exercise their rights of speech and assembly to boycott businesses whose politics they oppose. Conversely, activists on the right are free to exercise the power of their pocketbooks and refrain from supporting businesses that shun their values. So, what are you waiting for, conservatives? There are coordinated shakedowns taking place right now that involve some of America’s most prominent companies who’ve chosen to surrender to progressive bullying and race-card opportunism. Silence is complicity. On Tuesday, McDonald’s told liberal magazine Mother Jones that the company had “decided to cut ties with ALEC,...

ORLANDO, Fla./NEW YORK (Reuters) - Coca-Cola Co is dropping its membership in a conservative national advocacy group that supports "Stand Your Ground" laws such as the one being used as a defense in the Florida killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin. The move by the world's biggest soft drink maker comes as corporate America faces increased scrutiny from consumers and shareholder activists over lobbying and political spending.

Recently NLPC has reported about Coca-Cola’s holiday ad campaign to protect polar bears with donations up to $3 million to the World Wildlife Fund, which was a barely disguised effort to fund environmental pressure groups’ fraudulent global warming fight . But Coke’s passion to avert climate catastrophism runs deeper than the Arctic ice. The company even has a position statement that says “the consensus on climate science is increasingly unequivocal,” that “global climate change is happening” (everyone agrees with that – it always has changed and always will), and that “man-made greenhouse gas emissions are a crucial factor.” “Across...

Coca-Cola ’s just-announced holiday campaign to supposedly protect Arctic polar bear habitat – highlighted by the company changing its iconic red cans to white – is ending, with the company killing off its new packaging two months earlier than planned. No, Coke hasn’t seen the light on its disguised support for the global warming hoax . The images of polar bears will instead appear on redesigned red cans, after many consumers mistakenly grabbed the white cans believing they were selecting the silver-canned Diet Coke. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported that in recent days about a half-dozen customers...

Last month NLPC reported that during the holidays Coca-Cola will change its traditional red cans to white as part of an advertising campaign to raise $2 million for the World Wildlife Fund’s “polar bear conservation efforts.” This despite the fact that global polar bear populations are healthy ( much larger than 50 years ago ), their Arctic habitat is recovering, and the locations where a few of their numbers have declined in some cases are attributed to too much ice, not “global warming.” Since polar bears are not endangered, it’s worthwhile to investigate what WWF activities the Coke money...

For years Coca-Cola has given millions of dollars to eco-extreme group World Wildlife Fund, whose alarmism and perpetration of falsehoods are unmatched among its cohorts in climate activism. Now Coke has initiated a new campaign with WWF that features its iconic advertising species in an effort to drive more funding to the international nonprofit group to “protect the polar bears’ Arctic home.” The promotion will include new packaging for Coke over the holiday season, changing its familiar red cans to white, and featuring an image of a mother polar bear and her cubs on the side. Coke says it...

Who says American companies aren't investing? They are. Billions, in fact. Only, they are just not investing here in the U.S. Atlanta based Coca-Cola (KO) plans to invest $4 billion in China, the company's CEO Muhtar Kent told reporters in Shanghai this week. It's the company's biggest planned investment in China since the 2009 investment of $2 billion. The investments will start next year and is part of the company's China capex until 2014. Kent said the company is even considering listing its shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, adding itself to the list of mainstream brands listing their depositary...

SNIPPET: "There are some good reasons for allowing at least a few jihadi forums to operate." SNIPPET: "However, there are limits to our ability to exploit all the intelligence opportunities a forum may present. To put it another way, jihadi forums contribute to future terrorism in ways that are unpredictable and/or beyond our ability to control. This would be the view held by those other government agencies who prefer to seek out and destroy forums and to take down forum activists. For my part, I can live with keeping online those forums we have sufficient access to monitor and resources...

TOKYO -- The Coca-Cola Company announced today that it is establishing the Coca-Cola Japan Reconstruction Fund and raised its pledge to a total of 2.5 billion Yen (US$31 million) donations towards relief and rebuilding efforts for the victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami over the next three years. This includes the 600 million Yen (US$7.3 million) in cash and product announced previously. The commitment was made following a two-day visit to Tokyo by Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company. Mr. Kent was accompanied on the trip by Company Directors Herbert A. Allen, a member of the...

U.S. sales of Diet Coke overtook those of Pepsi-Cola for the first time in 2010, making the diet soda the No. 2 carbonated soft drink in the country behind Coca-Cola, industry data are expected to confirm Thursday. Occupying the top two rankings would mark a historic win for Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO - News) in its decades-old rivalry with PepsiCo Inc. (NYSE: PEP - News), which has seen its market share slip in recent years and is trying to retool its marketing.

A major consumer group today called for a government ban on two types of caramel coloring used in colas, warning that the ingredients could cause cancer. The soft drink industry came out swinging, strongly objecting to the claim.

In December 2009, there was a thread here on Free Republic outlining the fact that Coca-Cola had released "holiday" packaging that said "Feliz Navidad" in Spanish, but "Holiday 2009" in English. Some were outraged because it appeared that Christmas was okay to acknowledge in Spanish, but not in English. It seems that Coke has learned their lesson and for their 2010 packaging, they use the English greeting "Merry Christmas". Click here to read the original 2009 Free Republic article on this matter. Click here to see an image containing both the 2009 and 2010 Coke package designs with the "Holiday...

Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck have a few things in common. The liberal and conservative cable hosts each described their respective rallies on the National Mall—whether to "restore honor" or "restore sanity"—as nonpolitical events. Neither walks in lockstep with Democrats or Republicans. And both often claim to simply be entertainers, while at the same time never shying away from weighty subjects like the economy and terrorism. -snip- Now the Huffington Post has lined up 212 buses leaving from the Mets Citi Field at 6 a.m. Saturday. (The buses will be equipped with snacks and drinks donated by Pom Wonderful, Stonyfield...

Walk into the lone Chicago Wal-Mart to stock up on pop in the summer heat and there, rising like a palm tree in an oasis, is a stack of Coke cases at a special price: 24 cans for $5. A brand-name beverage like Coca-Cola for about 20 cents a can is more than a great deal. It's a sign of Wal-Mart's purchasing might, a warning shot to competitors and less than good news for the beverage industry. Experts call that kind of intimidating power "disruption," and it will come to the Chicago area in a bigger way now that Wal-Mart...

Summer of 1985: Fidel Castro sits behind a transmitter and broadcasts a national radio address of monumental proportions: Cuba’s great American enemy to the north is in a state of decay. Though this statement came during the paranoid final years of the Cold War, Castro’s claim was not based on some clandestine CIA document smuggled by a double-agent. No, the proof of America’s decay, was that Coca-Cola tasted kind-of different. A few months earlier, before an audience of 700 reporters seated in New York’s Lincoln Center, Roberto C. Goizueta, Coke’s president and CEO (and, fittingly enough, a Cuban ex-patriot) made...

ATLANTA - A white Arkansas team’s win in a national “stepping” contest has sparked a fierce controversy over whether the integration of a once exclusively black college tradition constitutes a form of cultural theft. “What has happened is black youth culture, what people would call hip-hop, sort of made black culture . . . appealing to all kinds of people,” said Walter Kimbrough of historically black Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., an expert on black Greek life. The uproar began when the University of Arkansas’ all-white Zeta Tau Alpha team beat out five teams in last weekend’s Sprite...

China's giant sovereign wealth fund revealed it has accumulated stakes totalling $US9.6 billion ($A11.1 billion) in major US companies including Coca-Cola, Apple and Goodyear following a buying spree last year. Most of the stakes are small, reflecting China Investment Corp's strategy of avoiding politically sensitive acquisitions. But they highlight its growing presence in global markets as it invests a portion of Beijing's $US2.4 trillion ($A2.78 trillion) in foreign reserves. The holdings were disclosed Friday in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that listed shares traded in the United States. CIC, one of the world's biggest investment funds,...

Brace yourselves for the really big news coming out of the Copenhagen conference. It’ll be your corporate customers that force you to address climate change, not EPA or Congress. Yes, EPA will regulate the largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters, mostly coal-fired power plants and large industrial facilities that release more than 25,000 metric tons a year of those global warming bad guys. But that doesn’t mean smaller companies are off the hook, not at all. The challenge ahead for small businesses will come from your big corporate customers — from auto makers, food and beverage companies, electronics manufacturers, and giant...

Coca-Cola Warns Green Taxes Could Cut Its Profits By 50% Coca-Cola and Unilever have warned that their profits could halve over the next decade unless they reduce their emissions, as business leaders in Copenhagen called for a global fixed price on carbon dioxide. By Rowena Mason Published: 7:09PM GMT 11 Dec 2009 Coca-Cola announced that it would reduce the carbon footprint of its supply chains Photo: Reuters The two companies acknowledged that green taxes and regulation would cause profits to fall 47pc by 2018 in the consumer goods sector if no effective action was taken. Unilever and Coca-Cola both announced...

Climate Change: Major U.S. corporations have set up a Web site calling for a global climate treaty to be signed in Copenhagen. Considering recent evidence of massive climate fraud, perhaps they should reconsider. Many will remember the classic soft drink ad campaign where young people from many nations gather on a mountaintop and sing that they'd like to buy the world a Coke, the theory being that sharing a soda was the key to world peace. That sort of naivete has led peoples and governments around the world to accept at face value the outright fraud perpetrated by the Milli...