Tag Archives: california

Keeping Americans in a Fog

Farming

The food industry is in cahoots with the pesticide industry to keep Californians in the dark about what is really in their food.  American consumer products are owned by only a few corporate giants known as “Big Food”.  These corporations in addition to the “Big 6” companies in the pesticide industry are doing everything in their power to ensure that California’s Proposition 37 does not get passed.  Prop 37 is a bill that will allow companies to label food made with genetically engineered crops, which have previously been under the guise of “all natural”.  This will allow people to know if the food they are consuming has been genetically altered in any way.  The reason for this epic tag team of the food and pesticide industries is due to the fact that 99% of all genetically modified foods have been engineered to either contain pesticides or to withstand the application of these chemicals.  Since their fates are intertwined, they teamed up to contribute a whopping $25 million to ensure the failure of Prop 37.

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$3.3 Million Settlement Reached Over Lack of Tuna in Tuna Cans

Not enough tuna

What had started out in 2010 as an investigation to make sure “what is on the label is what’s actually in the can” finally ended on August 3 in a settlement for California residents.  An increase in consumer complaints regarding the lack of tuna provided by the three major tuna companies Bumble Bee Foods, Tri-Union Seafood, and Starkist Co. has resulted in a $3.3 million settlement.   The investigation was conducted by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA). Their research shows that these companies have been skimping on the actual amount of tuna held within the cans.  All three companies have failed to meet the federal “standard of fill” or “standard of identity.”  Instead they disguised the packed cans with oil, water, vegetable broth, and sometimes tuna.

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Happy Day for Former Sitcom Cast

TV turnaround

Queue the jukebox: the ol’ gang just got an increase in allowance.

Happy Days actors Anson Williams, Don Most, Marion Ross, Erin Moran, and the estate of the late Tom Bosley have settled with CBS and Paramount over a contract dispute from April, 2011.  Potsie and co. believed they had not received proper royalties for the sales of Happy Days merchandising that used their images, including comic books, T-shirts, and trading cards.  (Yes, nearly three decades after Happy Days aired its last episode, they still make comic books and trading cards with the characters.)  The actors’ contracts included clauses that gave 5% of proceeds from any merchandise holding their image and 2.5% if they’re shown as a group, but they claim that CBS and Paramount never included merchandise figures in revenue statements provided to the actors.  CBS and Paramount’s counterclaim was that, under a separate agreement with the Screen Actors Guild, the companies were allowed to use images from the show to promote sales of DVDs without paying the actors any extra royalties.

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Clarissa Settles It All

TV turnaround

Comebacks can be costly.  Melissa Joan Hart starred in a couple of hit TV shows in her career, Clarissa Explains It All (1991-1994) and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2003), both aimed at the teenage demographic.  After that, she wasn’t quite so young anymore (just 15 at the start of Clarissa, surprisingly), and thus wasn’t the best choice to sell TV shows to said demographic anymore.  Consequently, her acting career sort of floundered in the years post-Sabrina.  Sometime in 2006 and shortly after the birth of her first son, Hart hired talent manager Kieran Maguire to help bump her up to the lucrative 25-to-36 demographic and win back her bygone star power.  This tactic turned out to be successful: in 2010, Hart premiered her TV show Melissa and Joey, a family sitcom about parents and motherhood and raising kids and junk.  (Aside: That I, a 23-year-old male, have no interest in watching the show is testament to its intended marketing segment.)  Nevertheless, things were looking good for Mrs. Hart in her successful transition from teenage idol to sitcom matron.

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Facebook to Pay $10 Million in Sponsored Story Settlement

Thumbs up

A proposed settlement between Facebook and a class of litigants has the social networking company paying $10 million to charity.  The issue at hand was whether Facebook violated California law by using its users’ names and profile pictures to advertise products without paying them and without giving them any way to opt out.  With its “sponsored stories”, users’ “likes” of products were unwittingly posted across their friends’ news feeds.  Companies would pay way more for these stories than a traditional advertisement, with Mark Zuckerberg saying they were the “Holy Grail of advertising”, akin to a word of mouth personal recommendation.  So, if you clicked “like” on a page about bananas, you’d be shown on your friends’ feeds as “John Doe likes bananas, go buy one here”.  Or, in the case of Nick Bergas, your face would be endorsing a 55-gallon drum of personal lubricant.  His story accentuates the main legal problem at issue here:  what if you don’t care about a product you’re shown endorsing?  Worse, what if you don’t want to be shown endorsing anything at all?

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