Philip Morris

LOTS OF MONEY AT THIS COMPANY

The Philip Morris companies have been known as Altria since 2003. Altria revenues from tobacco in 2006 amounted to $66,734,000,000. Profits from tobacco were $13,270,000,000. (Altria Group, Wikipedia)  The company was started by the Jewish (Dr.Kadri Ulman, Morris Sinasi, http://www.snetaca.org/view_document.php?d=opinion&id=1.) merchant Philip Morris who opened a tobacco shop in the Bond Street in London in 1847.

When he died, the business was taken over by his wife Margaret and his brother Leopold. In 1881 the company went public, Leopold Morris joining Joseph Grunebaum to establish Philip Morris & Company and Grunebaum, Ltd. This partnership was dissolved in 1885 and the company became known as Philip Morris & Co., Ltd. (Company Website, http://www.philipmorrisinternational.com/PMINTL/pages/eng/ourbus/Our_history.asp)

CURRENT MANAGEMENT

Michael Szymanczyk is the Jewish head of Philip Morris USA. (Scott Bass, Jason Roop and Brandon Walters, The Richmonders who make things happen, Style Weekly, http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=8729) They like to call him a “Yankee” transplant. Id.

Another source puts it this way:

Because they didn’t have a long history in the United States, Philip Morris’ leaders weren’t as shackled to the past as were their counterparts at RJR. They were worldly men, who lived in New York City (Frank Tursi, Susan E. White and Steve McQuilkin, A Rival Rises, Chapter 14,
Part1, http://extras.journalnow.com/lostempire/tob14a.htm)

Worldly men (not Christians). Lack of long history in United States (immigrants). And all of that in New York City.

The man behind the cowboy at the time was quickly becoming the most successful tobacco merchant since Buck Duke in the heyday of his American Tobacco Co. Joseph Frederick Cullman III was only 45 when he was elected president after the death of McComas in 1957, but he had been in the business all his life. He had worked as a $15-dollar-a-week clerk in a New York tobacco shop, had learned about leaf and manufacturing from the masters at the Upmann cigar factory in Cuba, had peddled cigars as a salesman in New York and had helped his father run Benson & Hedges.

Something else separated Joe the Third and his father from the other executives in the tobacco business, explained David E.R. Dangoor, a Philip Morris vice president who worked for Cullman all his life.

‘The reason we’re the powerhouse we are is because of a couple of guys in the 1950s and 1960s. They rolled the dice four times and always came up double sixes. The Cullmans. With the Cullman family coming in, the Jewish mind entered the tobacco industry, which had been traditionally free of Jewish executives and Jewish interests,” said Dangoor, himself a Jew. (Id.)(emphasis added)

ACTIVITY IN ISRAEL

Philip Morris has launched the brand Maori Mix in Israel; it bears a map of New Zealand and quasi-Maori designs. Shane Bradbrook of the Maori Smokefree Coalition (Te Reo Marama) makes a good point: “Would we have them here and call them Jewish Mix? It would be as offensive to the people in Israel as it is offensive for Maori.”

(http://eyeteeth.blogspot.com/2005/12/philip-morris-markets-maori-smokes-to.html)

JEWISH STAFF

In 2003, Philip Morris decided to move its Jewish employees from New York down to Richmond. (Martha T. Moore, Philip Morris Braces For Culture Shock; NYC Workers Must Move To Richmond, Va., USA TODAY, June 25, 2003)

Jamie Drogin was one of them. “My friends describe me as the typical, loud, aggressive New York woman, and frankly, I don’t have a problem with that,” Drogin says. Id.

Hmm. Loud, aggressive, and from New York. She has something in common with the worldly men who hadn’t been in the country too long.

John Woodward didn’t mind Richmond too much, because he could still gets his bagels there. Id.

The biggest worry of Philip Morris employees, Wingfield says, was about diversity. Richmond has small but growing Asian and Hispanic populations and a Jewish community that supports six synagogues. Someone from the Jewish Community Center was on hand for the visiting workers.” Id.

That says it all.

SUPPORT OF JEWISH CAUSES

Being the Jewish company that it is, Philip Morris supports Jewish activities like the Jewish Community Council of Greater Coney Island, (http://www.jccgci.org/funders.htm), and the Arizona State University Jewish Studies program, (http://www.asu.edu/clas/jewishstudies/contributematchinglist.html)

SUPPORTED BY JEWISH LEGISLATORS

“Although I am generally proud to see Jewish politicians succeed, I am troubled that Rep. Eric Cantor’s legislative career is marked by his tireless advocacy on behalf of the tobacco industry (“Jewish Representative Rises in House’s Republican Ranks,” October 7). Cantor has boasted of his role in recruiting Philip Morris to move its headquarters to Virginia, and as both a state legislator and congressman he has gone out of his way to help shield the tobacco industry — and Philip Morris, in particular — from legal responsibility for its actions.

As the ongoing lawsuit by the Justice Department against the major cigarette manufacturers has revealed, the tobacco industry engaged in a decades-long campaign to hide the harms of smoking and secondhand smoke, to manipulate nicotine levels in cigarettes, to market to youth and to suppress the production of potentially safer cigarettes. During those decades, cigarettes killed millions of Americans. Smoking still kills more than 400,000 Americans each year. It’s disturbing to have a front person for this lethal industry as the most powerful Jewish voice in Congress.” (Micah Berman, Executive Director, Tobacco Public Policy Center, Capital University Law School, Columbus, Ohio October 21, 2005

Jewish Daily Forward, http://www.forward.com/articles/letter-october-21-2005/) (emphasis added)

CONCLUSION

This is the biggest cigarette company in the world. Cigarettes are responsible for 23 percent of the deaths in the Czech Republic. According to the Jew Berman, the tobacco industry has killed millions, causes the death of more than 400,000 Americans per year, and has been deceitful in the process.

Philip Morris was a Jewish company from the beginnings. It still is today. Its Jewish chief brought his Jewish staff down from New York to Richmond, where, happily, they can still get their bagels.

The company is greatly assisted in Congress by influential Jewish legislators.

They know their product kills, but claim this is economically beneficial. And for their company, it is.