Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The Great American Chocolate Bar "Hecho En Mexico"?

I know that most of you will soon begin choosing your candies for all of the upcoming holidays. With that in mind, I would like to ask you to boycott Hershey’s Chocolate and Hershey’s Foods products.

Starting almost two years ago the Hershey’s Corporation had shut down several non-union plants in Hershey, Pennsylvania as well as Canada. The company is outsourcing all the production to Monterrey, Mexico; hoping to shut down the remaining US/Canadian plants entirely. Hershey’s has been met with some insurgence from the Chocolate Workers union and several local public boycotts, however, this has not delayed business plans of relocation.

Over 1,500 jobs gone off to our southern neighbors who will work for 15 cents an hour.

We used to be the manufacturing center of the world, but now Americans can't even make chocolate.

Don't buy into it.

Don't buy Hershey's.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Buy Gluten Free things like snickers, reese's peanut butter cups, m & m's, york peppermint patties...what else.... None of those are Hershey's are they? Dangit Reese's is.

But yeah do it. Look up candy that is gluten free like the ones I listed above and buy it, so you won't make the little celiac children cry :P

- L

Anonymous said...

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (CNN) -- "I'll take two chili, uh..." a hungry customer stammers at the front of a two-hour-long line. "Chile rellenos," the money-handler trills back in perfect Spanish. This is not a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant; and it's more than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border.

St. Cecilia's nearly closed. After it was designated the parish home for Latinos, the congregation quadrupled.

The stuffed pepper causing the stutter is the hottest menu item at St. Cecilia's Lenten fish fry in St. Louis, Missouri. Chile rellenos, a traditional Mexican dish, have replaced fish as the main draw for Catholics giving up meat on Fridays. This century-old parish founded by German immigrants has turned 85 percent Hispanic.

"It's the browning of the Catholic Church in the United States," says Pedro Moreno Garcia, who until last month led the Hispanic ministry for the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Moreno Garcia points to St. Cecilia's Spanish-dominant Mass schedule as a sign of the times.

"Hispanics are the present and Hispanics are the future of the Catholic Church in the United States," says Moreno Garcia.

One-third of all Catholics in the United States are now Latinos thanks to immigration and higher fertility rates, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. While St. Cecilia's parish has relished the growth, elsewhere, the Latino population boom has rocked the pews.

"Instead of screaming out, 'The British are coming!' " Moreno Garcia says some people are screaming, " 'The Hispanics are coming! The Hispanics are coming! Run, run.' "

A self-described Nuyorican or Puerto Rican from New York, Moreno Garcia says even he gets mislabeled. Chile rellenos are served up at St. Cecilia's »

"They still confuse every Hispanic as being from Mexico, and that everyone is here illegally," says Moreno Garcia.

The Latino population is set to nearly triple by 2050.After more than 15 years working for the Catholic Church in majority-Hispanic areas of Texas, Moreno Garcia spent the last year tackling the challenges of a community where Latinos, although growing, are still the minority.

He recalls a few heated phone calls after the archdiocese newspaper, the St. Louis Review, added a page in Spanish. He fights prejudice with thought-provoking questions.

"When you go to heaven, and you're in front of St. Peter, what would you want to have in your hand, your baptismal certificate or your passport?" Moreno Garcia asks.

One archdiocese parish that is struggling with the Latino influx is Holy Trinity in St. Ann, Missouri, a suburban community with an affordable housing stock that has prompted a population shift in the last decade. Pedro Moreno Garcia is working to bridge language barriers, divisions »

Separate Sunday morning Masses in English and in Spanish at Holy Trinity are creating division among the devout.

"We're two separate parishes operating under one roof," says Parish Council President Gina Shocklee.

"I refer to it as Holy Trinity Catholic Church, and then there's Holy Trinity Hispanic Church," says council member Jody Tedeschi, who worries the separate Masses promote segregation.

Holy Trinity's parish council has spent the past year looking for ways to bridge the divide with limited success.


"When I come to Mass at noon, the Anglos leave, and [Latinos] go in and we don't even say 'hi' to each other, not even 'hi,'" says Garcia.

A majority of Latino churchgoers in the United States attend Mass with mostly Latinos in the pew and Spanish-speaking clergy at the pulpit, according to a 2006 Pew Forum survey. Today, 15 percent of priests ordained in the United States are Latinos, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

This kind of stuff is exactly what is being forced on the parishoners at ST NICK's. And this is the reason I left along with my family. You can see the amount of people attending has dropped since they did this. Rearranged Mass schedules, catered to the hispanics, special masses in spanish..to hell with that.

Patrica