{"id":2409,"date":"2006-06-19T09:34:14","date_gmt":"2006-06-19T09:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2409"},"modified":"2006-06-19T09:34:14","modified_gmt":"2006-06-19T09:34:14","slug":"if_its_good_for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2409","title":{"rendered":"If It&#8217;s Good for Philip Morris, Can It Also Be Good for Public Health?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/06\/18\/magazine\/18tobacco.html?ex=1308283200&amp;en=6f161cfc2cb0a4b7&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\">Joe Nocera<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>&#8220;We don&#8217;t make widgets,&#8221; Steve Parrish likes to say, and that acknowledgment strikes me as a good place to start this story. Parrish, whose title is senior vice president for corporate affairs, is a highly paid executive at Altria Group, a New York-based holding company that is the 10th-most-profitable corporation in America. If the name of the company doesn&#8217;t strike you as terribly familiar, that&#8217;s because a few years ago the company changed its name. It used to be called Philip Morris, a name that still attaches to two of its holdings, Philip Morris USA and Philip Morris International. (Altria also owns Kraft Foods.) So, yes, let&#8217;s stipulate right up front: Steve Parrish represents the country&#8217;s leading tobacco company, whose best-known brand, Marlboro, is so dominant it accounts for 4 out of every 10 cigarettes smoked in the United States. Last year, Philip Morris USA alone made $4.6 billion in profits. What was it that Warren Buffett once said? &#8220;You make a product for a penny, you sell it for a dollar and you sell it to addicts.&#8221; They most certainly don&#8217;t make widgets.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kraft is parent of Madison based <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kraftfoods.com\/om\/\">Oscar Meyer Foods<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joe Nocera: &#8220;We don&#8217;t make widgets,&#8221; Steve Parrish likes to say, and that acknowledgment strikes me as a good place to start this story. Parrish, whose title is senior vice president for corporate affairs, is a highly paid executive at Altria Group, a New York-based holding company that is the 10th-most-profitable corporation in America. If [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,18,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}