Pamela's Blog 8

Published on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Just Say NO! Make Coke the First Corpse to Go!”

by Pamela Satterwhite

With the corpse in a tomb,
Life can resume!

Back in the late eighties the economists Samuel Bowles, David M. Gordon and Thomas E. Weisskopf decided to put their heads together and figure out how ‘our’ economic system got broke and how to fix it. They issued their recommendations in the book After the Waste Land: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000, published in 1990.

One of their key findings was that the pitiful-power-drunk-few – that handful of folks who like to think of themselves as “masters-of-the-universe” – had embarked in the seventies on a campaign to “discipline” labor – that’s you and me – we who do the work.

They pledged to step-up their gathering, organizing, and planning activities, and never let up ‘til we were on our knees, backs bent, spirits broke, and begging.

At an important management conference in the middle of the recession, corporate leaders eagerly awaited the effects of rising unemployment. “We need a sharp recession,” one said. “people need to recognize,” a second added, “that a job is the most important thing they can have.” A third was most hopeful: “This recession will bring about the healthy respect for economic values that the Depression did.”…We call this the “cold Bath” treatment. The effects of this pressure show up in the record of both fiscal and monetary policy through 1979 – even before Paul Volcker and the Reagan administration arrived with their replenished supplies of ice. (Bowles, Gordon and Weisskopf, After the Waste Land, p. 89)

They got busy. Look around you at the results of all their busyness. They have mostly achieved their goals, and all life on our earth has been devastated by their “success.”

It’s critical for all life that we rein in their massive arrogance while simultaneously freeing our psyches from the lie that we aren’t capable of running things ourselves. We need to see our power, and what better way to start than to issue a reality check to one of the worst among them.

We’ve never needed them.

Just the opposite.

And the earth can no longer support either their illusions or our unwarranted shame.

We need to see our power.

We need to bury a corpse.

Once we do, we'll be able to feel our strength as free humans.

Through this first success, our confidence and determination to match their organization with our own will be released – our commitment to spend every consumer dollar with consciousness, and use every tactic in the toolbox that moves us closer to our future freedom without bosses, finally embraced.

What better place to start than with a completely useless product like “Coke?” Worse than useless, actually – harmful, rather – damaging of the environment, murderous towards the humans they grind up in their processing plants.

I thought of those Nixon-era podrunk planners when I read up on Coca Cola’s activities in Florida, Columbia, Guatemala, and India. The faithful managers of Coca Cola are clearly spawn of those vampires, with their pale, bloodless palms on the helm of the global economic ship, mowing us down with glee.

The Public Citizen website has a fact sheet compiled by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Here’s an excerpt:

Union workers at a Coca-Cola Bottling facility in Colombia, South America were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by paramilitary death squads according to news reports and a recent lawsuit filed against Coca-Cola and their bottler in Colombia.
The Colombian Union has long maintained that the company has open relations with murderous death squads as part of a program to intimidate trade union leaders.
The violence against Coca-Cola workers in Colombia is reminiscent of past atrocities committed against Coca-Cola workers in Guatemala when…union leaders there were assassinated.
An international human rights campaign forced Coke to take over operations in Guatemala in order to protect the safety of union workers. However, Coca-Cola recently turned these operations over to the same bottling company used in Colombia…
In the United States, Teamster workers have experienced serious problems in Florida where Coca-Cola turned Minute Maid juice operations over to a separate processor… [that] terminated all of the senior shop stewards and most Union supporters in a blatant and deliberate effort to intimidate workers.
In fact, since 1996 when Coca-Cola turned Minute Maid operations in Florida over to an outside processor, a worker has been killed on the job, there have been chemical leaks and explosions…product recalls, and repeated reports of rats and roaches…near open product.
Recently a 30-year employee (and senior shop steward) was fired for reporting a dead rat to an on-site USDA inspector. (http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/_bottled_/coke/)

Add to these horrors the poisoning and theft of the community’s water in Plachimada, in the state of Kirala, India, and I hope you will agree that it’s time to free our consciences of the taint of all-things-Coke.

All together now!
One, Two, Three, Four!
Leave Coca Cola at the store!
Five, Six, Seven, Eight!
Leave them bottles in the crate!
Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve!
We don’t buy what Coca Cola sells!

Let’s start with an easy corpse to bury – easy because it’s a completely useless product. Let’s purge it from our diets, spread the word, and see what happens…

Other websites that examine Cola Cola’s qualifications for being named “Stinking Rotten Corpse Number One”:

http://www.labournet.de/internationales/co/cocacola3.html
Casa Maria's Boycott List [no longer posted but trying to find it]
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/_bottled_/coke/
http://www.killercoke.org/
India Resource Center Action

India Resource Center Campaign brochure (coke/2004/Brochure.pdf)

http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/

news/2008/01/18/Campus/CocaCola.Under.Serious.Scrutiny-3158379.shtml

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Pamela's Blog 8

Published on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“Just Say NO! Make Coke the First Corpse to Go!”