"and i know the biggest crime/ is just to throw up your hands/ and say This has nothing to do with me/ i just want to live as comfortably as i can"
-Ani Difranco, 1993
Uh huh. Coca-Cola, that paragon of American exceptionalism, has for years hired paramilitary groups to intimidate, harass, kidnap, torture, and murder union organizers at its bottling plants in Colombia. It's all at killercoke.org. And it's not just in Colombia. There's currently a civil lawsuit pending against Coca-Cola in a U.S. District Court which alleges a systematic campaign of violence against unionistas in Guatemala. Prominent among its victims is union leader Jose Alberto Vicente Chavez: paramilitary forces attacked his family on March 1, 2008, killing his son and gang-raping his daughter.
In India, Coca-Cola contains such high levels of pesticides (DDT, malathion, etc.) that farmers have been spraying it on their crops with great success. And what do they do with their waste products? The solid stuff they distributed as fertilizer until recently: it contained such high levels of lead and cadmium that the local government finally ordered them to stop. And they've solved their liquid waste problem by pumping it into the holy River Ganges.
So that's how a sausage gets made.
Last year's film "The Coca-Cola Case" is an excellent primer to Killer Coke. Here's the trailer:
That's capitalism, served fresh daily.
Tell me, is it worth the dizzying highs when the hard times hit like hammers on your skull? Is it worth it, thumb-wrestling the invisible hand, when you know the house will always win?
Growth in gross domestic product is the cocaine that our current economic system needs (and totally freaks out about when it temporarily runs out). Growth requires one of two things: ever-increasing population ("new markets") or ever-increasing consumption, i.e., everyone spends more every year. We're pushing the limits of what our planet can hold population-wise, and credit-wise, we're tapped out, as we've seen in the last couple years.
It's got to stop. We need to transition to a steady-state economy, now.
Excellent post Doug. But why aren't you in class? You've kept a really consistent voice throughout: informed, impassioned, provocative. You incorporate excellent quotes, links, and multimedia (though you as your choice of font shows, you are more concerned with the writing/information than with image. That's a style choice, which is fine, even though it goes against the general advice about web presentation. Really nice work.
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