Just a Coke, Please

When the French Revolution finally swept aside the estate of aristocracy, nobody could have imagined that we'd invent an even better subterfuge to pick up the slack. Michael Blanding refreshes the memory a little in his article, The Case Against Coke, by reminding us about the corporation's virulent anti-union policies: and they are so ugly it isn't even hyberbole to call them medieval. By way of comparison, all Wal-mart does is shut down stores for Christ's sake! (Which reminds me: Happy Easter... and good luck.) According to a statement on the web-site, in 2005 Coca-Cola signed an agreement with the IUF, the international food and beverage industry union, permitting employees to "exercise rights to union membership and collective bargaining without pressure or interference." But the company feels compelled to follow neither the letter nor the spirit of such agreements. People have been fighting Coca-Cola's abuses (among other corps) for years now.

This story makes that evident:
In his last harvest, Shahul Hameed, the farmer who owns the modest smallholding, could coax only five sacks of rice from the land, and a meagre 200 coconuts. His irrigation wells have run dry. Meanwhile, the huge factory extracts up to 1.5 million litres of water a day from the deep wells it has drilled into the aquifer to produce Coke, Fanta, Sprite and the drink the locals call, without irony, Thumbs-Up.

So does this one:
A Coca-Cola franchise company in India is the subject of a police inquiry into the death of a community leader who had publicly objected to a planned Coca-Cola bottling plant in the village where he chaired the local council.
This second citation, for a frame of reference, is from February 2006. And that's just how they've been treating the workers.

Here's another horror story:
Coca-Cola in India is Guilty of:
* Causing Severe Water Shortages for Communities Across India
* Polluting Groundwater and Soil Around its Bottling Facilities
* Distributing its Toxic Waste as "Fertilizer" to Farmers
* Selling Drinks with Extremely High Levels of Pesticides
(Notice the reference to Columbia in here.)

You may as well sell the farm and head for the hills, folks. And don't forget to bring extra soft drinks because it could be a long picnic. As if religious fundamentalism wasn't bad enough on its own, now we've turned loose a bunch of psychopaths in the hope that the "better angles of our nature" will overcome their dogmatic, money-grubbing instincts and their self-righteous, selfish cruelty. You'd better think again Pangloss.