Word: colas
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Aside from post-finals 30 packs of Milwaukee’s Best, the most popular beverage on campus is undoubtedly the Coca-Cola that flows like wine during exam period. But if campaigners at this week’s World Social Forum in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, India have their way, more people might be looking elsewhere for their caffeine fix. Delegates at the forum, a left-leaning alternative to the World Economic Forum taking place at Davos, Switzerland, are looking to globalize a series of smaller boycotts against the soft-drink giant...
...protesting Coke, but they are hoping the Bombay forum will provide a chance to join forces with a union boycott of Coke led by Sinaltrainal, Colombia’s largest food and bottling union, the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union. The protesters allege collusion between Coca-Cola and a right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, which the U.S. State Department classifies as a terrorist organization, in the intimidation and assassination of union members in Coke bottling plants in Colombia...
...released statement Coca-Cola has said that the allegations are “completely false…nothing more than a shameless effort to generate publicity.” The bottlers also deny any involvement in the killings, although one wonders why random paramilitary groups would go around the country murdering union leaders against the wishes of the companies they are seeking contracts from. Union leaders such as Adolfo Munera, who just a week after winning a case in Colombia’s highest court forcing a Coke bottler to re-hire him after he was cleared of bogus criminal...
With help from the 80,000 activists in Mumbai this week, the combined boycotts could get the international support they need to be effective against transnational corporations such as Coca-Cola. Coke contracts have come under fire at Columbia, NYU, University of Vermont and University of California, Berkeley to name a few, and contracts have already been terminated at Bard College, Lake Forest College and at bars and colleges in Ireland. So far, Harvard’s involvement has been limited to bringing Colombian workers to campus to speak about the repression but Madeleine S. Elfenbein...
...Sasha watch the triumph of the cold war--a triumph for which they mortgaged much of their lives--being squandered by corporate cowboys and callow compromisers. "You think the war's over because a bunch of old Nazis in East Germany have traded Lenin for Coca-Cola?" Sasha demands of Ted in one of his bravura harangues. "Do you really believe that American capitalism will make the world a sweet safe place? It will pick it dry." The novel comes to a head in the present day with the two friends attempting a final, desperate gambit in pursuit...