[Ciepac-i] Chiapas Today 556: Coca Cola, the Antisocial and Psychopathic Corporation (3/3) Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:28:55 -0500 (CDT) "Chiapas Today" Bulletin No. 556 CIEPAC; CHIAPAS, MIXICO COCA COLA, THE ANTISOCIAL AND PSYCHOPATHIC CORPORATION PART 3 OF 3 Miguel Pickard - 24-Jan-2008 - num.556 CIEPAC, San Cristsbal de Las Casas Environmental Impact on the Indigenous Communities There is but on "social responsibility" for corporate executives: they must make as much money as possible for their shareholders. This is a moral imperative. Executives who choose social and environmental goals over profits-who try to act morally-are, in fact, immoral. There is, however, one instance when corporate social responsibility can be tolerated-when it is insincere-hypocrisy is virtuous when it serves the bottom line. Moral virtue is immoral when it does not. (opinions of Milton Friedman, neoliberal ideologue). [Bakan, p. 34] The laws in Mexico regarding water and the environment seem to have been designed with the absurd logic of the above quote in mind. The laws in Mexico protect and promote the voracious appetite of businesses like Coca Cola for water and other resources, while punishing those who do the most to protect, conserve, and increase those resources, such as the indigenous communities(8). In Mexico, the national water law only recognizes certain "user stakeholders" as the potential beneficiaries of this resource, while denying this status to the indigenous and ethnic communities. Thus, indigenous communities are not even recognized as possible legal interlocutors. Nonetheless, the six indigenous communities in the foothills of the Huitepec volcano contribute to the management of part of the San Cristsbal river basin, caring for the forest, land, and water. In this fashion they help recharge the aquifer in which Coca Cola has placed its deepest wells. These activities on the part of the indigenous communities are not recognized because these communities are outside of the institutional structure and norms of this countrys laws. This contradiction is demonstrated by the fact that the indigenous communities, when they extract water from the aquifer, are operating "outside of the national water law." They dont have title to the water because the laws do not permit it. On the other hand the Coca Cola corporation, which only extracts water and contributes nothing towards its sustainability, has total legal access. The San Andris Accords, negotiated and signed in 1996 by the Zapatistas of the EZLN and the Mexican government, tackled these anomalies and offered a solution. The Accords recognized the indigenous ethnicities and communities as legal subjects in all of Mexico and thus, after 500 years of discriminatory and exclusionary treatment, established a new relationship between the indigenous communities and the government(9). However, certain fundamental aspects of the Accords, such as legal recognition of the indigenous peoples, were turned aside by the legislature in 2001 when it approved a law that violated the spirit and letter of the pact signed five years earlier. Impact on Health [The] Pfizer [pharmaceutical company] and its shareholders make more money from drugs that teat baldness and impotence than they would from drugs to treat diseases, such as malaria and tuberculosis, that are leading causes of death in the developing world. [The pharmaceutical companies] likely have the know-how and the physical capacity to place more emphasis on developing and making drugs to fight these killer diseases. Though such drugs would do immense good for the world and could save millions of lives every year, the costs to any company that developed them would almost certainly outweigh the benefits. [Bakan, p. 49] The fundamental and obvious fact that the Coca Cola corporation makes junk food, with virtually no nutritional value, at significant cost to the health and pocketbooks of the people who buy it, has no relevance to the company as long as its activities result in profits for its shareholders. The executive director of Pepsi Cola stated openly that the majority of the products sold by the company are junk: "as long as there is a mouth, we will put food in it." [Moore] It is basically up to the consumer to know what he is putting in his mouth and to take the necessary precautions, something that is obviously difficult when the bulk of advertising dollars is directed toward children. A can of Coca Cola contains approximately 10 teaspoons of sugar. According to a study published in the scientific journal The Lancet, the probability that a child will become obese increases with each can of sweetened soft drinks that he or she consumes. Obesity can be aggravated can cause poor blood circulation and heart problems. It can also cause serious physical and psychological problems such as depression, eating disorders, and low self-esteem. In some people, Coca Cola can cause flare ups of gastritis. In 1998, the non-governmental organization Multinational Monitor accused Coca Cola of being one of the ten worst corporations for having "filled children up with sugar and carbonated water." A recent study by the Word Health Organization recommended limiting the sale and advertising of soft drinks. The recommendation was based on studies that found a direct relationship between an increased incidence of diseases such as obesity and diabetes and the aggressive advertising of soft drinks. The Mexican Association of Studies for the Defense of the Consumer confirmed that almost 83 percent of the population had cut milk out of its diet because of its high cost and that the annual sales of milk in the country were only about half the amount spent on soft drinks. [CIEPAC] In recent years, the major Coca Cola bottlers have stopped using sugar cane (sucrose) to sweeten their soft drinks and have substituted high fructose corn syrup, with the aim of lowering the cost of making the soft drink. However, it has been shown that high fructose corn syrup metabolizes in the body differently than sucrose. In addition, the corn used to manufacture high fructose corn syrup is in many cases genetically modified, and its effects on human beings have not been determined with certainty. [Wikipedia] Finally, Laura Olgumn, professor at the National College of Biological Sciences of the National Polytechnic Institute, has found that the Coca Cola Zero sold in Mexico contains a sweetener that has been banned in the United States for almost 40 years because it may be carcinogenic. The use of cyclamates has not been allowed in food, drinks, or food supplements since 1969, according to Olgumn, because consuming them in large quantities may cause cancer. [Virtigo] The Campaigns Against Coca Cola Like the psychopath it resembles, the corporation feels no moral obligation to obey the law-For a corporation, compliance with law, like everything else, is a matter of costs and benefits-If the chance of getting caught and the penalty are less than it costs to comply, our people thing of it as being just a business decision. Executives, when deciding whether to comply with or break a law, behave rationally and-make cost effective decisions [-] which means they ask, "hats the penalty, what the probability of being caught, how much does that add up to, and how much does it cost to comply and which is bigger?" [Bakan, p. 79-80] The problems continue today. The threats against workers who want to unionize in Colombia continue. On December 6, 2007, the paramilitary group "Black Eagle Front" circulated a death threat to the leaders of SINALTRAINAL, a few days after a Nestli worker affiliated with the union was murdered, and at the same time as the union was holding its general assembly. The threat said in part, "You guerilla sonofabitch, your time has come, take care of your family because it is in greater danger than you are." [SINALTRAINAL] Neither the Coca Cola corporate headquarters in Atlanta nor its bottler, FEMSA, in Mexico City has made any statements about this new aggression. The illegal practices are ongoing. In Mexico, the 14 Coca Cola bottlers in the country are facing 70 lawsuits for engaging in monopolistic practices, since on many occasions they have prohibited small shopkeepers from selling rival brands of soft drinks. [Thomson] For these practices, Coca Cola has received the highest fines in the history of corporations in Mexico. [Zacune] It is unlikely that these fines will bring about a change of attitude. FEMSA, for example, also owns an enormous network of self-service Oxxo mini-stores, with more than 5,200 points of sale in Mexico alone. It is predictable that these stores will tend to favor its major soft drinks, along with the juices and nectars of the Del Valle company, which it just bought. Faced with the outrages provoked by the paradigmatic Coca Cola corporation, various activist organizations in several companies have promoted a boycott of its products. The campaign has reported some significant successes. Thanks to numerous and creative actions, carried out mostly by students, Coca Cola products have been banned from about 60 institutions of higher education in various countries. [Peck] At the World Social Forum, July 22 was declared "World Day Against Coca Cola" in order to protest "the deaths of unionists in Colombia, the financing of Zionism and the campaign of George Bush, the theft of land and water in many countries around the world, and the harmful health consequences caused by the drinks manufactured by this emblematic multinational, which is a symbol of imperialism." [Rebelisn] Another tactic activists have used to call attention to the company has been the participation of "shareholder activists" in annual meetings that the corporations are required to conduct in certain countries. The activists objectives are to disrupt and provoke scandal by asking uncomfortable questions at these meetings, which are traditionally complacent and self-congratulatory, in order to force the directors to operate with greater transparency, to raise the consciousness of smaller shareholders, and to cause opprobrium among the population at large, through information that at times gets media coverage. Activist Ray Rogers has designed many campaigns against large international companies, including the "Stop Killer Coke" campaign. Rogers has commented, "You cant confront powerful institutions and wait for them to make meaningful concessions unless you pressure them with force and power-the [anti]corporate campaign is in reality a means of confronting power with power." Rogers tactics successfully forced the giant textile corporation J.P. Stevens to sign a contract with the textile workers union. [Baran] Similarly, the campaign against Coca Cola has had good results at more than 120 universities. [Peck] The principal objective of these campaigns then is, in short, to affect the profits of the corporation to such an extent that a cold cost-benefit analysis makes it clear that it is more profitable to stop committing the offenses that motivated the boycott than to continue committing them. Such campaigns have had success in the past, they may well have success in the future, and it is undoubtedly necessary to continue them. However, in spite of the indisputable successes of the high visibility campaigns designed by Rogers and other activists, one fact is clear: in general, all corporations behave in the same way. Confronting them one by one by means of campaigns designed ad hoc to provoke consternation among the shareholders and consumers is a tactic that, in the long run, will not produce much in the way of structural changes. In the long run, nothing will prevent other corporations from acting similarly. At the end of the day, the principal objective is not only to get Coca Cola to change its practices, but to transform the laws and structures so that corporations stop anti-social behavior. From this perspective, Pepsi Cola or Big Cola arent "alternatives" to Coca Cola because their corporate practices are exactly the same(10). Are there alternative strategies or actions? The author of The Corporation, Joel Bakan, offers some alternatives that could be explored along with boycotts: * Improve the regulatory system, which would include a reevaluation [-] of government regulations to bring corporations under democratic control, e.g., so that corporations stop working egotistically. Revoking the charter of a particularly antisocial corporation would be a worthwhile consideration in a more democratic society. * Strengthen political democracy through the public financing of election campaigns, in order to stop the enormous influence that corporations have in the political sphere through their donations to candidates. * Create a robust public sphere in which all types of social groups can discuss what values (clean air y water, nutritional foods, health children, a healthy environment) are too sacred to be sacrificed to globalized capitalism. The alternative approaches that Bakan recommends can produce positive results. But they are implicitly based on a premise that, in the world in which we live, becomes less valid by the day - that is, that there exist two spheres, the corporate and the governmental, which are more or less independent and autonomous. Today in many countries, especially in those in which the democratic tradition is incipient or historically weak, the premise is no longer valid and thus the obstacles to realizing at least the first two options that Bakan suggests are formidable. Bakan cites Harvards Joe Badaracco in this regard: "We are evolving-towards a system where corporations have an enormous and an arguably disproportionate influence on our political system". Democracy requires, at a minimum, some measure of equality of opportunity to participate in the political process. Yes profound inequality is the result when corporations-exercise the same rights as individuals within that process. Entrepreneur Robert Monks says we face a "situation of great precariousness, dangerously close to the co-optation of government by business-Unless we are extremely attentive to the inclination of business to dominate government, it could well be that the institution [of government] will fade. [Bakan, 106] Precisely because of the penetration of the corporation into the governmental apparatus in many countries, and because today the government works for the corporations, it would be difficult to imagine that reforming the system utilizing the limited and decreasing space that civil society occupies within this system can have satisfactory results. In the short and medium term, it is valid to work through the reforms and battles in which civil society will have to engage in order to gain ground against the corporations. In the long term, however, only systemic change makes sense, since the survival of the planet depends on imposing a logic that is radically different from the one to which the destructive and predatory corporations has given rise. REFERENCES Amirica Econsmica, "Comisisn antimonopolio de EE.UU. aprueba compra de Panamco", 7 de febrero de 2003. American Anthropological Association, "AAA announces Coca-Cola resolution", 28 de febrero de 2007. www.aaanet.org. ANRed-L (Agencia de Noticias Red Accisn), "La unidad de los trabajadores es lo que va a cambiar la relacisn de fuerzas desfavorable", 29 de julio de 2006, www.anred.org/article.php3?id_article=1634. Bakan, Joel, The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, Nueva York, 2004. Baran, Madeleine, "Death squads have assassinated eight trade union leaders in Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia", Dollars and Sense, noviembre/diciembre de 2003, www.dollarsandsense.org. Bell, Beverly, "Cola Wars in Mexico", In These Times, 6 de octubre de 2006, www.inthesetimes.com/article/2840. Bellinghausen, Hermann (2001), "Agresiva campaqa de Coca Cola de Chenalhs a Acteal, La Jornada, 3 de noviembre de 2001. Bellinghausen, Hermann (2005), "Coca-Cola disfraza de altruismo su apropiacisn del agua en Chiapas", La Jornada, 22 de febrero de 2005. Blanding, Michael, "The Case Against Coke", The Nation, 1 de mayo de 2006, www.thenation.com/doc/20060501/blanding. Campos Garza, Luciano, "Las cocas de FEMSA", Proceso, No. 1602, 15 de marzo de 2007. Castro Soto, Gustavo, "Coca-Cola: la historia negra de las aguas negras", 13 partes. CIEPAC, 2003-2005. La serie esta disponible en www.ciepac.org/campanas/cocacola/documentos.php. CIEPAC, "Toma conciencia: campaqa de boicot contra Coca Cola", folleto, Chiapas, 2006. Collingsworth, Terry, "Another `Classic Coke` Move to Deny and Delay Accountability for Human Rights Violations in Colombia", en Worker Rights News, Vol. 9, No. 1, primavera de marzo de 2006, www.ilrf.org/. Enciso, Angilica (2005-A), "El gobierno opts por privatizar y comercializar el recurso", en "Agua, edicisn especial", La Jornada, diciembre de 2005. "Agua, edicisn especial", La Jornada, diciembre de 2005, p.116. Enciso, Angilica (2005-B), "Denuncian maniobras de Coca-Cola para adueqarse de agua en Chiapas", La Jornada, 27 de abril de 2005. FEMSA, "Csdigo de itica", disponible en www.b2i.us/profiles/investor/fullpage.asp?f=1&BzID=994&to=cp&Nav=0&LangID=2&s=0&ID=1991. Garcma Garcma, Antonino, "La gestisn del agua en la cuenca endorreica de San Cristsbal de Las Casas, Chiapas", tesis de maestrma en Ciencias en Desarrollo Rural Regional, Universidad Autsnoma de Chapingo, Estado de Mixico, junio de 2006. Giorgio Trucchi, Sanchez, "Represisn sindical en Coca Cola FEMSA", La Fogata Digital, www.lafogata.org/06latino/latino3/nica_4.htm. India Resource Center, "Community Protests Coca-Cola Plant in India", 25 de octubre de 2007, www.indiaresource.org. Leech, Garry M., "Coca-Cola Accused of Using Paramilitaries to Target Colombian Unionists", NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 35, No.2, septiembre/octubre de 2001. Mariscal, Angeles, "Chiapas, abundancia y contaminacisn", en "Agua, edicisn especial", La Jornada, diciembre de 2005. "Agua, edicisn especial", La Jornada, diciembre de 2005, p.78. MinutoUno, "Coca Cola promete restituir los 200 litros de agua que usa por cada uno de la gaseosa", 5 de junio de 2007, Buenos Aires, disponible en www.minutouno.com/1/hoy/article/Coca-Cola-promete-restituir-los00-litros-de-agua-que-usa-por-cada-uno-de-la-gaseosa%5Eid_31404.htm. Moore, Angela, "Indra Nooyi`s Pepsi challenge", MarketWatch, 6 de diciembre de 2007, disponible en: www.marketwatch.com/news/story/indra-nooyi-puts-her-brand/story.aspx?guid=%7B442A36A9-B79E-4A9D-BE2A-AAF7D8292BA3%7D. Morris, Betsy, "The Real Story: how did Coca-Cola`s management go from first rate to farcical in six short years", Fortune Magazine, 31 de mayo de 2004. Peck, Adam, "Coca Cola, Pepsi, or Cadbury-Schweppes", The Statesman, 13 de diciembre de 2007. Polaris Institute, "Coke Further Undermines Colombian Investigation", Ottawa, Canada, 14 de junio de 2007, www.polarisinstitute.org/coke_further_undermines_colombian_investigation. Rebelisn, "Hoy, Jornada internacional de boicot a la multinacional Coca-Cola", 07 de julio de 2007. Sicilia, Javier, "Coca-Cola y homofobia", Proceso, No. 1514, 6 de noviembre de 2005. SINTRAINAL (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos), "Amenazados dirigentes de SINALTRAINAL trabajadores de Coca Cola", disponible en www.sinaltrainal.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=65&Itemid=32. Thomas, Mark, "Dispatches: Mark Thomas on Coca-Cola", video sobre la Coca Cola, producida para la televisisn britanica Channel 4, transmitida el 19 de noviembre de 2007, disponible en www.killercoke.org. Thomson, Adam, "Coca-Cola enfrentara mas demandas", El Universal, Mixico, 29 de mayo de 2007. Virtigo, Mixico, No. 354, 30 de diciembre de 2007, p.91. Wikipedia, "Criticism of Coca-Cola has come from many sources for various reasons", en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Coca-Cola. Zacune, Joe, "Coca Cola: The Alternative Report", War on Want, marzo de 2006. NOTES 8. A large part of what follows about the conservation of resources by the indigenous communities in Huitepec comes from Garcma, especially pages 203, 207, and 208. 9. On the occasion of the signing of the San Andris Accords, the EZLN and the federal government issued a joint pronouncement. In a separate section of Conclusions, it said, in part, the following: "The Federal Government assumes the obligation to construct, with the different societal sectors and in a new federalism, a new social pact that radically modifies the social, political, economic, and cultural relations with the indigenous peoples. The pact must eradicate the everyday forms and public life that generate and produce subordination, inequality, and discrimination, and must effectuate the corresponding rights and guarantees: the right to a different culture; the right to their habitat; the use and enjoyment of the land, in compliance with article 13.2 of Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization; the right to political self-management of the communities; the right to develop their culture; the right to their traditional systems of production; the right to management and implementation of their own development projects." See www.ezln.org/san_andres/documento-1.htm 10. In Mexico the soft drink Pacual is a possible alternative, to the extent that its organizational structure (a workers cooperative) allows it to separate itself from the immoral conduct observed in corporations. Thanks to Msnica Wooters, CIEPAC member, for her support in this research, and to Antoine Libert, CIEPAC colleague, for his comments on a previous version of this essay. Our grateful thanks to Carol Pryor for her excellent translation into English. -- The Center for Economic and Political Investigations of Community Action (Civil Association)CIEPAC A.C., is a member of the Movement for Democracy and Life (MDV) of Chiapas, the Mexican Network of Action Against Free Trade (RMALC) www.rmalc.org.mx, Convergence of Movements of the Peoples of the Americas (COMPA ), Network for Peace in Chiapas, Week for Biological and Cultural Diversity , the International Forum "The People Before Globalization", Alternatives to the PPP and of the Mexican Alliance for Self-Determination (AMAP) that is the Mexican network against the Puebla Panama Plan. 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