staticbrain.com

Coke is the Drink of the Death Squads

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

About half of the union organizers that are killed in the world each year are Colombian. Colombia is also the biggest recipient of United States military aid in the hemisphere. Coincidence?

We need your help to stop a gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings and torture of SINALTRAINAL (National Union of Food Industry Workers) union leaders and organizers involved in daily life-and-death struggles at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia.

In July 2001, the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Forum (www.laborrights.org) filed a lawsuit on behalf of SINALTRAINAL, several of its members and the estate of Isidro Gil, one of its murdered officers. The lawsuit and campaign aim to force Coca-Cola to prevent further bloodshed and to provide safe working conditions.

Coca-Cola bottlers “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilize extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders,” the lawsuit states. It also notes that Colombian troops connected with the paramilitaries have trained at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC at Fort Benning, Ga., where trainees were encouraged to torture and murder those who do “union organizing and recruiting;” pass out “propaganda in favor of workers;” and “sympathize with demonstrators or strikes.” This was made public when the Pentagon was forced to reveal the contents of training manuals used at the school. (For more information, see School of the Americas Watch websiteSOA Watch.) The year that the lawsuit was filed, The Coca-Cola Co. made $4 billion in profits and paid its CEO, Douglas Daft, more than $105 million. Coca-Cola continues to rake in billions each year, yet the frightening conditions at the Coke plants remain unchanged. Labor unions and human rights advocates in the United States can stop these atrocities at Coca-Cola’s bottling plants.

Please read the enclosed exposés. The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke will move the fight to the doorsteps and into the boardrooms of Coca-Cola and its key financial ally, SunTrust Banks. As long as SunTrust, “the bank of Killer Coke,” maintains its intimate ties to Coke through board interlocks, large stock holdings and credit relationships, SunTrust, along with Coca-Cola, will be a principal target of this campaign. We ask you to take part in this most important struggle. By working together, we can protect our sisters and brothers and restrain corporations like SunTrust and Coke that behave so immorally and irresponsibly. Any support you give will be greatly appreciated and acknowledged.

In solidarity,

Javier Correa, President, Sinaltrainal
William Mendoza, President of SINALTRAINAL, Barrancabermeja.
Ray Rogers, Director, Campaign to Stop Killer Coke

Download PDF

Campaign to Stop Killer Coke
P.O. Box 1004, Cooper Station
New York, NY 10276-1004

You can email us at: stopkillercoke@aol.com

You can call us at the following number:
(718) 852-2808

Ray Rogers, Campaign Director

Protest Coke and Lobby Coke’s Board of Directors

COKE CAN’T HIDE ITS CRIMES IN COLOMBIA

A few corporate power brokers at Coca-Cola and Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks today stand accused as accessories to a violent crime wave. While they sit on their assets, workers at Coke bottling plants in Colombia risk their lives every day simply by going to work.

The world’s largest beverage company recently launched a $250 million U.S. advertising blitz on behalf of its flagship brand, keyed to the theme, “Coca-Cola…Real.” Meanwhile, the influential men who comprise the “$ix-Pack” subbornly refuse to acknowledge the horrific reality that Colombian Coke workers and their families are facing.

Let’s take a look at six individuals who could easily point Coke in the right direction — if only they would challenge the complacency and indifference that envelops their respective boardrooms.

Warren Buffett, No. 2 on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, has an estimated net worth of $30.5 billion. Nebraska’s celebrated “corn-fed capitalist,” chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, owns more than 200 million shares (8.1%) of Coke stock and has served on Coke’s Board of Directors since 1989.

Buffett not only ranks as the top Coke shareholder, but owns five million-plus shares (more than 2%) of SunTrust Banks, the financial institution so closely tied to Coke since its first public stock offering in 1919 that it is known as “Coke’s bank.”

Douglas Daft, Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Co., raked in more than $105 million in compensation for 2001. He owns 3.5 million Coke shares and 9,413 shares of SunTrust, where he sits on the Board of Directors. A form letter written “on behalf of” Daft last year to whitewash Coke’s role in Colombia claimed there’s “no evidence” to support “outrageous allegations against the company and its bottling partners.”

Coke Director Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of USA Interactive, is a Hollywood honcho who has “run more major studios — Paramount, Fox, Universal — than any mogul still standing,” according to Vanity Fair. With a net worth estimated at $900 million in 2001, he was quoted in The Wall Street Journal recently on corporate values: “When the values are right, good ideas catch on.”

SunTrust Banks Chairman, President and CEO Phillip Humann also a director of Coca-Cola Enterprises, owns 668,826 shares of the bank and 41,402 shares of CCE, Coke’s largest subsidiary. His 2001 compensation was a mere $2.27 million.

Gary Fayard, Coca-Cola’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, serves on the boards of CCE and Panamerican Beverages (also known as Panamco), one of Coke’s “anchor bottlers” and the distributor of its products in all of Venezuela, most of Colombia and parts of Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama. He may soon have an expanded role in the “new” company to be formed when Panamco, based in Miami, merges with Coca-Cola Femsa, based in Mexico.

Coke Director Donald McHenry is a professor at Georgetown University and a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He owns 35,066 shares of Coke stock. He frequently spoke out on human rights while serving in the Carter Administration, but he can’t seem to face up to Coke’s shameful collaboration with paramilitary terrorists and union busters in Colombia.

Protest Coke and Lobby Coke’s Board of Directors

Lyrics: Coke is the Drink of the Death Squads

Coke came to Colombia
Seeking lower wages
They got just what they came for
But as we turn the pages
We find the workers didn’t like the sound
Of their children’s hungry cries
So they said we’ll join the union
And they began to organize

So Coke called up a terrorist group
Called the AUC
They said “we’ve got some problems
At the factory”
So these thugs went to the plant
Killed two union men
Told the rest, “you leave the union
Or we’ll be back again”

Now Coke did not complain
About this dirty deed
Why give workers higher wages
When Coke is all they really need
They phoned the AUC
Said “thanks, without you we’d go broke
And to show our appreciation
Here’s one hundred cases of Coke”

(Chorus)
The baby drinks it in his bottle
When the water ain’t no good
The dog drinks it
But he don’t know if he should
Some folks say
It’s the nectar of the Gods
But Coke is the drink of the Death Squads

Well the workers wouldn’t take
This situation lying down
Some went up to Georgia
Said “look what’s happened to our town
You American workers got downsized
And as for us we just get shot
And those of us who survive
Our teeth begin to rot”

(Chorus)

Well now that’s the situation
What are you gonna do
‘Cause death squads run Colombia
And they’re paid by me and you
We can let Coke run the world
And see what future that will bring
Or we can drink beer and smash the state
Now that’s the real thing

(Chorus)

Visit KillerCoke.org

Technorati Tags: activist, activists, activism, Coke, Coca-Cola, Killer Coke, killer, killers, murder, murderers, Ft. Benning, School of the Americas, U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, Army’s School of the Americas, SOA, America, Americas, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC, pentagon, terror, terrorist, terrorists, death, death squads, Columbia, domestic terror, domestic terrorists, army, United States Army, US Army, USA, United States of America, AUC

The military is conquering technology using man-made materials including cameras, lenses, and projectors among other things like full-spectrum invisibility coatings for soldiers, tanks and airplanes to bend light around objects and make them appear invisible on the battlefield.

With a proficiency in technology that is downright scary the army in cahoots with the pentagon is creating meta-materials that would create invisible soldiers. They have found a way to “cloak” them so to speak.

“This so-called “super-lens” is already in development by Purdue University…” Army Eyes Invisibility Cloak

And it’s not just our military involved in these shenanigans monkeying around with invisibility. Britain is also testing invisibility apparatuses.

A soldier, who was at the trials, said:

“This technology is incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it. I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees - but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.” Army tests James Bond style tank that is ‘invisible’

It’s like something out of an H. G. Wells novel, this kind of subterfuge, this insane scheme, that can only lead to evil machinations. Think of a deranged, psychotic invisible loony on the rampage. With Big Brother invisible this could only be the beginning of the end, Apocalypse Now.

Technorati Tags: invisible, invisibility, invisible man, weapons, weapon, Britain, military, soldier, soldiers, tank, tanks, invisible tank, invisible, tanks, invisible soldier, invisible soldiers, Pentagon, war, battlefield, invisibility coatings, cloak, invisibility cloak, tank gun, tank guns, big brother

HAARP is the American military’s plan to manipulate the world’s ionosphere, and can create earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, jam all global communications, disrupt weather systems, interfere with migration patterns, disrupt human mental processes, negatively affect your health and disrupt the upper atmosphere. In this video Dr. Nick Begich discusses HAARP. HAARP technology is the ultimate radio frequency microwave weapons system disguised as a research instrument. Publicity gives the impression that HAARP is an academic project with the goal of changing the ionosphere to improve communications for our own good. However, according to U.S. military documents — HAARP aims to “exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes”.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?
by F. William Engdahl Global Research, October 30, 2005

No sooner are indictments being handed down to Scooter Libby, the Chief of Staff of the Vice President of the United States for lies and coverup of information used deliberately to suppress the fact the Bush Administration had no ‘smoking gun’ to prove Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear arsenal, but a new scandal is surfacing every bit as outrageous and ultimately, likely also criminal.

Against all scientific prudence and normal public health procedure, the world population is being whipped up into a fear frenzy by irresponsible public health officials from the US Administration to WHO to the United States Centers for Disease Control. They all warn about the imminent danger that a malicious viral strain might spread from infected birds, primarily in Vietnam and other Asian centers, to contaminate the entire human species in pandemic proportions. Often the flu pandemic of 1918 which is said to have killed 18 million worldwide, is cited as an example of what ‘might’ lie in store for us.

On November 1, appropriately enough the day after Halloween, President Bush is scheduled to visit the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland to announce his Administration’s strategy of how it will prepare for the next flu epidemic, whether from Bird Flu or some other strain. The plan has been a year in the making. On October 28 the Senate passed an $8 billion emergency funding bill to address the growing Avian Flu panic. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, in a moment of candor during the debate on the Senate bill told the press, ‘If it isn’t the current H5N1 virus that leads to an influenza pandemic, at some point in our nation’s future, another virus will.’ In the meantime taxpayer billions will have gone to a handful of pharmaceutical giants positioned to profit. None stands to reap more lucre than the Swiss-US pharmaceutical giant Roche Holdings of Basle.

The only medicine we are told which reduce the symptoms of general or seasonal influenza and ‘possibly’ might reduce symptoms also of Avian Flu, is a drug called Tamiflu. Today the giant Swiss pharmaceutical firm, Roche, holds the sole license to manufacture Tamiflu. Due to the media panic, the order books at Roche today are filled to overflowing. Roche recently refused a request from the US Congress to lift its exclusive patent rights to allow other drug manufacturers to produce Tamiflu with the improbable excuse that it was in effect, too complex for others to rapidly produce.

However, the real point of interest is the company in California who developed Tamiflu and gave the marketing rights to its patented discovery to Roche.

‘Rummy Flu’

Tamiflu was developed and patented in 1996 by a California biotech firm, Gilead Sciences Inc. Gilead is a NASDAQ (GILD) listed stock company which prefers to maintain a low profile in the current rush to Tamiflu. That might be because of who is tied to Gilead. In 1997, before he became US Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld was named Chairman of the Board of Gilead Sciences, where he remained until early 2001 when he became Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld had been on the board of Gilead since 1988 according to a January 3 1997 company press release.

An as-yet-unconfirmed report is that Rumsfeld while Secretary of Defense also purchased an additional stock in his former company, Gilead Sciences Inc., worth $18 million, making him one of its largest if not the largest stock owners today.

The Secretary of Defense, the man who allegedly supported the use of contrived intelligence to justify the war on Iraq, is now poised to reap huge gains for a flu panic his Administration has done everything it can to promote. It would be useful to know whether the Pentagon’s successor to Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans developed the strategy of biowarfare behind the current Avian Flu panic. Perhaps some enterprising Congressional committee might look into the entire subject of plausible conflicts of interest regarding Secretary Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld stands to make a fortune on royalties as a panicked world population scrambles to buy a drug worthless in curing effects of alleged Avian Flu. The model suggests the parallel to the brazen corruption of Halliburton Corporation whose former CEO is Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney’s company has so far gotten billions worth of US construction contracts in Iraq and elsewhere. Coincidence that Cheney’s closest political friend is Defense Secretary and Avian Flu beneficiary Don Rumsfeld? It is another example of what someone has called the principle of modern US corrupt special interest politics: ‘Concentrate the benefits; diffuse the costs’ President Bush has ordered the US Government to buy $2 billion worth of Gilead Science’s Tamilflu.

GMO Chickens come home to roost

But Tamiflu conflicts are perhaps just the tip of the iceberg of the Avian Flu story. There is high-level biological research underway in Britain and presumably also the United States to develop a genetic engineering method to make chickens and other birds ‘resistant’ to Avian Flu viruses.

British scientists are reportedly genetically engineering chickens to produce birds resistant to the lethal strains of the H5N1 virus devastating poultry in the Far East. Laurence Tiley, Professor of Microular Virology at Cambridge University and Helen Sang of the Roslin Institute in Scotland are involved in developing ‘transgenic chickens’ which would have small pieces of genetic material inserted into chicken eggs to allegedly make the chickens H5N1 resistant.

Tiley told the Times of London on October 29, ‘Once we have regulatory approval, we believe it will only take between four and five years to breed enough chickens to replace the entire world (chicken) population.’ The real question in this dubious undertaking is which GMO giants are underwriting the research and development of GMO chickens and who will control their products. It is increasingly clear that the entire saga of Avian Flu is one whose dimensions are only slowly coming to light. What we can see so far is not at all pretty.

Credits: Is Avian Flu Another Pentagon Hoax

Global Research Contributing Editor William Engdahl is author of ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto Press and the soon-to-be released book, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Geopolitics of Gene-ocide’. He can be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.