This week Allie and I drove up to Wimington, DE — home to many credit card companies and corporate headquarters, due to something special about Delaware's tax law. Who knew I would be back to Delaware so soon? The Coca-Cola Corporation decided this was an appropriate place to hold a share"owners" meeting (that's shareholders to all you non-corporatespeak types). Given Coke's human rights and environmental abuses in Colombia and India, we decided this was an appropriate place to protest! It's actually the second year for our visit to Coke, and the deck was fully stacked with proxies ready to lambast Coke's eternal dodge of responsibility for their bottling plants "happening" to employ paramilitary thugs to kill union leaders. The CEO even saw fit to address these abuses in his opening remarks, hoping to weasel out of it with a report from a notoriously ineffective monitoring agency, CalSafety. CalSafety didn't find any wrongdoing, much as they hadn't during an inspection of the infamous El Monte, CA sweatshop where workers were forced to work at gunpoint behind barbed wire. Fancy that!
Outside the hotel, a small but stalwart group of us picketed and chanted such things as, "Diet, Cherry, or Vanilla! Coca-Cola is a Killah!" again. The nice thing about Coke as a target is that it really gives rise to activist creativity. I'd give my left nostril to never hear "Hey hey, ho ho! Something bad has got to go!" One of our students gave a wonderful treatise on why CalSafety is wholly inadequate. The meeting went an hour over, and nothing other than our agenda got in edgewise. Remember kids, just say no to Coke (and Minute Maid, Odwalla, and Dasani).
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