Cola Republic

By W. Edwin Hinds IV

Yesterday I caught some glimpses of a documentary that was running on my television as I washed dishes in the nearby kitchen. Water pregnant with surfactant solution streaming down the drain as I rinsed away the mess while the voice of my favorite prisoner, number 655321, narrates. Macolm McDowell has a countenance and aural signature which commands my attention, his heritage in Science Fiction cinema and television essentially assures that level of respect from me. So I listened, and listened well oh my brothers and sisters.

The thrust of the film is about the deprivations of global corporations and the governments they buy off in third-world countries, via the one-two punch of the World Bank and World Trade Organization. The World Bank lends money to these countries, money which cannot be paid back because the corrupt local governments loot the proceeds and hand out anything that is left to their constituents, essentially buying votes. Part of the loan is an assurance that the debtor nation will remove tariffs, which are a tax on the poor if the country imports more than it exports, but in this case it is the World Trade Organization opening the doors for multinational corporations to push aside the marketplace and rape natural resources. All of this is done with the collaboration of corrupt local officials, who could give a damn about their neighbors. The natural resource of choice for exploitation is water.

This is very much the case in Mexico City, where the largest single concession of water rights was given to Coca-Cola. In the city that spawned the cultural meme of “don’t drink the water” the poor get the shaft while government and their corporate cohorts reap the benefit of cheap water with which to mix their toxic brew and ship it to gleeful American yuppies who pound Mexican Coke thinking of it as only the latest fad to follow while they drive their Prius. Instead, they are paying for the shipment of water from Mexico and into the Estados Unidos, contributing to the desertification of the planet. Seething run-on hatred, in rant form against my favorite Piñata, the conspicuous consumer of the western world who purchases their culture from the mall while sticking mass produced corporate green products up their ass, assuming that makes them an environmentalist. I digress.

In Belize the people took to the streets to prevent their water from being purchased by Bechtel. This all begs the question of, who the hell is selling all the water? Who is naive enough to think they can sell their planet, who can sell their mother? The government of Belize, of course! The duly elected organized-crime oligarchs put the military and police on the streets to defend the judicial rape of water resources by foreign entities. That was not enough, the people organized and achieved a victory against Bechtel, destroying the attempts of privatization. At this point in the documentary, I couldn’t help but think of the Chemical Brothers music video for “Out of Control”. Young revolutionaries fighting black-clad gendarmes in the sweltering streets of a nameless latin nation, which turns out to be a movie set where they are creating a Viva Cola commercial.

It gets worse! Yes, I wish I could say it didn’t. Africa is in bad shape, the Aral Sea was destroyed by the “Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature”, The Bush family is buying land in Paraguay to control the massive aquifer beneath it, multinationals are running amok all over the planet privatizing water, government is selling YOUR water rights, and best of all the UN has reports that assume all out conflict over water will occur in key regions by the year 2025.

The government has contempt for you, the corporations have a short view of the future because they have a lender of last resort and final arbiter who will shoot peasants to protect profits. The World Bank and World Trade Organization are destroying the planet through fiscal tyranny in the perpetuation of a dollar hegemony.

Enjoy Coke. Its the LAW, tovarisch.