The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [112]
The inevitably dubbed “Battle in Seattle” inaugurated the modern anti-globalization movement (or as some within the movement insisted on calling it, the “anticorporate globalization” movement). This time, unions were allied with environmentalists, marching side by side in Seattle with activists dressed as sea turtles under the slogan “Teamsters and Turtles Together!” After Seattle, a patchouli-scented caravan of activists and black-masked anarchists followed the economic elite to meetings of the WTO, IMF, G8, and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in cities across the world, stalling much of their agenda.
Even after energy was siphoned off from the movement in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the new alliance between environmental and labor activists against corporate globalization held strong. It’s that attitude students brought with them when they returned to campus in the fall of 2003, at the same time the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke was finding its feet. Suddenly, here was a campaign against the very symbol of American capitalism, accused of horrific crimes of murder and intimidation in a far-off country. Rogers encouraged anyone who wanted to run with the campaign to download literature and campaign materials from the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke’s website. But even he was surprised when word came that a 1,200-student college in Illinois had removed Coke from its campus in favor of Pepsi after a student petition. Soon after, 1,400-student Bard College in upstate New York followed suit, on the basis of violations to the code of conduct it implemented for vendors after the sweatshop campaign.
It was enough for the Coca-Cola Company to take notice. “Unfortunately, Bard College officials appear to be relying on discredited allegations that have been reviewed and repeatedly rejected by courts and independent investigations in the United States and Canada,” Coke spokeswoman Lori Billingsley told the Atlanta Business Chronicle (without elaborating on which investigations she was referring to). “There is no factual or legal basis that our company and its bottling partners were responsible for wrongful conduct in Colombia.”
Despite Coke’s denials, the college campaign really took off across the Atlantic when the 20,000-student University College Dublin scheduled a referendum on dropping its contract with Coke. With three thousand votes cast, the measure passed by fewer than sixty votes. Coke flew into action, sending in a public relations representative from Latin America to give a presentation in support of the company; SINALTRAINAL countered by sending Luis “Chile” García to present its side. When a revote came down on November 19, 2003, the campaign won by an even higher margin than before—causing the first serious blow against the company, and putting the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke on the map.
In a sense, colleges seemed the perfect venue for the campaign—a way to “cut out markets” in the one place that Coke was most eager to keep them in order to develop that key early brand loyalty. Meanwhile, Corporate Campaign could rely on a virtually unlimited amount of foot soldiers that cost it virtually nothing—a not insignificant fact given that the campaign never had more than a $100,000-a-year budget, compared with Coke’s $30 billion. The college battle also created waves far from campus, as the media piled on Coke’s alleged misdeeds overseas. Coke’s hometown Atlanta Business Chronicle wrote a long, unflattering article, and business magazine Forbes ran a cover story titled “Coke’s Sinful World” that mentioned the situation in Colombia. Rogers’s strategy of publicly embarrassing the company was working—and the company only dug itself into a deeper hole when it tried to fight back. When Carleton College invited Coke spokeswoman Lori Billingsley to speak in the spring of 2004, Rogers was in the audience. When she repeated her assertion that an independent investigation had cleared the company, he leaped up, yelling, “They’re lying!