Social Justice Television: June 14th Edition of Social Justice Television

We begin this edition of SJTV with a video short from KillerCoke.org who are organizing a campaign against the Coca Cola Company over allegations they hired death squads to suppress Union Organizing activities in it's Columbian bottling plants in South America.

In July 2001, the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund (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) 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 www.soaw.org, the website of SOA 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.

COKE CAN'T HIDE ITS CRIMES IN COLOMBIA

Isidro Segundo Gil, an employee at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Colombia, was killed at his workplace by paramilitary thugs. His children, now living in hiding with relatives, understand all too well why their homeland is known as "a country where union work is like carrying a tombstone on your back." Read More...

Listed below are union leaders at Coca-Cola's Colombian bottling plants who have been murdered. Hundreds of other Coke workers have been tortured, kidnapped and/or illegally detained by violent paramilitaries, often working closely with plant managements.

Date	Name	Coca-Cola Plant

1989	Avelino Achicanoy	Pasto
4/8/94	Jose Elaseasar MancoDavid	Carepa
4/20/94	Luis Enrique Giraldo Arango	Carepa
4/23/95	Luis Enrique Gomez Garado	Carepa
12/5/96	Isidro Segundo Gil	Carepa
12/26/96	Jose Librado Herrera Osorio	Carepa
6/21/2001	Oscar Dario Soto Polo	Monteria
8/31/2002	Adolfo de Jesus Munera Lopez	Baranquilla

Voting Machine Security Demo
We will also see a brief Security Demonstration from Princeton University Computer Scientists who claim they created a demonstration on vote stealing software that can be installed in under one minute. For more information go to http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting or http://engineering.princeton.edu/news/felten06

In the second half of todays show we will hear from visionary designer and architect William McDonough as he calls for us to to rethink how we make things and incorporate sustainable design into human industry http://www.mcdonough.com

“I believe we can accomplish great and profitable things within a new conceptual framework—one that values our legacy, honors diversity, and feeds ecosystems and societies . . . It is time for designs that are creative, abundant, prosperous, and intelligent from the start.”

William McDonough is a world-renowned architect and designer and winner of three U.S. presidential awards: the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), the National Design Award (2004); and the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003). Time magazine recognized him as a "Hero for the Planet" in 1999, stating that "his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world."

Mr. McDonough is the founding principal of William McDonough + Partners, Architecture and Community Design, an internationally recognized design firm practicing ecologically, socially, and economically intelligent architecture and planning in the U.S. and abroad. He is also the cofounder and principal, with German chemist Michael Braungart, of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), which employs a comprehensive Cradle to Cradle design protocol to chemical benchmarking, supply-chain integration, energy and materials assessment, clean-production qualification, and sustainability issue management and optimization.

Author of Cradle to Cradle

Now in its fifth printing . . .