Coca-Cola, los Derechos Humanos y la Represión Laboral

Según http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, la corporación número uno en la cartera de acciones de Warren Buffett es Coca-Cola. La empresa tiene un historial abismal de derechos humanos, especialmente notable gracias a su colorida historia de reprimir la organización laboral. Según un artículo de Jeremy Rayner para el Centro John F. Henning para las Relaciones Laborales Internacionales:

Hay creciente evidencia de que las empresas estadounidenses son cómplices de la persecución de sindicalistas en sus operaciones colombianas. En el caso de la planta embotelladora en Carepa, donde Isídro Segundo Gil fue asesinado, el sindicato Sinaltrainal sostiene que Coca-Cola deliberadamente se mantuvo al margen y permitió al gerente de la planta traer paramilitares para destruir el sindicato. Los trabajadores en la planta de Carepa habían estado pidiendo a Coca-Cola y su embotellador, Bebidas y Alimentos, intervenir en su nombre durante dos meses antes del asesinato de Isídro Segundo Gil. El gerente de la planta, Ariosto Milan Mosquera, había anunciado públicamente que él había pedido a los paramilitares destruir el sindicato. Su declaración había sido seguida por una serie de amenazas de muerte de los paramilitares, que habían llevado al sindicato a enviar cartas a Coca-Cola y a Bebidas y Alimentos pidiendo que interviniesen para asegurar la seguridad de sus trabajadores. Y esa no fue la primera vez que se habían llevado a cabo amenazas contra los trabajadores. Justo dos años antes, en 1994, los paramilitares habían asesinado a dos sindicalistas en la misma planta. No debería haber sorprendido a nadie cuando dos meses y medio después de la súplica de ayuda por parte del sindicato, Isídro Segundo Gil fue asesinado y el sindicato fue suprimido.

Más sindicalistas han sido asesinados en otras plantas embotelladores en Colombia, tanto antes como después del incidente en Carepa. Un sindicalista, José Avelino Chicano, fue asesinado en la planta de Coca-Cola en Pasto en 1989. En el 2002, a pesar de la limitada publicidad acerca de los hechos en Carepa, un líder sindicalista llamado Oscar Dario Soto Polo, fue asesinado durante el curso de negociaciones contractuales en la planta de Bucaramanga. A pesar del coraje y la notable perseverancia de los activistas laborales de Colombia, la campaña de intimidación necesariamente ha tenido un impacto en la organización laboral. El presidente de Sinaltrainal, Javier Correa, reportó el año pasado que el número de trabajadores sindicalizados en plantas de Coca-Cola había caído en más de dos tercios desde 1993, de 1.300 trabajadores a solo 450.

Este tipo de campañas de intimidación violenta han sido ayudadas e instigadas por los dólares del contribuyente estadounidense. Muchos de los involucrados en estas campañas de violencia anti-sindicalista se graduaron de la infame Escuela de las Américas del Departamento de Defensa de los Estados Unidos. Los paramilitares de derecha que masacran regularmente a los organizadores laborales están cercanamente conectados al ejército Colombiano, que recibe cantidades enormes de asistencia del gobierno estadounidense para dedicar a la guerra contra las drogas y la guerra sucia contra las anti-capitalistas Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). En consecuencia, aunque Warren Buffett pagase más impuestos, al menos una parte de ese dinero se canalizaría hacia la violencia contra organizadores laborales.

Además de la brutalidad en Colombia, Coca-Cola ha estado implicada en acciones de violencia e intimidación contra sindicalistas en Guatemala. Estas y otras violaciones de derechos humanos se detallan en http://killercoke.org/.

Nótese que al contrario de la imagen progresista de Buffett, él se beneficia inmensamente de las violaciones de derechos humanos de Coca-Cola. Si Buffet en realidad quiere “tomar en serio el sacrificio común”, debería sacrificar los beneficios que ha obtenido de las tácticas corruptas de Coca-Cola y usar parte de su inmensa riqueza para ayudar a los trabajadores de Coca-Cola que sufren alrededor del mundo gracias a esas tácticos. También debería repudiar la ayuda militar del gobierno estadounidense y sus intervenciones imperialistas en países como Colombia.

Wells Fargo y el Complejo Carcelario Industrial

La segunda corporación en importancia en la cartera de acciones de Warren Buffett es Wells Fargo. La empresa es una gran receptora de asistencia social corporativa. Por ejemplo, recibió 43,7 millardos de dólares provenientes de impuestos federales para rescatarla de la quiebra. Pero peor aún es la inversión de Wells Fargo en mercaderes de prisiones. Wells Fargo tiene 4 millones de acciones en Geo Group, la segunda más grande corporación de cáeceles privadas de los Estados Unidos, y 50.000 acciones en Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), la más grande corporación de cárceles privadas en el país. Estas acciones combinadas tienen un valor de más de 120 millones de dólares. (Fuente: http://www.cjjc.org/en/news/50-immigrant-rights/215-wells-fargo-divest-from-prisons).

Corporaciones como Geo Group y CCA no ganan su dinero proveyendo bienes o servicioes a clientes. Más bien, ganan dinero exclusivamente otorgado por el gobierno, y exclusivamente por la actividad de encerrar seres humanos en jaulas, la mayoría de las veces por ofensas no violentas. Además, estas empresas cabildean activamente para introducir leyes injustas, en gran parte haciendo uso del Consejo de Intercambio Legislativo Estadounidense (ALEC), un grupo político corporativista de corte conservador. Tal como Bob Elk y Mike Sloan escribieron recientemente en un artículo para The Nation:

ALEC ayudó a implementar algunas de las leyes condenatorias más duras que existen hoy en día, como los mínimos obligatorios para delitos de drogas no violentos, las leyes de “tres strikes”, y las leyes de “verdad en la sentencia”. Sólo en 1995, la propuesta de Verdad en la Sentencia de ALEC se convirtió en ley en veinticinco estados. (El representante estatal Scott Walker era un miembro de ALEC cuando patrocinó las leyes de verdad en la sentencia de Wisconsin y, según PR Watch, utilizó sus estadísticas para argumentar a favor de la ley). Más recientemente, ALEC ha propuesto “soluciones” innovadoras al hacinamiento que ayudó a crear, como la privatización del proceso de libertad condicional por “el éxito probado de la industria de la fianza privada”, como recomendó en 2007. (La Coalición de Fianza Estadounidense es un miembro ejecutivo del Grupo de Trabajo de Seguridad Pública y Elecciones de ALEC). ALEC también ha trabajado para aprobar leyes estatales para crear cárceles privadas con fines de lucro, de gran beneficio para dos de sus principales patrocinadores: La Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) y el Geo Group (anteriormente Wackenhut Corrections), las mayores empresas de prisiones privadas del país. Una Investigación de In These Times durante el verano pasado, reveló que ALEC organizó reuniones secretas entre legisladores estatales de Arizona y CCA para escribir lo que se convirtió en la Ley SB 1070, la notoria ley de inmigración de Arizona, para mantener las prisiones de CCA llenas de inmigrantes detenidos. ALEC ha demostrado ser expertamente capaz de inventar infinitas formas de ayudar a las empresas privadas a beneficiarse de la masiva población carcelaria del país.

Estas leyes aumentan el número de personas pacíficas encerradas en jaulas, así como las longitudes de sus sentencias. Los que terminan tras las rejas son casi sin excepción miembros de la clase obrera, y son desproporcionadamente gente de color. Mientras tanto, el Geo Group y CCA obtienen ganancias obscenas de estas leyes clasistas y racistas. Wells Fargo se beneficia de invertir en estas empresas, y Warren Buffet se beneficia de invertir fuertemente en Wells Fargo. Si Warren Buffet pagase más en impuestos, al menos una parte de esos impuestos irían al complejo industrial-carcelario y luego irían directamente a la cuenta bancaria insondablemente grande de Warren Buffet.

Warren Buffet, el Mercader de la Guerra

El gobierno “mima a los súper-ricos” especialmente en tiempos de guerra. En la guerra, la gente pobre y obrera es enviada a luchar y morir en tierra extranjera. Son enviados a matar a la gente de países pobres, y los que mueren representan desproporcionadamente a la clase obrera del país. Mientras tanto, los ejecutivos corporativos e inversores se benefician fuertemente de la venta de armas, vehículos y otros dispositivos usados para asesinar gente pobre en una tierra distante. No debería sorprender a nadie que Warren Buffet se encuentre entre los inversores que se benefician del complejo militar-industrial estadounidense.

Según http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, Buffet tiene 7,8 millones de acciones de General Electric (GE). GE produce una gran variedad de productos, muchos de los cuales le permiten beneficiarse de la guerra. GE le ha vendido al ejército estadounidense aviones, misiles, bombas y sistemas informáticos para el campo de batalla, entre muchas otras cosas. Además, GE ha sido acusada muchas veces de defraudar al gobierno estadounidense en relación a sus contratos de defensa.

Warren Buffett también tiene 34,2 millones de acciones en ConocoPhilips y 0.4 millones de acciones en Exxon Mobil, dos empresas petroleras que se han beneficiado de la invasión de Iraq. Este año Buffett consideró seriamente invirtir en General Dynamics, una compañía que genera todas sus ganancias a través de contratos militares.

Un aumento en la carga impositiva de Warren Buffet no cambiaría esta dinámica en lo más mínimo. Por supuesto, la mayoría de los dólares de impuestos van a los denominados “gastos de defensa”, que no son nada más que subsidios manchados de sangre a estas y otras compañías del complejo militar-industrial.

Monsanto y el Monopolio de las Patentes

CNN Money reportó en 2010 que Warren Buffet tuvo acciones en Monsanto. Monsanto es una empresa agroindustrial y de biotecnología, mejor conocida por desarrollar cultivos de organismos modificados genéticamente (OMG). Por esta razón, la empresa ha sido confrontada fuertemente por muchos grupos ambientalistas. El impacto de cultivos OMG es un tema de debate científico que no voy a discutir en este artículo. Sin embargo, es sumamente notable que Monsanto haya hecho uso de la ley de patentes para aplastar a productores pequeños, en una ilustración dramática del “monopolio de las patentes” sobre el que han escrito durante muchos años los anarquistas individualistas como Benjamin Tucker.

Las semillas modificadas genéticamente de Monsanto están todas patentadas, dándole a la compañía privilegios monopolistas, y la capacidad de usar la violencia estatal para acosar a cualquier agricultor que guarde semillas, o incluso a aquellos cuyos campos son accidentalmente polinizados por los cultivos modificados genéticamente de Monsanto. Monsanto ha llevado a cabo más de 100 pleitos de patentes contra agricultores. Uno,Kem Ralph, tuvo que pagar 3 millones de dólares y pasar tiempo en la cárcel simplemente por guardar semillas, una práctica agrícola muy común. Estas tácticas agresivas de Monsanto han llevado a un grupo de agricultores representados por la Fundación de Patentes Públicas a luchar.

En nombre de 22 organizaciones agrícolas, 12 negocios de semillas y 26 granjas y agricultores, la Fundación de Patentes Públicas (PUBPAT) está demandando a la compañía de biotecnología en la corte federal del distrito de Manhattan y asignado al Juez Naomi Buchwald.

Los demandantes orgánicos tenían que protegerse preventivamente de las posibilidad de contaminación de sus cultivos por Organismos Modificados Genéticamente (OMGs), dijo PUBPAT.

“Este caso pregunta si Monsanto tiene el derecho de demandar a agricultores orgánicos por infracción de patente si las semillas transgénicas aterrizan en su propiedad”, dijo Dan Ravicher, el director ejecutivo de PUBPAT y profesor de leyes en la Escuela de Ley Benjamin N. Cardozo en Nueva York. PUBPAT es una organización de servicios legales sin fines de lucro, basada en la escuela de leyes Cardozo. Su misión declarada es “proteger la libertad en el sistema patentes”.

“Parece muy perverso que un agricultor orgánico contaminado por semillas transgénicas pueda ser acusado de infracción de patente, pero Monsanto ha hecho acusaciones así, y es conocida por haber demandado a cientos de agricultores por infracción de patente, así que teníamos que actuar para proteger los interesas de nuestros clientes,” dijo en un comunicado de prensa.

Es inquietante que un pleito así sea necesario. Es inquietante que una corporación pueda usar al estado para ejercer esta forma de control e intimidación contra agricultores pequeños. Es probablemente más inquietante que un multimillonario que invierte en, y se beneficia de estas prácticas violentas de negocio, sea celebrado como ícono progresista.

Es Hora de dar la Pelea en la Guerra de Clases

Warren Buffet tiene una frase muy famosa: “Hay una guerra de clases, de acuerdo, pero es mi clase, la clase rica, la que está haciendo la guerra, y estamos ganando.” Buffett hablaba del código de impuestos, pero eso apenas rasga la superficie de la violenta y rapaz guerra de clases que los súper ricos hacen contra la gente ordinaria. Se hace un poco difícil hacer del código de impuestos la prioridad máxima cuando uno se entera de cómo los líderes sindicalistas están siendo asesinados, de las guerras que se hacen innecesariamente, de que se está encerrando en la cárcel a gente pacífica, y que se está forzando a la quiebra a los agricultores, todo por el bien de los beneficios corporativos. Los cambios al código de impuestos nunca van a solucionar esos temas. ¿Entonces, qué lo hará?

Todos los problemas que he identificado aquí provienen de la misma fuente: el poder centralizado irresponsable. Cuando a un estado centralizado se le da el poder de hacer la guerra, sus asesinatos son considerados como “políticas públicas” más que crímenes, y cuando las corporaciones pueden influenciar la política estatal, las guerras en pro de las ganancias son un resultado inevitable. Cuando se le da el poder a un estado centralizado para encarcelar gente pacífica, lo hará. Cuando los negocios son poseídos y controlados por unos pocos inversores y ejecutivos ricos en lugar de ser autogestionados por los trabajadores, éstos sufrirán el deterioro de sus condiciones materiales y ataques viciosos a su libre asociación. La gente debería tener control sobre sus propias vidas, en lugar de que las decisiones más importantes que los conciernen se hagan en Washington o en las salas de reuniones corporativas. Es hora de construir una verdadera resistencia al poder coercitivo y a la autoridad. Es hora de resistir a las guerras y las cárceles, de defender a los trabajadores, de construir redes de ayuda mutua, de crear alternativas de base a los programas gubernamentales y a las corporaciones capitalistas. Es hora de construir una sociedad nueva en la cáscara de la vieja.

Este es un mensaje que no vas a recibir de Warren Buffett. Los cambios superficiales al código de impuestos resultarían en una sociedad un poco más estable, con una población algo más feliz, pero él aún podría beneficiarse de la violencia rapaz y coactiva ejercida contra la gente pobre y obrera. Una revolución real, una sociedad en que la gente se organizase desde abajo y rechazase violencia institucional, sería desastrosa para Warren Buffett. Porque en una sociedad libre, billonarios como Buffett quizás tendrían que aprender a trabajar para vivir.

Artículo original publicado por Nathan Goodman el 26 de noviembre de 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Wade Craig, editado por Alan Furth.

No, but the government sure does. Maybe that’s why the Koch Brothers put so much money into lobbying groups and think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation whose main purpose is to influence government policy.

“Oh,” but you say. “They’re not looking to make money through increased government coercion. Far from it! They’re just lobbying government to get out of the economy so they can take their chances competing on their merits in an unfettered market economy.”

Well … not quite.

The legislative agenda pursued by groups like ALEC, Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute isn’t exactly libertarian. At least not if, by “libertarian,” you mean anything more principled than “whatever big business wants from government to make it profitable.”

As an example, consider so-called “Ag-Gag” bills  — written by ALEC — that  prohibit undercover journalists from exposing animal abuse within corporate agribusiness. This past year such bills were introduced in nine states and signed into law in three.

The Koch Brothers are also enthusiastic advocates (to say the least) of the Keystone XL pipeline, standing to make billions from the project if it’s completed. Needless to say, Keystone’s route depends heavily on the use of eminent domain to steal land from family farmers, and Keystone’s government backers have run roughshod over Indian lands (including sacred burial grounds) guaranteed by treaty. Last I heard, eminent domain is only possible through coercion — you know, that thing David Koch said he lacks the ability to do.

The Keystone project is also heavily dependent on regulatory state preemption of ordinary common law standards of civil liability for the air and groundwater pollution and health damage fracking causes to surrounding communities. And the Koch brothers are also prominent cheerleaders for “tort reform” — i.e., making it more difficult to hold corporations liable for their wrongdoing and make them pay for the harm they’ve caused.

So the actual pattern we see is the Koch brothers and their pet think tanks actively encouraging a near-totalitarian level of state intervention to suppress all the mechanisms of civil society — investigative journalism by a free and independent press, a vigorous system of civil liability, etc. — that would help keep business honest and hold it accountable. Hardly surprising, when you consider Koch Industries got its start building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. Say, now — he had the power to coerce, didn’t he?

While we’re at it, ALEC has actively lobbied for the draconian drug laws and for detention of “illegal aliens” [sic] that are so profitable to its sponsors like CCOA, Wackenhut and other private prison corporations. That doesn’t sound too libertarian, does it?

And how about David Addington’s new No. 3 role at Heritage? Addington was Dick Cheney’s go-to guy for writing legal memos on stuff like indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance. You can see why a guy like that would be a perfect fit for a think tank that’s all about “limited government” and “restoring the Constitution.” All sarcasm aside, I think you can see that people like this have a very, um, skewed idea of what “freedom” means.

The role of people like Charles and David Koch, and of think tanks like ALEC, AEI and Heritage, in the larger free market libertarian movement is a lot like that of the Pharisees in the Judaism of Jesus’s time. “Whited sepulchres” and “generation of vipers” are some of the terms he used, I think.

The Pharisees, Jesus said, would cavil and split hairs for years on the finer points of the law, while utterly disregarding its spirit; they would tithe their very herbs, while putting their money into their day’s equivalent of tax-free nonprofit foundations to avoid taking care of their aged parents.

The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of world off their land.

It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple.

Coca Cola, Human Rights, and Labor Suppression

According to http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, the #1 corporation in Warren Buffet’s stock portfolio is Coca Cola.  Coca Cola has an abysmal human rights record, most noteworthy thanks to its colorful history of repressing labor organizing.  According to an article by Jeremy Rayner for the John F. Henning Center for International Labor Relations:

There is mounting evidence that American companies are complicit in the persecution of trade unionists at their Colombian operations. In the case of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, where Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered, the union Sinaltrainal argues that Coca-Cola knowingly stood by and allowed the plant’s manager to bring in paramilitaries to destroy the union. The workers at the Carepa plant had been asking both Coca-Cola and its bottler, Bebidas y Alimentos, to intervene on their behalf for two months before Isídro Segundo Gil’s murder. The plant manager, Ariosto Milan Mosquera had announced publicly that he had asked the paramilitaries to destroy the union. His declaration had been followed by a series of death threats from the paramilitaries, which had prompted the union to send letters to both Coca-Cola and Bebidas y Alimentos asking that they intervene to secure their workers’ safety. And this was not the first time that threats against workers had been carried out. Just two years before, in 1994, the paramilitaries had killed two trade unionists at the same plant. It should have surprised no one when two and a half months after the union’s plea for help, Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered and the union busted.

Unionists have also been assassinated at other Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia, both before and after the incident at Carepa. One unionist, José Avelino Chicano, was killed at a Coca-Cola plant in Pasto in 1989. In 2002, despite the limited publicity surrounding the events at Carepa, a union leader named Oscar Dario Soto Polo was killed during the course of contract negotiations at the plant in Bucaramanga. Despite the remarkable courage and perseverance of Colombia’s labor activists, the campaign of intimidation has necessarily taken its toll on worker organizing. The president of Sinaltrainal, Javier Correa, reported last year that the number of unionized workers at Coca-Cola plants had dropped by more than two thirds since 1993-from 1,300 workers to only 450.

Such campaigns of violent intimidation have been aided and abetted by US tax dollars.  Many of those involved with these anti-union campaigns of violence were graduates of the Defense Department’s infamous School of the Americas.  The right wing paramilitaries which regularly slaughter labor organizers are closely connected to the Colombian military, which receives huge amounts of aid from the US government so as to fight the drug war as well as a dirty war against the anti-capitalist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Thus, even if Warren Buffett were to pay more in taxes, at least some of that money would go to violence against labor organizers.

In addition to brutality in Colombia, Coca Cola has been implicated in violence and intimidation against unionists in Guatemala. These and other Coca Cola human rights violations are profiled in detail at http://killercoke.org/.

Note that, contrary to Buffett’s progressive image, he profits immensely off of Coca Cola’s human rights violations.  If Buffett really wants to “get serious about shared sacrifice,” he should sacrifice the profits he has gained through the corrupt tactics of Coca Cola and use some of his immense wealth to help the Coca Cola workers suffering throughout the globe thanks to those tactics.  He should also repudiate the US government’s military aid and imperialist intervention in countries like Colombia.

Wells Fargo and the Prison Industrial Complex

The number two corporation in Warren Buffet’s stock portfolio is Wells Fargo.   Wells Fargo is a major beneficiary of corporate welfare.  For instance, they received $43.7 billion in federal taxpayer bailout money. But far more destructive is Wells Fargo’s investment in prison profiteers.  Wells Fargo owns 4 million shares in the Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, and 50,000 shares in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the country.  These shares combined are valued at more than $120 million (Source: http://www.cjjc.org/en/news/50-immigrant-rights/215-wells-fargo-divest-from-prisons).

Companies such as the Geo Group and CCA do not earn their money by providing goods or services to customers.  Rather, they make their money solely from the government, and solely for locking human beings in cages, mostly for non-violent offenses.  Further, these companies actively lobby for unjust laws, largely using the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporatist conservative political group.  As Bob Sloan and Mike Elk wrote in a recent article for The Nation:

ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Timesinvestigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

These laws increase the number of peaceful people locked in cages, as well as the lengths of their sentences.  Those they lock up are almost without exception members of the working class, and they are disproportionately people of color.  Meanwhile, Geo Group and CCA gather obscene profits from these racist and classist laws.   Wells Fargo then profits by investing in these firms, and Warren Buffett profits by investing heavily in Wells Fargo.  If Warren Buffett were to pay more in taxes, at least some of those taxes would go to the prison industrial complex and then head straight back to Warren Buffett’s unfathomably large bank account.

Warren Buffett the War Profiteer

Never does the government “coddle the super rich” more than in times of war.  In war, poor and working people are sent to fight and die in a foreign land.   They are sent to kill the populations of poor countries, and those killed disproportionately represent the country’s working class.  Meanwhile, corporate executives and investors profit heavily by selling the weapons, vehicles, and other devices used to murder poor people in a distant land.   It should not surprise you to learn that Warren Buffett is among the investors profiting off of the American military industrial complex.

According to http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, Buffett owns 7.8 million shares of General Electric stock.   GE produces a wide variety of products, and their war profiteering portfolio is no less diverse.  General Electric has sold the US military aircraft, missiles, bombs, and battlefield computer systems, to name a few.  Further, GE has been charged multiple times with defrauding the US government in relation to their defense contracts.

Warren Buffett also owns 34.2 million shares in ConocoPhilips and 0.4 million shares in Exxon Mobil, both of which are oil companies which have profited from the invasion of Iraq.  Earlier this year Buffett seriously considered investing in General Dynamics, a company which earns all of its revenue through military contracts.

An increase in Warren Buffett’s tax burden would not change this dynamic in the slightest.  Indeed, the bulk of tax dollars go to so called “defense spending,” which amounts to nothing more than blood stained subsidies to these and other military industrial complex corporations.

Monsanto and the Patent Monopoly

CNN Money reported in 2010 that Warren Buffett owned stock in Monsanto.  Monsanto is a controversial agribusiness and biotechnology firm, best known for developing genetically modified organism (GMO) crops. For this reason, they have been strongly opposed by many environmental groups.  The impact of GMO crops is a topic for scientific debate which I will not discuss here.  However, it is incredibly noteworthy that Monsanto has enlisted patent law to crush small producers, in a dramatic illustration of the “patent monopoly” long written about by individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker.

Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds are all patented, granting the company monopoly privileges and the ability to use state violence to harass any farmers who save seeds, or even those whose fields are cross pollinated by Monsanto’s GMO crops.  Monsanto has filed over 100 patent lawsuits against farmers.  One, Kem Ralph, has had to pay $3 million dollars and serve prison time, simply for saving seeds, a common agricultural practice.   Such aggressive tactics from Monsanto have prompted a group of farmers represented by the Public Patent Foundation to fight back:

On behalf of 22 agricultural organisations, 12 seed businesses and 26 farms and farmers, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is suing the biotech company in the federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Naomi Buchwald.

The organic plaintiffs had to pre-emptively protect themselves from potential patent infringement in case of accidental contamination of their crops by genetically modified organisms (GMOs), said PUBPAT.

“This case asks whether Monsanto has the right to sue organic farmers for patent infringement if Monsanto’s transgenic seed should land on their property,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s executive director and a law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. PUBPAT is a non-profit legal services organisation based at Cardozo law school. Its stated mission is “to protect freedom in the patent system.”

“It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement, so we had to act to protect the interests of our clients,” he said in a press release.

It is disturbing that such a lawsuit is necessary. It is disturbing that a corporation can use the state to exercise this sort of control and intimidation against small farmers. It is perhaps more disturbing that a billionaire who invests in and profits from these coercive business practices is being held up as a progressive icon.

Time to Fight Back in the Class War

Warren Buffett famously said “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”  Buffett was talking about the tax code, but that barely scratches the surface of the violent and rapacious class warfare the super-rich are waging against ordinary people.   It becomes a bit difficult to make tax law your top priority when you realize that labor leaders are being murdered, unnecessary wars are being fought, peaceful people are put in prison, and farmers are coerced into bankruptcy, all for the sake of corporate profits.  Changes to the tax code will never fix that.  So what will?

Every problem I have identified here stems from the same source: Unaccountable centralized power.   When a centralized state is granted the power to wage war, its killings are presumed to be “policy” rather than crimes, and corporations can influence state policy, wars for profit are the inevitable result.   When a centralized state is given the power to lock up peaceful people in cages, it will.  When businesses are owned and controlled by a few wealthy investors and CEO’s rather than through workers’ self management, the workers will see their material conditions suffer and their free association under vicious assault.  People should have control over their own lives, rather than seeing their most important decisions made from Washington, DC or some corporate board rooms.  It’s time to build a real resistance to coercive power and authority.  It’s time to resist wars and prisons, to stand up for workers, to build networks of mutual aid, to create grassroots alternatives to government programs and capitalist corporations.  It’s time to build a new society in the shell of the old.

This is a message you won’t receive from Warren Buffett.  Surface changes to the tax code would give him a slightly more stable society with a happier population.  But he would still be able to profit from rapacious violence and coercion against poor and working people.  A real revolution, a society in which people organize from the bottom up and reject institutional violence, would be disastrous for Warren Buffett.  Because in a free society, billionaires like Buffett might have to learn to work for a living.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, No Grave a los Ricos, Rompa su Privilegio: Una Respuesta a Warren Buffett.

When it comes to understanding ALEC, I think Carson said it best:

ALEC’s proposals represent “free enterprise” in much the same way that a chain gang from one of their “private” prisons represents “free assembly.”

ALEC has supported some of the most tyrannical legislation in recent memory. It wrote SB 1070, Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant “Papers Please” law. Why would a “limited government” organization support giving police new powers to violate privacy and attack immigrants? Because detaining more immigrants means more profits for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), one of ALEC’s corporate members. CCA receives taxpayer money to operate prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers. ALEC’s anti-immigrant laws, as well as its harsh sentencing bills, exist to keep prisons full for CCA’s benefit. Locking human beings in cages so that a corporation can receive government money hardly sounds like a free market policy to me.

ALEC also endorsed the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Like SOPA, its sister bill, PIPA would empower the government to censor the Internet in the name of protecting so-called “intellectual property” (IP). IP “rights” are monopoly privileges granted by government. They coercively limit competition to keep prices artificially high. In addition to enforcing monopoly privileges, PIPA would allow censorship of sites that even link to copyrighted content, flying in the face of the First Amendment.

Consequently, the bill faced diverse opposition from groups including Google, Wikipedia, Human Rights Watch, and the Tea Party Patriots. But ALEC apparently does not support free markets or limited government enough to stop supporting a bill that would eviscerate internet freedom and the First Amendment. As always, corporate profits come first for ALEC.

In addition to advertising itself as an advocate of free markets, ALEC talks a lot about championing federalism. Yet the very nature of ALEC undermines one of the principal advantages of federalism. In theory, federalism is valuable because it keeps decisions under local control, allowing people to influence the policies that govern their lives, and leaving them the option to move if they disagree with local policies. Yet ALEC is a mechanism for multinational corporations to push similar legislation in every state. This erodes local control, putting power in the hands of a national organization run by multinational firms. Furthermore, by pushing similar legislation in all 50 states, ALEC undermines the ability of citizens to ‘vote with their feet’ and leave states that pass bad laws.

ALEC further undermines federalism using their International Relations Task Force. This task force exists to push international trade agreements. While this may seem benign, so-called “free trade” agreements do much more than just lower trade barriers. These agreements create centralized international bodies that can overrule decisions and laws passed by national and local governments. This is the very antithesis of federalism. Is it possible that ALEC supports these international bodies on free market grounds? To the contrary, ALEC pushes trade policies that they say “strengthen the intellectual property rights of our members.”  And as we have seen, IP regimes are anti-competitive, not free market, policies.

Ultimately, ALEC’s member corporations do not support liberty. Rather, they fear the freedom and decentralization their stated principles would permit. In a free market, they would not be able to collude with legislators for favors or profit from prisons and IP monopolies. In a society with decentralized federalism, corporations couldn’t use trade agreements to force pro-corporate policies globally.   Corporate power needs state power to thrive, so ALEC fights daily for state power, all while talking about “free markets.”