WTF are we doing!

Last month at the annual general Coca Cola meeting, the shareholders asked the corporation to eliminate BPA (Bisphenol A, a synthetic estrogen and ubiquitous plastic component) from it’s cans. The corporation refused to do so. 26% of the shareholders voted to search for a replacement or alternative for BPA. Coca Cola stated that scientific research so far has been insufficient to determine if BPA really causes harm to the human physical body. When we look at the point of who has the final say in this issue we can see that the corporation is overruling it’s shareholders. And that’s where the 2005 Coca Cola slogan “make it real” kicks in. In most cases businesses and multi- nationals are driven by the greed of their shareholders, pushed into unethical actions to accumulate more money. In the case of Coca Cola we can see that the corporation is “getting real” and has become an entity that’s acting on it’s own.

It shows a lot of arrogance when a big corporation like Coca Cola is closing it’s eyes for the proven consequences of the use of BPA in packaging which is ultimately ending up in our food chain. Coca Cola is using it as inner coating of their soda can’s, the coke does slowly leach the coating and the BPA dissolves in the soda. By drinking their canned soda pop one gets so to speak a BPA bonus. This bonus can lead to the following physical conditions: a reduction of the male and female reproduction, breast cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinological diseases, thyroid diseases, metabolism problems, obesity, early onset of puberty and cardiovascular endocrinological issues. All of these conditions are, according to Coca Cola, not proven to be related to their canned soda and therefore it doesn’t exist. We all love to close our eyes and make the bad things go away, so no judging here, the difference with one individual and a corporation is the scale on which the consequential outflows are manifesting itself.

So what makes a corporation really different from the individual, except for the larger scale of consequences? A corporation is a large group of individuals that are bind together through money. The word corporation does already reveal it’s mission. When we divide the word into corpus and operation, you can see that all the individuals together form a corpus, which is latin for body and can therefore be seen as an entity. So the entity operates as the embodiment of their main goal, making money. All the individuals are in the corpus to make a living and earn money. By doing a bad job they risk losing their jobs, to avoid this the individual needs to be less critical about the corpus in order to follow the goal of money making. In other words the individual will turn a blind eye when it comes to morals and ethics. Everybody is pleasing the one who stands a step higher within the corpus in order to keep their job. Therefore it’s not ultimately the CEO the individuals have to answer to, it’s money that rules from top down and throughout all layers of the corpus.

In the case of Coca Cola it’s money that speaks when it’s not willing to withdraw their cans and not willing to search for alternatives for BPA. Withdrawing all the cans worldwide is a financial loss the corpus will not take in order to keep itself alive. The same goes for the research into other coating products. Even money making is more important than polishing the image of the corporation who has been using the extract of coke leaves in their soda pops more than 100 years ago when they just started the business. They can be this arrogant since the owner of the corporation is money. Over the past 100 years they hooked with money a lot of people on coke. They exchanged or bribed with their soda governments for the return of political influence in poor mostly South American countries.

In Argentina around 45 years ago, Coca Cola used to hand out their coke on the beaches and got mainly kids hooked on their soda, their future consumers. One of them was Cesare, an Italian boy that grew up with his parents and sister in Argentina. He and his friends knew which beaches to go in order to get a free coke. He ended up addicted for life, when he woke up he had breakfast with a coke and when he went to bed he had a coke at his bed stand. When he was still a young child he suffered from an ulcer due to all the coke he drank, in adulthood he struggled with obesity and a lot of other health conditions, but he was still not able to give up his addiction to coke. In his fifties while at work his heart suddenly stopped beating and he died. His family didn’t make a case out of this and didn’t sue Coca Cola, they neither investigated why he had died at such a young age.

Cesare was the collateral damage of a corporation where one individual came up with the idea of handing out free coke. This individual formed a group within the corpus to investigate and commercialise this idea in order to get all the responsible individuals to like the idea and transform it into a corporate policy. On top of advertising they handed out samples to get people to like their product and aimed for kids to get life time consumer clients. They all were driven by their boss, called money, and were no longer able to see that addicting people to this product was not in the best interest of all and that the corpus was turning into an evil entity that didn’t give a shit about its clients. Money, the boss of the corpus, wanted to attract more money and didn’t care anymore how to establish this, which ended up in like attracts like. There was no real plan or consideration for the fact that wanting more and more has its limits. The corpus became this large heavy machine that was no longer able to be stopped until the plug will be pulled and no one will buy their product anymore.

That’s where we come in, because it’s too easy to blame a corporation for the damage they do without investigating where we, ourselves stand within this story. The corpus is part of life on planet earth, we are part of life on planet earth, therefore we’re all as responsible as all individuals. Buying the product is keeping a corporation alive. Buying an unbranded product is most of the time the same as buying the branded product, since there are only a few corporations that manufacture all brands worldwide. Not buying the product is still allowing the corporation to exist. So it looks that either way we are in deep shit if we want to stop a corporation from being an evil entity. Not buying anything from corporations would make us starve or doing the impossible and make all stuff and food ourselves.

The real question here is, are we going to take our responsibility or do we turn a blind eye and enjoy all the money opportunities in life. When money is the goal and drive for individuals to keep corporations going in order to survive or to gather more than their financial fair share, then it’s obvious what needs to be pulled out of the equation. MONEY. WTF are we doing people? We’re sustaining these corporations by buying their products and with the same hand we used to buy, we finger point to the same corporations to blame them for the damage they bring. It’s an issue of the pot calling the kettle black. Within our current society there is no sustainable solution to avoid corporations from becoming evil entities. Now money is greed and survival, therefore it will not unconditionally support life.

To develop corporations that can operate as a corpus in the best interest of all, we need another money system. We need to change completely to get the evil out of our system and at the same time out of the world system. There are already solutions ready to be implemented, the only thing that’s missing is enough people that understand that they are responsible for the current world. Unless we change ourselves there will never be a sustainable change within this world. Therefore throwing away a tender like money is the same thing as throwing away the pan after the food is spoiled. We as humanity are not ready and self-honest enough to get society working without the exchange of a tender/currency. An Equal Money System provides currency for every human in order to have a basic income in life from birth to death. Currency for the labor that’s done, so nobody has to work to survive, but does work in order to support society. Nobody has to come up with ideas that does not support life in order to please his boss and not get fired. Within an EMS a corporation can never develop itself into an evil entity, because it will simply not allow itself to go against life.