Coca Cola and Starbucks have to be pragmatic not only regarding Russia itself, but to what their exclusion from the Russian market might lead to in their other core markets.
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Apologies in advance for again using the sanctioned Russia Today’s links to this story on Coca Cola and this other one on Starbucks as a springboard to say what hypocritical gangsters NATO are, not only with respect to Russia but in the world (der welt) at large as well but news wise, Russia Today continues to lead the field.
Although war criminals like British Foreign Minister David Cameron, who has the blood of hundreds of thousands of dead Libyans on his grimy hands, barks that not only Russia Today but all of Russia must be sanctioned to the core, Coca Cola and Starbucks have to be more pragmatic than that lap dog not only regarding Russia itself, but to what their exclusion from the Russian market might lead to in their other core markets.
Although NATO’s sanctions have forced both companies to withdraw from Russia, they are both now registering several trademarks with the Russian authorities, as they have to think through how to best play the long game. The Atlanta-based soft-drinks giant is now seeking to register three brands in Russia – Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Sprite – to ensure that no Russian, Chinese or Indian operator gets the jump on them by claiming those up-for-grabs brands for themselves, when their legal protection expires in 2025.
Coca Cola has famously been down this road many times before, most notably when they began the production of the Fantastic Cola drink, better known today as Fanta, for Hitler’s Wehrmacht. As Coca Cola were using the U.S. Marine Corps to corner the domestic American market and to penetrate markets overseas, their German buddies produced Fanta in Nazi Germany to fill the gap in the Nazi market that the exodus of Coca Cola from the banks of the Rhine had caused. Not only that, but Coca Cola’s German division, in true Deutschland über alles fashion, went on to corner the entire west European market after the War.
Russia had been very much a late comer to the Coca Cola empire, only being conquered at the 1980 Olympics. From that small beginning, Coca Cola spread like a cancer through Russia, until Russia was home to ten giant Coca Cola factories, drowning Russians in never ending rivers of Fanta, Sprite, Schweppes and a variety of other branded, patented products. Dobry, a Russian made cola, has now claimed a large part of that market for themselves and, no doubt, the Indians and Chinese are watching Dobry’s successes very carefully.
Though Coca Cola has the ugliest of histories, the fact is there is a market amongst youngsters for such syrupy slop and that market has to be satisfied to keep the kids happy as much in Russia, as it has to be in Vietnam or some similar country. I mention Vietnam because Coca Cola’s iconic ”I’d like to buy the world a Coke” 1971 Hilltop ad was made at the height of the Vietnam genocide. Just think about that for a second. When the scum of the USMC were raping their way across South East Asia and when the U.S. Air Force was bombing the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos back into the stone age, the Coca Cola company were telling them that the solution to all their problems was to drink their toilet cleaning fluid.
And then there is China with their tea drinking fetish, which Coca Cola wants to destroy, so that the Chinese drink their gruel instead. If Coca Cola could get 5% of young Chinese to drink their brew instead of their own much healthier green tea, what a bonanza that would be for them, unless the Scottish precedent upsets the apple cart. Scotland is the only country in the world where Coca Cola is not the most popular soft drink. Irn-Bru, which is an orange coloured liquid sugar concoction I wouldn’t give to a dying dog, is in top position there due, in very large part, to massive advertising.
Now, imagine if Masha and the Bear, as well as Kamila Valieva and Russia’s other sporting heroes gave Coca Cola the boot, what message would that send to NATO? If Ronaldo despises Coca Cola, who are Masha, Valieva and all of Russia, India and China to disagree?
Coca Cola’s collaboration with Hitler, as well as its cola wars with Pepsi epitomises the American way of doing business. Dominance, global dominance über alles in der welt, has always been their game and to get us to drink their muck, that is best used to clean out latrines.
But cola goes much further than your nearest latrine. Because sugar shaped the western world more than any other commodity, gold perhaps excepted, sugar and cola lobbyists abound on Capitol Hill. As their collaboration with U.S. Presidents from JFK to Nixon in the overthrow of Allende in Chile shows, their money packs a lot of political punch with America’s shot callers.
And, just as with Chile and Vietnam in the 1970s, so it is with Russia today. The Vietnam genocide was a sacrilege, with these Ronald McDonald worshipping, Big Mac chomping, Coca Cola swigging, napalm dropping sociopaths mowing down anything that moved and, adding insult to injury by telling the Vietnamese to buy themselves a Coke to get that loving feeling.
And, seeing as we are going all 1970s ”I’d like to buy the world a Coke” retro, the cola drinkers of the Islamic Republic of Iran are worth a mention because it was there, in sunny Tehran, that Coca Cola opened up the Middle East’s largest bottling plant just a few short weeks before the Islamic revolution kicked off. Although Iran is a cola friendly country, because it is not particularly American friendly, that plant was quickly nationalised and Coca Cola was officially banned, thus cutting off a huge slice of the Middle Eastern market from these predators.
And, though countries like Saudi Arabia produce a wide variety of soft drinks, splintered markets are of no use to Coca Cola unless they can be picked off one by one. From Scotland to Saudi Arabia and onwards to Sochi, that may no longer be the case.
Sure, Coca Cola wants us all to buy a Coke and that seems harmless enough on the surface and more so if you are stupid enough to take them and their pals at face value. Pals like Armin Papperger, the flamboyant CEO of “German” arms’ manufacturer Rheinmetall, who has seen his company’s share price jump by 1,200% as a result of the Ukrainian and other wars he has profited so handsomely from. Having already established several factories in Ukraine, Papperger wants to build a mega factory in some south western corner of that rump Reich, which is surrounded on almost all approaches from Russian drone and missile attacks by Romania and Poland. Not to second guess the Russians but Papperger’s factories and all Germans involved near or far in them should be in the mix when considering prime targets. But they should not be the only targets.
Ursula von der Leyen is another. This unelected autocrat has decided that billions of dollars of Russian assets in the European Union can be stolen to fund the coke habits of Zelensky and his fellow junkeys. Just to be clear how this con works, the aid goes to boost Rheinmetall and for von der Leyen and Europe’s other corrupt leaders to get their tens of millions in kickbacks. When Smedley Butler wrote that war is a racket, he had creepy crawlies like her, Papperger and that Cameron bullshitter in mind.
Though I’d like to buy the world a Coke, I’d be a bit slow to buy Putin one, lest he glass me with its bottle. Not only is Russia supposed to meekly acquiesce to its assets being robbed but it is expected to collude with Coca Cola, even as Eli Lilly refuses to sell its Humalog-brand insulin and other life-saving products to dying Russian children. And, though a lot of that is a rerun of NATO’s genocidal campaigns against Libya, Syria, Iraq and Vietnam, the hope has to be that von der Leyen, Papperger and Coca Cola will all come a cropper in Russia and countries further afield, just as Hitler and his Fanta drinking Wehrmacht did in times gone by.
