Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Retaliation as Strategy
I just got through listening to a radio program about Coca-Cola's inability to import its beverages bottled in India to the US or Europe due to its content of pesticides at 34 times the level allowed by public health agencies. So, for the time being--or until Congress can alter these public health regulations--these products can only be marketed in the third world, where cancer from soda pop will hardly be noticed amidst the carcinogenic waste dumped daily in the fields and streams of IMF/World Bank-sponsored loans for related industrial projects, the interest on which has already necessitated closing down public health programs there.
This happy thought led me to recall a headline yesterday about some oil or chemical company executive making something like 600 million dollars a year to make sure such projects in the third world continue, and I couldn't help asking how it is that executives like these haven't been assassinated. All in due course I guess.
Not that retaliation is necessarily a wise strategy or effective tactic, but, given the circumstances, I can hardly condemn anyone for it on moral grounds.
This happy thought led me to recall a headline yesterday about some oil or chemical company executive making something like 600 million dollars a year to make sure such projects in the third world continue, and I couldn't help asking how it is that executives like these haven't been assassinated. All in due course I guess.
Not that retaliation is necessarily a wise strategy or effective tactic, but, given the circumstances, I can hardly condemn anyone for it on moral grounds.
