Killer Coke's charges go flat
THE DOG DAYS of summer offer just enough heat and cover for an effective political attack. Remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?
In August 2004, that group of Bush-backing Vietnam veterans turned up the heat and condemned John Kerry as unfit for presidential duty. This August, Ray Rogers, the man behind the New York-based Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, is working to paint Deval Patrick as unfit to be governor of Massachusetts.
Rogers, a Beverly native and graduate of the University of Massachusetts, returns this week to the Bay State to launch a well-orchestrated anti-Patrick attack. A longtime labor activist, he is also the creator of KillerCoke.org, a website devoted to fighting the alleged corporate sins and human rights abuses of
Rogers is supposedly a one-man attack band, so he is recruiting volunteers to help spread his anti-Coke, anti-Patrick message. Some would-be volunteers, he said, are connected to other Massachusetts political campaigns, although he declined to be specific. ``We are getting calls from other candidate offices," said Rogers. ``. . . People want to be helpful."
Does that make Rogers a tool of Patrick's rivals? He says no. But it is hard to separate him from the opposition research that goes on during hot political campaigns. Who is paying for the leaflets and his Bay State travels? Who is behind this all-out effort to derail Patrick? Five labor union representatives who support Patrick yesterday sent a letter to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance requesting that Rogers be investigated for campaign finance law violations. Rogers, they said, is a public relations consultant who is soliciting and expending money to advocate Patrick's defeat. They questioned whether Rogers is coordinating his activities with any other political committee or candidate, and whether any person or entity connected to a candidate or political committee is donating to his cause.
Meanwhile, ``Killer Coke" makes a variety of nasty charges concerning Patrick's tenure at Coca-Cola. The most serious is that Patrick ``tolerated and defended Coke's Colombian bottlers who conspired with paramilitary thugs to kidnap, torture, and murder union leaders." Plaintiffs in a federal suit filed in 2001 charged that Coca-Cola bottlers ``contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces" to use extreme violence, including murder, to silence trade union leaders.
I happened to be at a Patrick event in Stoneham on May 15, when he was asked about the matter by someone in the audience. Patrick told his questioner, ``We did investigate." But, he said, ``We could not establish a link between the company I worked for and the paramilitary." (Coca-Cola lawyers argued at the time that it did not own and, therefore, did not control the bottling plants.) The case against Coca-Cola was dismissed and that ``was the right legal outcome," Patrick said in Stoneham. However, he said he was not satisfied with the legal outcome and told Coke's CEO that ``people want confidence in the brand." He said that he subsequently ``proposed and publicly pledged to send an independent arbiter to Colombia." The company declined to launch an independent investigation and ``that's why I resigned," Patrick said.
Now, as a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Patrick is running as a populist who will stick up for the little guy. So, yes, Democratic primary voters must decide which best represents Patrick's true heart and political gut: his current rhetoric or his corporate experience with the likes of Coca-Cola, Texaco, and Ameriquest. He should be held accountable for any inconsistencies in his story or positions. He was an advocate for civil and human rights in the early years of his legal career; from there, he obviously moved onto a more lucrative private-sector practice.
To turn his later years as a corporate lawyer into the personification of evil seems a stretch -- but it's a stretch Rogers is trying to make. ``He is unfit to be governor because he's an insider involved in making the policies and decisions that harmed people and communities throughout the world," he said.
In an interview with the Globe's Frank Phillips, Patrick said, ``People have to figure whether they want to call me a liberal loony or a corporate devil."
Unfortunately, Patrick's comment echoes the sad extremes of modern campaign rhetoric. The truth about most people is almost always somewhere in between. But political attack campaigns care less about truth and light -- and more about generating enough heat to burn and destroy.
Joan Vennochi's e-mail address is vennochi@globe.com. 
