Everyone says that Robert is just a prince of a fellow. So when I read his opener, “I just did a speaking gig at Microsoft. Spoke to Nestle executives from around the world. Nice group of folks,” I naturally assumed that he’s had his head buried so far up the ass of technology that he hasn’t heard the news about certain multinational corporations and their cynical and rapacious greed.

It’s not just about the infant formula and the cash flow issues and the understimulated moms who are left with no alternative to formula feeding and an increasing infant mortality rate. Naturally, this is a story that can’t be lived down and the corporation should be broken up and asset values returned to the shareholders as a lesson regarding multinational corporate ethics. But there’s no international court to adjudicate that, no real hope for social justice. So we watch Nestle and try to curb their monstrous greed wherever we encounter it. And that “nice group of folks” line is bullshit. They, the so-called “nice executives from all over the world” are rapacious, greedy mother-fuckers or they wouldn’t have risen that high in the food chain at one of the most thoughtless and cruel corporations in the world.

Nestles corporate support of African slave labor in chocolate production should be enough to make any thinking, caring person turn his or her back on the nice-guy corporate execs, or spit on their shoes, or something.

Our local experience with Nestle/Perrier had to do with their corporate policies around illegal extraction of groundwater. We had to struggle for years to get these jerks to back-off their plans to dry up our aquifers in Wisconsin for their shareholders’ profits. Sadly, they moved on to Michigan and are now doing their best to suck that state dry.