Forum Post: Occupy With a Purpose --- Boycot greedy executives.
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 25, 2011, 5:15 p.m. EST by kryogyn
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The only way to hurt a rich man is to make him poor. You can sit out in there in the park for 20 years and that won't get anything done. Now that you've got the attention and the hearts of the world it's time to do something. If I was the head of this movement I would learn from movements in the past in that the biggest way to affect change is the good old fasioned boycot. Figure out what company pays it's executives the most and boycot that company with the demand that they reduce executive compensation. Once that company either collapses or caves then you move to the next company that now has the highest paid executives. Wash rinse repeat until they respect the middle class once again. It's time to take back America one corporation at a time.
That is a good idea, but boycotts do take a long time because you can only attack one corporation at a time by targeting one of their products. (Blanket, multi-product boycotts tend not to work) The more complicated the boycott (ie "Nobody buy anything from Johnson and Johnson"), the harder it is to get going. If you tell people "Don't buy Johnson and Johnson baby powder," that has better chance at traction.
So what specific product would you target first?
I couldn't agree more about boycotting and have been screaming it from the hilltops for months now. If we all stopped buying imported items from today for however long it takes and stayed consistent with it by being prepared to either put off certain purchases or buy resale so that the cash registers wouldn't ring up automatic reorders for the same imported items, we could literally bring Wall Street to its knees pretty quickly. Never forget that the last few dollars in your pocket as a consumer pack more power than the millions in the pocket of the CEO. Why? Because the number game is still in our favor. We can still place more votes at the cash registers and create and change more demand than any CEO can. The Wall Street firms are actually quite susceptible to damage from pissed off consumers. And their monitoring of inventory sales and slow downs is calculated and watched by the minute. This causes immediate volatility in their stock and drives down investor confidence and purchase orders.With a vote at the cash register for only USA made products accompanied by endless streams of avalanched emails demanding that all consumer goods have an equal USA product match on the shelves, we could send their corporate office warning bells in to overdrive. The lucky point in this country is that all of our major retailers are in fact, the manufacturer of many of their own product lines and can make the change without much explanation to any supplier. It's a start in the right direction in bringing the power of this country back to the working people of the 99% Just go into this with the mind set that we are going to do this for the long hall until every last job comes back to the USA and we wipe out poverty and unemployment completely. This will take some sacrifice in terms of not being able at first to even find USA made alternatives to purchase. Try to fill in the gaps in the mean time by buying resale, refurbishing or putting off major purchases like fancy electronics. It won't be forever. But if we really make it our destiny to overwhelm every retailer in this country with daily demand letters and threats of boycott, we can take control of this economy. By the way, the TeaParty has already started the action of bringing about a Constitutional Convention to amend the Constitution and Occupy needs to take the same Harvard training with the author of "Republic, Lost" and get prepared and organized to be a part of that historical constitutionally changing convention before the convention gets bought out by the corporate financed Tea Party agenda. Occupy will be the only democratic voice at that convention.
Boycott every last mega corp and bank you can. Let them know why. Persuade the employees (who are the 99% also) of them to join the protests and/or organize their own strikes
Sorry to be THE ultimate wet blanket in this equation... but doesn't that mean everyone should stop being all over FaceBook and Twitter? Or using all of their apple gadgets? How many people are wearing clothes or using sleeping bags and blankets furnished by American Apparel, KMart, Sears, Macy's, etc?
Boycotting has a huge impact I agree, but the question I am posing is will people in this movement be really prepared to deal with the other inconveniences of boycotting?
Possibly, as they are camped in a park, but that is a core few, and even those people have various amenities.
With boycotts come sacrifice, and for most people it is a mental hurdle they might not able to even conceive.
I am not on FaceBook because they are the long arm of the CIA and are able to track your every move even after you have logged out but as far as I know, we are not paying to use FaceBook and believe it or not, it is an USA product. So is Twitter and probably the cable company that provides your service. The biggest problem comes in when you try to buy electronic products, which of course there are no USA equivalent products for. That is why I've mentioned over and over again that putting off those types of purchases for awhile, buying resale or refurbishing are some words and actions that we just need to work into our vocabulary and minds until we bring all of retail and their bankster friend investors to their knees and every manufacturing job back home. Don't forget that we invented 99% of the consumer products in the world. It's not like we don't have the technology to make them here. It was always a matter of their choice on where to cheaply produce something. And now, it needs to be corrected by our choice. But the daily email avalanching of retailers is of utmost importance in this plan so that they are very clear about what consumers are demanding and what lengths they are going to go to in order to accomplish those demands.