Robert Greenwald's WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price is a potent and
timely effort to awaken our inner conscious consumer. But the corporate
ethics malfunction that we are experiencing goes far beyond Walmart, and
pervades every aspect of our lives. There is nothing new about any of this.
Arundhati Roy has worked tirelessly to point out that our spending habits
play a significant part in supporting corporate empires and folks like Ralph
Nader have been begging us to pay attention to our complicity in corporate
plundering for years.
As we stumble through the holiday season, mindlessly maxing out our credit
cards, it is high time that we re-examine our own complicit spending and
consuming habits. The reality is that we do have the power to commit change
in the way we spend our money, not only during the holiday season, but also
in the purchasing choices we make every day. There is no shortage of
companies that are poster children for the bad corporate citizen award. But
perhaps we can chose a few that many of us use every day, and make the
choice to pick alternative products until these companies take substantive
action to change their destructive policies. With that in mind, here are
some worthy targets for a national Buycott:
Coca Cola: You shouldn't be drinking this stuff anyhow, it's unhealthy.
But there are a lot of other reasons not to drink Coca Cola products, the
most important being the company's leading role in the commodification of
water. Other reasons include safety issues at their plants and how they
treat their employees, particularly in Columbia where Latin America's main
bottler, Panamco is accused of hiring para-militaries to kill and intimidate
union leaders and workers (
www.killercoke.org). In India, the company's
practices are linked to water shortages and pollution. See
www.caja.org and
www.indiaresource.org for more information.
General Electric: These folks, while claiming to bring good things to life,
are a major military contractor and builder of nuclear power plants. That
is bad but what is worse is that they also own NBC News. If you think their
involvement in the energy and defense industries doesn't impact how these
issues are reported on the news, I have some real nice land along the Gulf
coast for you. Buy somebody else's light bulbs, preferably energy efficient
ones.
ExxonMobil: Filled your tank lately? Well fill it somewhere else, CITGO is
the best choice. CITGO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state
owned oil company. Venezuela is run by a democratically elected government
which uses the oil revenues to help the country's poor. They don't do that
in Saudi Arabia. When energy companies refuse to invest in renewable
resources, make obscene profits and give their CEO's bonuses with that many
zeros, they don't need your business. You can find a CITGO station near you
at
http://www.citgo.com/CITGOLocator/StoreLocator.jsp. You can also sign a
petition to hold Exxon accountable at
http://www.moveonpac.org/exxon/.
DuPont: This company has known for decades that there is no safe level of
exposure to Zonyl RP, their grease-resistant coating that is used for food
packaging and that it could contaminate food at three times the federal
safety standard. The company did not share this information with the FDA.
As a result, the chemical is found in the bloodstream of virtually every
American. The company has also failed to disclose known health effects of
one of the ingredients in Teflon, which is used in a wide variety of
products, from cookware to carpeting. No corporate entity should ever have
the right to force consumers to be exposed to chemical toxins without their
knowledge. While this is a somewhat more difficult company to buycott
because their products are often part of other products, make every effort
to avoid them.
Ford: Their fleet has the lowest fuel economy of any car manufacturer in
America which leads to higher fuel usage and auto emissions. Tell your
local Ford dealers that you demand fuel efficient cars. Check out
www.actforchange.org for more information. And don't forget subways,
buses, bikes and feet.
And of course,
Walmart: This company is destroying our nation one community at a time. It
pays wages so low that their employees can't afford health care and need
food stamps. Walmart discriminates against women and drives local companies
out of business. Most ironically of all, despite the company's constant
mantra of low prices, it is actually the leader in overcharging at the
register. In her new book, Democracy's Edge, Frances Moore Lappe offers the
best reason to avoid Walmart. According to Lappe, "a dollar spent in a
locally owned business can generate three times more local economic activity
than a dollar paid at a corporate chain." Go to
www.wakeupwalmart.com for
more information about this largest of predatory companies and take your
business elsewhere, to locally owned merchants if possible.
There are plenty of other companies that don't deserve our business (see
http://peace-action.inbyron.com/lists.html and
http://www.boycott-republicans.com/ for some more good ideas). The point
here is that not patronizing these particular offenders is virtually
painless, making participation in a Buycott an easy choice for a wide
cross-section of people.
A few centuries ago, the good people of Boston told the British where they
could take their tea and shove it. It's high time that we hold another Tea
Party and not the kind with white gloves or dainty china. By not giving
these companies our business, we can give them the business and make it
clear that we have had enough of their toxic, non-sustainable, socially
reprehensible behavior.
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Lucinda Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and activist. She is the
Founder of the Feminist Peace Network,
www.feministpeacenetwork.org. Her
work has been published in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad
including, Awakened Woman, Alternet, Dissident Voice, Off Our Backs, The
Progressive, Rain and Thunder, Z Magazine , Common Dreams and Information
Clearinghouse.
