Thread by @doctorow

In the 1970s, progressives discovered a shortcut to political change: the boycott. Boycotts had been around for a long time, to be sure, but with industries in relatively weak states, with lots of competitors, the threat of lost business could spur fast action.

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Politics were slow and unreliable. Lawsuits were expensive, slow and unreliable. Boycotts were fast, and involved direct, tangible steps that every person could take: redirect your spending from one company to another, make the change.

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But as progressive movements ceded the political realm, reactionaries conquered it. Reagan and his successors (including pro-business Dems) enacted laws and policies that encouraged monopolies and weakened labor unions.

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40 years later, boycotts are dead.

Hate excessive packaging?

Good news: the grocery aisle has minimal packaging alternatives you can vote your dollars on.

Bad news: these "alternatives" come from the same companies as the high-packaging products you're "voting against."

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Boycotts only work when there's competition. As this Simpsons screenshot demonstrates - Duff Lite, Duff Dry and Duff all come from the same pipe.

Likewise: Fox Studios, who made the Simpsons, are now part of Disney.

Don't like Fox? Vote with your dollars on Disney!

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Right-wing politics have a problem. If your fundamental belief is that a small number of people should have more (money, power, influence) than everyone else, then by definition, your politics only benefit a minority, and you win elections with majorities.

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The right has three tactics to overcome this.

I. It relies on antimajoritarian institutions, like the Electoral College and the Senate. That's why the Dems should ABSOLUTELY kill the filibuster, which protects Senate power, which is minority power, which is plute power.

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II. It suppresses the votes and power of working people, through gerrymandering, poll taxes, voter-roll purges and anti-union rules that shatter the collective power of otherwise atomized and powerless workers.

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III. It convinces turkeys to vote for Christmas. Performative culture-war bullshit, white nationalism, transphobic panics, etc - none of these are intrinsic to the right-wing project, but they bring a lot of scared bigots out to vote for dead-eyed corporate rule.

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The new Jim Crow law just adopted in Georgia is a perfect example of how these three tactics deliver power to corporate power. It's a voter suppression law, passed by a gerrymandered statehouse that represents a minority of Georgians, which exploits white nationalism.

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Remember, the reason corporate America is worried about Georgia is the Black, working-class-led political machine that threatens to enact majority rule in a place whose state and national leaders are essential to inequality-boosting, plute-enriching, worker-destroying rule.

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The reason all these red states introduced nearly identical voter-suppression bills is that they all get their laws from the same place: ALEC, a business-backed thinktank that writes and pushes "model legislation" in state- and local governments.

salon.com/2021/03/27/con…

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ALEC finds its wins in GOP legislatures, but it gets its funding from a broad cross-section of corporate America, including companies that publicly brief for racial and gender justice.

commoncause.org/democracy-wire…

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Now, ALEC has faced something of an exodus, losing members like AT&T and Google, but that doesn't mean that they've divested from ALEC policies.

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The politicians who carry water for ALEC are 100% dependent on campaign contributions from orgs like the Chamber of Commerce.

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These politicians brief for policies that hurt the majority of Americans, and can only get elected through voter suppression, gerrymandering and appeals to bigotry. There's no other way to win electoral majorities while espousing antimajoritarian policies.

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This doesn't mean that corporate execs and employees aren't horrified by Georgia's New Jim Crow law - it just means that they can't do anything about it. Companies that halt donations to the GA GOP will STILL financially support them, through their industry associations.

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It's a perfect macrocosm of the consumer's dilemma: if you rely on money, rather than politics, to accomplish political change, you will never make a change that reduces the power of money in politics. It's impossible to spend your way out of monopoly capitalism.

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At best, it's merely useless. At worst, it's a net negative, sucking up the hours you could spend on political change with comparison shopping. As @zephyrteachout points out in BREAK 'EM UP, what you do matters more than what you spend.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/bre…

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If you're organizing to support union drives, don't waste time shopping to "buy local" for posterboard and markers - they're all manufactured by anti-union monopolists, no matter who sells them. Get whatever's easiest and then go fight the companies in the POLITICAL realm.

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Stop conceiving of yourself as an ambulatory wallet, whose only power comes from where and how you spend - if you only vote your dollars, you'll always lose, because the rich have more dollars than you and so they get more votes.

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Keep your eyes on the prize: smashing corporate power. Far more exciting than the MLB boycott of Georgia is the Republican response: GOP hardliners want to take away baseball's antitrust exemption.

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1378103553437360131

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If this happens, it will be the absolute best possible outcome - because it represents the shattering of the coalition that makes antimajoritarian politics possible. If the right starts siding with bigots and AGAINST companies, they'll cut their own supply lines.

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The voter suppression, gerrymandering and bigotry that the GOP relies on is expensive. It can't exist without corporate power. The reason it exists in the first place is corporate power.

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Reinvigorating antitrust as an act of performative culture-war bullshit is the political equivalent of pointing a gun at your own dick to own the libs and then blowing your actual dick off.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/27/lit…

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These are the fracture lines we need to exploit. They've been proliferating for years. The modern antitrust revival comes out of these fracture lines.

It's an open secret that much of the money and energy for anti-Big Tech trustbusting comes from the cable industry.

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Comcast and AT&T hate Google and Facebook, but not for the same reason you or I do. In their view, the billions Googbook make from surveillance, rent-extraction and manipulation have been misapproriated from the telecoms industry.

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They have made the catastrophic blunder of betting that if they awaken the slumbering antitrust giant to smash Big Tech, that it will then go back to sleep - and that it CERTAINLY won't turn on THEM.

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This is such galaxy-brain idiocy. Like the public will watch a new army of trustbusters arise to rip apart Googbook and then say, "You know what? I just remembered that I FUCKING LOVE COMCAST, so whatever you do, don't give them the same treatment."

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A bet that after the dust settles, the hard-fighting lawyers, activists, politicans and workers who smashed corporate power in Big Tech will realize that they were only worried about "surveillance capitalism" but were totally cool with all the other kinds of capitalism.

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Consumer power is a dead letter. Political power is a live wire. Boycotts are a distraction, even - especially - when giant corporations engage in them.

But the other stuff - strikes, trustbusting, ending financial secrecy - that's where change comes from.

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The problem with the world isn't where you shop.

You're not an ambulatory wallet and don't let anyone convince you that you are.

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/amb…

eof/