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It’s called the ‘Power of the Purse’ & we can wield it if we choose. The gift of No-Buy-Friday. [1]
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Date: 2025-03-07
It’s called the ‘Power of the Purse’ & we can wield it if we choose.
If you’re feeling powerless and frightened, action will help.
If you can’t get yourself to speak out, write emails and make phone calls — or if you think you’d be wasting your time or ‘poking you head up too high’, here is something simple, effective and stealth with which to ‘strike’ back. Today is the second No-Buy-Friday (“Buy nothing day”) which I urge you to participate in.
~~~
The paradox of time travel is the fear that interaction with the past by a visitor from the future can change the trajectory of history. Among a multitude of detrimental outcomes, there is the possibility of negating the ‘intruder’s’ own birth or the invention of time travel itself. While still the stuff of science fiction, this remains a core concern when considering obstacles to shaking off the shackles of time.
Nevertheless, such concern reveals the subversive power of denial to undermine the same logic when applied to aligned circumstances which share fundamental characteristics. This cripples our ability to arrive at similar conclusions when we subconsciously prefer different results.
Due to this dissonance, it is widely held that the individual is powerless to shape the future, when things along these lines is inconvenient or threatens our ‘comfort zone’ — as political and environmental proaction do. When the need for a productive response arises, rather than move forward proactively, we waste time and energy in avoidance, by bending logic to justify inaction. This can prove fatal.
Yet, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, most will doggedly claim that only major governmental and international efforts can have any meaningful impact on climate change, while dismissing the effect that the aggregate of individual action can have.
It is a human commonality that we wait for others to take action and solve problems, while often disparaging actions that shine an unflattering light on our inertia.
Perhaps it was for this reason (among others), that you wouldn’t necessarily know from the press and to a certain extent even from this site, that on February 28, there was a national ‘no buy’ event, or that attempts are being made to sustain it and build traction. Although I wasn’t certain as to the intention of the organizers, I saw it as an opportunity to express our displeasure with the cabal of debauched plunderers sacking America, by kicking them in their assets.
A review of the ‘no buy’ articles posted on DK display a moderate to poor response on the part of readership, especially when compared with far more gripping ‘trainwreck’ posts. We need to welcome the potential of boycotts to provide our suffering and disgruntled base with a simple method to send a powerful ‘economic indicator’ to the power establishment, that we hold the purse strings and can tighten them if we choose.
Whether we buy before Friday or after is beside the point — by providing this measurable shift in numbers, we set off the alarm, alerting their ‘number crunchers’ that we can ‘cut the flow’.
During the Vietnam war protest back in the late 60s, boycotts were staged to telegraph messages to the powerful in much the same way — and it was effective.
“Money” people are ‘morbidly’ fixated on wealth, becoming as hypersensitive as seismographs that detect the slightest tremors. They react to near imperceptible fiscal shifts. When detected, their tightly wound rapaciousness sets off a subliminal alarm which can quickly lead to panic — destabilizing common sense — which is already a ‘rare commodity’ in their portfolios.
Despite the fact that those of us who participated in these targeted ‘protest boycotts’ were considered as little more than annoying pests by the corporate war machine, the effect of closing our wallets was magnified by their fiscal paranoia, delivering our message loud and clear — and the power behemoths reacted.
There was never any question in my mind that I would participate on the 28th, as I welcome most any opportunity to stick it to ‘the man’ who looks for every opportunity to stick it to us.
Despite understanding the latent power of the individual vis-à-vis collective coordination, analyzing the current consumer ethos had reduced my expectations of turnout to something akin to faith in the fecundity of wishing wells.
I’d have been more optimistic if we had a national ‘no shooting up’ day to protest heroin trafficking.
After all, heroin addicts may not think they’re addicted, but at least they know they’re users — while most consumers don’t. When it comes to obsessive compulsive consumption, denial is in ‘double blind’ mode.
So I was surprised when reports came back that afternoon with news exceeding my PTSD set expectations.
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/3/4/2307868/-What-Effect-Did-The-Economic-Blackout-have
Amidst the mixed results were these, which I quote verbatim from this diary :
“Forbes provided this analysis:
On blackout day, Target website visitors dropped 9% compared to Friday, Feb. 14, from 5.2 million to 4.7 million.
Target app user traffic, representing the most loyal Target customers, was off even more, down 14%, from 4.2 million to 3.5 million.
By comparison, Costco experienced a 22% rise in Feb. 28 web traffic, from 2.4 million Feb. 14 to 2.9 million and Costco app user visits rose 3%, from 1.3 million to 1.34 million.
On blackout day, the nation’s number one retailer, Walmart, experienced a 5% slump in web traffic, down from 11.7 million on Feb. 14 to 11.2 million and number two Amazon dropped by 2%, from 67.1 million to 65.9 million.
However, Amazon app traffic rose 1% to 51.4 million visitors while Walmart’s dropped 2% to 13.6 million.”
While these numbers may seem negligible, they do not go unnoticed by those bitten.
(Perhaps providing some perspective: Walmart’s profit margin is less than 3%.)
That this was not covered properly by the mainstream press didn’t nonplus me in the least, as I fully expected them to do their ‘jobs’ according to current journalistic ‘standards’. Furthermore, with the latest installment of “White House: Hissy Fits / Season 2” bogarting the News, my expectations went deep-freeze.
While I already knew such coverage wasn’t necessary for hitting the target, I also realize the importance of reaching our base to let them know this works.
For the past several years, I’ve been posting diaries and comments on this site trying vainly to get readers to understand that as consumers we hold the power to take on ‘the Beast’. But to do so we need to first learn to control our spending, “by curbing consumption back to true necessities, not what we’ve been brainwashed into thinking we need.”
On February 28, we began this process.
Movements like this take time to build.
Our modest results can be seen as miraculous under the circumstances or as discouraging —
thus providing us with an excuse to stay focused on our junky consumer behavior.
The former is in many ways what we are up against and the first line of battle.
2/28 was only the opening salvo in what will need to be a protracted battle, if we are to survive.
Key to this effort is the requirement that we fully grasp the ‘revelation-ary’ nature of the ‘no-buy’ approach, as it profoundly alters our role in the entanglement of forces involved, while providing us with one more means of taking the upper hand.
In our subjugated minds, the interplay of power inherent to this supplier/consumer relationship, has been subverted into a one-sided expropriation of control and dominance. This has been programmed into the masses by millennia-old social structuring facilitating the usurpation of power through force and manipulation. As the ‘forever’ established norm, it is broadly accepted without question.
However, should we choose to listen to our protest of the 28th, we have just explained to ourselves that despite this preconditioned conviction of powerlessness in the face of the force tearing our world apart, we are anything but.
We are in fact, when we choose to be, more powerful and historically always have been.
Indeed, we have by choice the potential to be the more powerful and this is bourn out by history —
in the drift of which, we are lulled by convenience and expediency to forget; because humans love nothing better than to shed responsibility.
When I have attempted to explain this to readers here, it fails to penetrate the deafening ‘roar of desire’.
Instead, I get repeatedly schooled by DK ‘human behavior specialists’ that such action is either impossible because ‘nobody will do it’ (including them) or because (as we’ve been conditioned to believe) it would be threat to our precious economy. This later we foolishly value more than life itself. Logic here becomes duplicitous and inverted to better serve self-deception.
After the tumultuous 60s, the American political landscape had changed. The fabric of society had continued to fray and Americans were being largely neutered by the choking vines of unfettered convenience/ unrestrained growth of consumerism consumption.
During the Bush/Cheney era, when anyone ventured to suggest using boycotts to counter power, the concept itself was pictured as being ineffectual, and potentially detrimental to the ‘end goal’. This was largely because corporate America had infiltrated our thinking so sufficiently that they could twist sound reasoning effortlessly and their lies were readily accepted because by then we were already domesticated consumer sheep and ‘junkies’ avoid reality like vampires shun daylight. <
Boycotts had become ‘a bridge too far’ and as mediocrity became all pervasive, the average American drifted further into ineffectual socio-impotence and consumption induces paralysis.
While Bush took advantage of 9/11 to lead the country into the mother of oil wars, he told us to go ‘buy - buy’ and we obeyed, escaping from a fearful world to the somnambulant bliss of shopping.
Our overlords are bleeding the world and we embrace the illusion of helplessness because, as we
are all human, we are driven by the same desires that they are, which manifest according to the limits of our relative options. For far too long, our overlords have been usurping the better ones, while tossing us just enough scraps to sustain complacency.
I’ve been hearing reports that Europeans, who, overall can be less conservative and pigheaded than Americans, have followed up on the Orange’s erratic and dangerous actions by retaliating with boycotts — both spontaneously individual and collectively organized.
Whoa onto us if we don’t follow their example and build on what we’ve started.
If we do not recognize the yin-yang of power and take back our entitlement, we will perish.
As I’ve said in the past, this is a dance and we’ve been allowing them to lead. Disengagement can help bring this madness to a halt.
The action we took on the 28th, successfully sent the power mad a message — but if we don’t recognize the advantage cutting consumption gains us, embrace the empowerment provided and use it to fell them, they will simply step over the ‘ant hill’ and finish dragging us to Hell.
Please observe “No-Buy” today.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/7/2308610/-It-s-called-the-Power-of-the-Purse-amp-we-can-wield-it-if-we-choose-The-gift-of-No-Buy-Friday?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
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