Re: Boycotts are for sucks

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

'fraid I have to respectfully disagree with you there, Dan.  Boycotts can be
essential tools in communicating with big companies that have no other
priorities than making profits and driving their stock price up.  You can write
to Shell Oil and say "hey, I don't like how you're helping the Nigerian
government kill people so that you can make more money", but as long as they're
making money, they won't listen.  You've really only got two choices: try to
make it more profitible to do the right thing ("we will pay you more money if
you don't do xyz") or try to hurt ther public image to make them stop (like
Michael Moore did with Kmart in Bowling for Columbine), which is like a boycott
because presumably people won't patronize a company with a lousy public image.
I don't buy your "it only hurts local people" argument, because in today's
economy, companies make billions and still shut down tons of local jobs.
Often they make those billions *by* shutting down local jobs.  I remember an
interview with a candy factory manager near St. Louis where he said if the
plant had been *less* productive, it wouldn't have been so profitable to shut
it down.  The chain from cosumer boycott to lost jobs is no longer that simple.
A company *could* take the hit in their profits and keep people employed; the
fact that they don't is part of the problem.

Ultimately, though, I think what a boycott really comes down to is a personal
sense of integrity: "do I want *my* money to go to support activities I believe
are wrong?"  If that is the motivation, it doesn't matter whether your choice
to buy brand x hurts those who sell brand y.  I could make the same argument
you did to claim I *have* to buy crack, otherwise all those crack dealers would
be out of work.  If someone is doing something unethical, it's better that they
be doing something else.  Just to say "I have to feed my kids, so I *need* to
sell crack" isn't a good enough excuse.  We all have to navigate the shoals of
business and consumer ethics in a capitalist/consumer society, and to take the
product or process as a given, and then say "I have to take what's put before
me, or I might hurt the people who put it there, rather than the people who
handed it to those people", puts *way* too much power in the hands of the
faraway people.  It's not sufficient for a local person to say "oh, hey, I just
get what they send me and put it on the shelves; it's not *my* fault."  ("I was
just following orders.")

We're all locked in a web of decisions together, and not buying a product if
the company has bsiness practices you don't approve of is a perfectly ethical
(WTO attempts to stop it to the contrary) means of making choices.  Capitalism
says markets, workers and consumers all need to be flexible and mobile to find
new niches when the old ones dry up.  Ironically, it's systems like communism
that demand you should take what you're given.  THis is why we need more robust
anti-trust laws and a government that actually enforces them, so that we *can*
make informed choices and the service and goods providers have room to respond.
If everything is owned by just a few (or one) companies, then choice is a joke,
and we do hurt the local people, because they don't have other choices, either.

Well, that's enough of a tirade from me, I think.  I wish I had Cutting Room
Floor; I'd talk about that instead. I'll get it on the 23rd, no doubt.  Sigh.
Three more weeks!
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

"At its current rate of expansion of 5% per year, a paper copy of the 
  Astrophysical Journal would close the universe by 4450." 
	- Trimble & Ashwanden, Astrophysics in 2000, PASP
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