Nov. 24, 2007 - Yesterday, on what should be observed as a national day of sateity after Thanksgiving’s excess, a woman mere weeks away from certain unemployment went, with her holiday dinner still not fully digested, out to shop in the wee hours of the morning. As an AP writer reported:
‘I’m really looking for the bargains this year because I’m losing my job; they’re moving our plant to Mexico after the first of the year, so I have to be careful,’ said Tina Dillow of New Richmond, Ohio, who camped out at a Best Buy store near Cincinnati at 3 a.m. because of a great deal on a laptop….
I’d call that stone-crazy, not “careful”– Tina’s handing a wad of her last assured, albeit rapidly depreciating, dollars to a company known for funding Republican politicians bent on driving American workers to ruin — but then I didn’t shop at all. Not even to buy into the outdated one-note tune of the annual “Buy Nothing Day” campaign.
The notion of purchasing zilch on Black Friday, instead of launching an orgy of holiday shopping, began as an environmental pitch about 15 years ago. Although it was based on guilt-tripping North Americans for consuming more than our fair share, quite a few Brits participate, too. The event is still being sold in the same “shame on you” manner, as witness the current video depicting our continent as a bloated, belching pig and asking us to “give it a rest” for 24 hours.
Surely, now that so many of us realize the real culprit is a system rigged against us as much as against anybody else, we need to place the blame for environmental destruction and socioeconomic injustice where it honestly belongs. And we need to do heaps more about it than stage a one-day sulk.
But what? A sweeping Christmas Shopping Boycott has been pledged by those affiliated with We’re Not Buyin’ It. Their website shows a sophisticated understanding of the problem, but offers few specifics about retailers to avoid or favor, if you need to buy something not produced locally.
Obviously we should give a miss to the “big box” discount stores that have undermined the relative self-sufficiency and landscapes of countless communities and are even sabotaging all plans for heightened port security. Among these, Wal-Mart and Target are worst-of-the-worst.
Also worth shunning are shops owned by private equity raiders, now gnawing their knuckles in fear of poor holiday sales, after overburdening the companies with debt attached to the acquisitions. In many cases, they also plundered the firms’ retirement accounts and lowered wages, too. Yes, jobs are on the line and investors include not only hedge funds and the ultra-rich, but also the innocently stupid. However, these jobs and holdings are already rendered almost valueless, so we might as well make scoundrels suffer with the rest of us from the crisis their avaricious trade and monetary policies have sparked, by avoiding Toys ‘r Us, Michael’s, Mervyn’s, Dollar General, PetCo, Claire’s, GNC, Burlington Coat Factory, Jimmy Choo, Boots the Chemist and any others we can determine are in this category. Whatever they rake in will go first to the raiders and then the companies will go to hell, anyway. The next round of our economic meltdown, experts say, is coming from that quarter. Right, atop the existing Mortgage Meltdown, Credit Collapse and Dollar Dive, we can look forward to considerable fallout from Buyout Blowup.
Just how bad things are going to get still remains anybody’s guess, but forecasts of another Great Depression aren’t thin on the ground — and it could be worse, given rocketing energy and food costs, plus massive accumulated debt, the paucity of nearby sources for essentials and patterns of residential development that increased oil dependency and produced Continued>>>>
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/enough-already-by-the-other-katherine-harris/
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