What is more powerful than one-man one-vote? It is voting with your dollar. It is fighting capitalism with capitalism. How can you take activists across the globe and unite them with power to reshape the global economy? It’s the power of the boycott.
When you use boycott as a campaign tool it can be very successful. Take for example Gandhi and the British Raj salt tax march in the 1930’s when thousands of ordinary people united under the cause of producing salt without paying the Raj tax. They were ultimately successful.
For every dollar you withhold from a corporation you remove – on average –x1.33 the original amount. For every $5 you remove from BP they actually lose $6.60 in revenue. This number can be found by using the stock compared to its sales. The boycott power against Coca-Cola is $5 per every $1 withheld since its stock is 5x its sales.
“You’re taking a traditional boycott and applying economic metrics and in this process it gives the activist more leverage,” says financial activist Max Keiser, “Think strictly in strategic results. If you have enough boycotters and activists applying the boycott you will attract attention from the global hedge fund community, which is always looking for stocks to sell short or prices to attack.”
This information is a powerful tool for activists of all spectrums be it left-wing Occupy or further to the right Tea Party. The information is so powerful they wish to keep it secret, such as the SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] iPhone app or Firefox extension. Critics claim that SOPA will destroy free speech on the internet. The app works by scanning a barcode and if the company supported ‘SOPA’ through campaign donations or lobbying a ‘stop’ sign appears encouraging you to not buy this product. Receiving a ‘clear’ status results from the company’s hands being clean of the debate.
“Now you’ve got a multi-trillion dollar industry blindly working with activist to attack the stock. The result is a lower stock price,” Max Keiser continues that the only way to see if your boycott is effective is by measuring the stock price. “The only thing that an activist should look for, in terms of whether they’re successful or not—it’s not what the company says, it’s not what the company writes in its annual report, it’s not what some politician says the company says—they should only look at one thing, and that’s the stock price. The stock price goes up, they’re failing; the stock price goes down, they’re winning.”
Protesting has progressed from hunger strikes to voting with your dollar. Drenching a body in gasoline and setting yourself ablaze may attract much needed attention to a cause, yet, using the power of metrics in the form of market manipulation through the process of economic boycotting will have a much heavier impact in the long term. Frankly, corporations don’t care if you live or die.
Remember how quickly BP blitzkrieg the airwaves with its personification of the company with its “We’re BP – We Care” campaign? Perhaps they were scared the public would actually stick to its guns concerning the boycott?
As the term 99% become incorporated into our daily vocabulary we reflect on the leaked memos of major corporations that are scared of the “One Man, One Vote” mentality. We rage against the 1% while understanding they only account for 1% of the voting bloc. They use their money to manipulate everything from markets to our behavior even our legislation. What if the 99% put their money where their mouth is and fought fire with fire by becoming consciously aware of their spending power?
Real change would be inevitable.
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