Economic Boycotts

In the crisis following the tragic events of September 11th, President Bush appealed to the American people to show their patriotism by spending, by fueling a sagging economy with dollars. Though it has been a long time since I worked as an economist, some old imprints must have surfaced from the rusty archives of my memory. Over lunch one day, I said to a friend, "If we can help this country by infusing the market place with money, then we can also choose which sectors of the economy we wish to support and which we choose not to favor with our spending. Never in recent memory has there been a more important time to express one's vision of the future than now.

As my own active mind raced hither and thither, I began to think of what I hoped would form a part of the future: organic food, safe medicine, non-polluting energy, and educational systems and institutions that help each individual to discover his or her contract with God to fulfill a purpose on Earth. I had never felt so fertile or creative as an economist, and I really wanted to inspire others to see the potential of a completely different "multiplier effect." In classical economics, we trace the movement of a dollar through many hands and watch how it stimulates one sector of the economy after another. In conscious economics, we can choose to use our earnings to "sponsor" that which we wish to see thrive.

So, on the positive side, I saw how consumption of organic food and medicine would operate against the megalomaniacal aspirations of Archer Daniel Midlands and Monsanto and perhaps arrest the infiltration of genetically modified food and medicine into our culture and DNA. Without pounding the streets with banners and slogans, one can simply talk to one's friends and neighbors and encourage conscious consumption. This site is new and the suggestions that are posted represent an embryonic effort to inspire and encourage consumer activism. It will grow and you can click on the subscribe button to be notified when there are new posts.

State Farm Insurance

State Farm Insurance has denied countless claims for wind damage in areas of the Bayou devastated by hurricanes.  It has accomplished this inhumanity against legitimately insured customers by falsifying engineering reports, forging signatures, and systematic corporate abuse of power.  Show your support for your dislocated brothers and sisters by boycotting State Farm.

Aspartame

Although Monsanto denies the chemical's toxicity, 80-85% of consumer complaints to the FDA about food pertain to Aspartame. Symptoms vary enormously: muscle and joint pain, menstrual cramps, ringing in ears, vertigo, nausea, insomnia, severe headaches, blurred vision and slurred speech, memory loss, blindness, mild to seriously suicidal depression, and seizures.

Exxon-Mobil and Chevron-Texaco

For more than half a century, the world has understood the problems related to air pollution and diminishing resources. During at least the last 20-30 years, alternatives to fossil fuels have been developed, but multinational corporations and their cohorts in government have failed to implement policies allowing for a smooth transition from obsolete technologies to modern methods for producing the energy that sustains the modern world . . . and now we at war for oil.

Round Up

In 1997, Monsanto lost a lawsuit and agreed to stop using the terms "bio-degradable" and "environmentally friendly" in its advertising. The primary byproduct of herbicide manufacture is dioxin, a chemical described by some as the most toxic on the Planet. It has been implicated in any number of issues from Agent Orange to the Love Canal.

Junk Science

While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to campaign in favour of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.

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Aspartame || Round Up || State Farm