TAKE BACK YOUR POWER. BOYCOTT THE HOLIDAYS

Here is something nobody will tell you. The real power in a capitalist society, which is what we have here in the United States, does NOT rest with the wealthiest members of that society. They would like you to think it does. In fact, they go to great lengths to convince you it does with their ivory tower economists and their fancy, convoluted economic theories. But it doesn’t. The real power in a capitalist society belongs to the consumers -  the people who buy stuff day in and day out.

How can that be, you ask?

Well...the wealthiest Americans don’t keep their wealth in gold bars stacked in a giant vault somewhere. Their wealth is in their investments - in the stuff they own - and the value of their investments is based entirely on the amount of income those investments produce. Guess where the income those investments produce comes from. Right. You got it in one. It comes from consumers. It comes from you and me and the rest of the middle and working class Americans who buy food, clothes, medicine, jewelry, electronics, toys, games, apps, furniture, appliances, all sorts of services and everything else we buy every day. If we stop buying stuff those investments lose their value and all that wealth disappears. Poof. Just like that. It’s gone.

Now... we can’t just stop buying stuff. We need stuff.  But, do we really need everything we buy? Could we do without some of the stuff we would like to have but don’t really need, at least for a little while, if it would get Donald Trump out of the White House, Mitch McConnell and his Republican cronies out of the Senate and convince the wealthy Americans who fund their campaigns to stop funding those campaigns and give us back our country?

I had an idea a couple of years ago about boycotting the President’s Day Sales. About 20,000 people on Facebook liked the idea, but I didn’t have the contacts, the access or the resources to get the idea to a wide enough segment of the population to have a real impact, and I still don’t, but I think the idea is worth revisiting. Only now I’m talking about boycotting the entire holiday season, from Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving in November), through all the gift buying, parties and holiday travel in December, continuing on into the clearance sales in January, up through and including the President’s Day Sales in February. I am talking about 4 months of not buying the stuff we don’t absolutely need.

Let’s do the numbers.

In the 2016 Presidential Election 62,985,134 people voted for Donald Trump. 74,139,350 people didn't. They voted for Hillary Clinton or one of the other candidates. Let's round that number off to 74 million just to make the math a little easier. How much money, on average, do you think each of the 74 million people who didn't vote for Donald Trump is planning to spend during the upcoming holiday season? Obviously, some will spend more than others and some won't spend anything. What do you think. $500 a person? I think more that that. I think that is a very conservative estimate, but let's go with $500 per voter who didn't vote for Donald Trump just for argument sake.

If only half the people who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, and certainly don't want to see him re-elected, spend only half what they planned to spend during this upcoming holiday season (that’s 37 million people who voted in the last election for someone other than Donald Trump spending no more than $250 a piece during the 4 month holiday season) the financial impact would be $9,250,000,000. That’s 9 billion, 250 million dollars that stays in the pockets of middle and working class Americans and out of the pockets of the wealthy Robber Barons. Double that amount (18 billion, 500 million dollars) if everyone who didn’t vote for Trump joins the boycott.

That's a lot of money. Do you think that amount of money might get the attention of the wealthiest Americans who are propping up Donald Trump and the Republican members of Congress with their investment income? They don’t have a political agenda. It’s all about the money for them and if we cut off the flow of money they will do whatever they have to do to start that flow back up again, to include stopping the financial support they are currently providing to Trump and the Republican members of Congress who are encouraging and defending him, if that is what we demand as a condition for starting to spend our money again. .

Think about it. There is no risk in doing this. You don’t have to go to a march or a protest rally where you might get hurt or arrested. You don't have to sign anything or give money to anyone. Nobody can know what you planned to spend or actually do spend so there can be no repercussions. You have nothing to lose by trying to make this happen. You will still have the money you don’t spend during the boycott and you can spend it later in the year if you want to. Yes, there is some sacrifice involved, but we are not talking about giving up the holidays completely. We are just talking about cutting the among of money you spend during the holidays in half. You would basically be sacrificing some convenience for a few months, but that seems like a small sacrifice to make considering what is at stake - Donald Trump getting reelected. Even if you aren't convinced this will work, isn't it worth a try? Nothing else has stopped Donald Trump and his cronies from doing whatever they want. This could be the leverage we've been looking for.

Here is what I am proposing:

TAKE BACK YOUR POWER

CUT YOUR HOLIDAY SPENDING IN HALF

MAKE THE COMMITMENT and SPREAD THE WORD

This holiday season (Black Friday through President’s Day), don’t spend more than half the money you planned to spend on in-store and on-line purchases, entertainment and non-work related travel. If you don’t absolutely need it or need to do it, don’t buy it and don’t do it.

We can do this. We can take back our country from the Robber Barons by hitting them where it hurts them the most - cutting off the flow of money to their investments.

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YOU CAN´T HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT, TOO

If I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times. “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” It was one of my mother’s favorite expressions; and it was my introduction to the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not bad behavior. There are no norms, rules or laws that prohibit it. It is just ignorant behavior because it defies logic and logic is one of the cornerstones of human intelligence. Hypocrisy is holding two mutually exclusive ideas at the same time, which you can't reasonably claim to do. Mutually exclusive means if you have one you can’t have the other. They cancel each other out. So, no reasonable person is going to believe you or take you seriously if you are being hypocritical.

If you eat your cake, you don’t have the cake anymore. You ate it. It’s gone. Having your cake and eating it are mutually exclusive. That makes claiming you can have your cake and eat it, too, hypocritical.

You can’t claim you are against abortion because you believe in the sanctity of human life and then support capital punishment and expect any rational person to believe you actually care about the sanctity of all human life.

You can’t claim you support the freedom of speech because you believe it is essential to preserve our democratic republic and then shame and persecute other people who say things that don’t meet your standards of “political correctness” and expect any rational person to believe you actually care about anyone’s freedom of speech but your own.

Holding and expressing mutually exclusive beliefs makes you a hypocrite and being a hypocrite is ignorant.

There is a lot of hypocrisy going around in the United States these days, on both sides of the political divide. I blame this widespread ignorance on what has been called the Dumbing Down of America. It has been deliberate. It has been systematic, And, it has been going on for almost four decades. Back in the day, when I went to school, we were taught how to think... because our parents and our government wanted us to grow up to be independent, responsible citizens and you can’t be an independent, responsible citizen if you can’t think for yourself. That has been gradually changing and today, under the guise of “standards-based education”, young people are taught what corporate America wants them to know - and nothing else - because corporate America wants our children to grow up to be predictable consumers who can be easily manipulated into buying stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have so that the 1% of Americans who control almost all the wealth in the United States can accumulate even more wealth.

The good news is ignorant and stupid are two different things. Hypocrisy is ignorant, but you can fix ignorant with learning. You can’t fix stupid.