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THREE CHEERS FOR CAPITALISM: GRAB 'EM BY THE WALLET!


Progressives, activists, and people of good faith horrified by the election of Donald Trump have rallied in opposition to his selection of Steve Bannon to the post of White House chief strategist, and rightly so. Bannon is the person most responsible for the reprehensible misinformation and the most egregious personal attacks we have ever seen in a campaign, and his website, Breitbart News, mouthpiece of the so-called "alt-right," is baldly and broadly bigoted. It seems inconceivable that such extreme views could be setting up shop just steps from the Oval Office.

Clever opponents are attempting to fight back against Breitbart using market-based strategites. Grab 'em by the wallet! When it was discovered that prominent brands such as Kellogg's had ads on the site, vociferous campaigns were launched demanding immediate retraction, to which Kellogg's and others swiftly complied, prompting predictable Breitbartian backlash. Each side used a time honored threat in an attempt to sway company policy: a boycott. Of course, these companies now have to choose between offending one or the other group. However, for most, the choice is clear. As Elizabeth Warren said in a fiery denunciation of Bannon just days after the election, "bigotry is bad for business."

We know this all too well right here at home. The notorious HB2, a blatant and bigoted attack on the LGBTQ community, has cost us untold millions of dollars in revenue and untold hundreds of jobs. Worse yet, the reputation of our state has been sullied. We are seen as narrow-minded, bigoted, reactionary, and vindictive. The kind of economy we need to grow in order to compete in the marketplace of the world is under complete threat when companies cannot promise to their employees that they will all enjoy equal protection under the law. As Warren noted in her speech, neither customers nor employees want bigotry.

Although Kellogg's initially looked foolish for not even knowing on which sites its online ads land, its swift action to pull those ads allows it both to do the right thing and get a big PR win doing it. There is even a campaign afoot to buy its Nutrigrain bars at Target (another prominent anti-bigotry company) and donate them to food pantries. For Americans, does it get any better than being able to shop AND do the right thing?

Boycotts have long been a potent tool in the struggle for social change. Everyone remembers Rosa Parks' famous refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, but we should also remember that real change followed after a lengthy boycott of the entire bus system in that city. Months and months of publicity and public pressure ultimately led the courts to declare segregated buses unconstitutional.

In the struggle against Trump and his odious allies, we must continue to win hearts and minds in the marketplace of ideas, using facts and cogent analysis to argue our points. But we must also win in the actual marketplace of goods and services. The vast interconnections created by the global economy make it difficult to find out, for example, exactly who got exploited to build your iPhone. But it doesn't take much work to find out how companies spend their money, on both advertising as well as political donations. We need to continue doing this work and to spread our findings far and wide so that consumers who are also voters can make informed decisions about how to spend their money and form whom to vote.

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