You should be boycotting these companies already because they support extreme right politics by their ALEC membership:
- FedEx
- UPS
- Motorola
- Anheuser Busch
- American Express
- Bose
- Chevron
- Marlboro
- Sony
- Texaco
- Boeing (fly on Airbus instead, see how to boycott Boeing)
You should be boycotting Amazon for many reasons.
If you oppose private prisons, then you already boycott these banks:
- #BankOfAmerica (#BofA)
- #FifthThird
- #JPMorgan #Chase
- #PNC Bank
- #Suntrust
- #USBank (#USBancorp)
- #WellsFargo
Don’t think they are out of reach to Europe – many European small banks that you assume are ethical actually outsource their investments to JP Morgan. Also, BofA uses different branding outside the US.
If you like transparency with food labeling, then you endorse labeling of #GMO food, in which case you boycott companies that lobbied against GMO labeling. There are hundreds of companies that fucked us over, but these are the top ten financers of anti-labeling lobby:
- PepsiCo
- Nestlé
- General Mills
- Coca-Cola
- ConAgra
- Campbell Soup
- The Hershey Company
- J.M. Smucker
- Kellogg
- Mondelez
Some of those mushroom into many brands. See the attached infographic.
It’s already nearly unsurmountable to boycott just the shitty detrimental corporations. I mean, how many people can boycott Microsoft? That means not emailing your government because chances are they use MS Outlook mail servers. As someone who boycotts all these companies and many more (Procter and Gamble, Unilever, etc), it’s a lifestyle change. Half the items in a European grocery store are from the US.
The only relatively non-evil corp from the US I can think of is Starbucks. I wouldn’t fixate on that. Focus on the shitty corps and it’s already more than most people can handle.
I’ve found that not many food items in my local shops are american, most of them are in fact European already. Especially if you buy the low price brands/the stores own brands. It’s very simple and affordable to deal with. However, the switch to linux instead of windows, has been proven to be more difficult for me. I haven’t done it yet. I have flashed the drive and tested, but not committed. This is, however, something I really want to do. Due to ethical reasons. However, I’m finding the discussion to move more business to Europe encouraging. To have european alternatives to credit cards and so forth. It is good that Europe is finally taking action. We do need to have the discussion about electricity and oil and gas though. If we choose to switch over to more EV’s we will need to produce more electricity, quickly. There are fast and easy green ways to do this. And we need to push for this. Boycotting little ol’ companies is a fart in the ocean of what we actually import. So I’d say, take it with a grain of salt. Do what you can. But have the real discussions. We are boycotting to send a message. But eventually we will have to think about the real issues, just like Europe should’ve done many years ago.
Don’t get distracted.
Why tf do you think Starbucks is a “non-evil” corporation?
Because it’s relative when boycotting. Why did you omit relative from your quote? Their competitor is Nestlé. Nestlé uses child slave labor, fights GMO-labeling, argues that water access is not a human right, among copious other shit, while the biggest dirt on Starbucks is tax avoidance in the Netherlands and serving milk from GMO-fed cows. Starbucks is one of the most ethical corporations of its size in the US.
Technically Nestlé is Swiss but nonetheless they are one of the worst, up there with Bayer-Monsanto and DuPont.
And exploiting workers, interfering in unionization, selling trash products, and much much more. Starbucks is definitely not better than all the others. In fact, all of big corp is evil.
Bit vague. I’ve heard nothing significant along those lines.
Maybe some one-offs, but if that’s something you care much about, focus on ALEC members. Starbucks never was an ALEC member but most large corps in the US were at one point. ALEC is a centralised heavy hitter in union busting. It is the anti-union machinery in the US that any corporation against unions joins. It’s the main reason FedEx and UPS joined ALEC.
It’s overpriced for what you get, which is why I don’t buy from Starbucks. Not as a boycott but that’s just the market working like normal. If you get bad value for the money, you walk. If we were talking about goods that you don’t consume in 10 minutes, sure I boycott shit like designed obsolescence.
Why not list it? It’s better to list it because you have a better chance of getting support for the boycott.
I searched my files and found some more dirt on Starbucks I didn’t know about:
I think its a bit silly to think of a boycott in terms of things other people use. So don’t run exchange for you private mail server and sure you can petition your government not to use microsoft but you are not falling to boycott microsoft because document you made in libre office and attached to an email you sent on your linux mahine was recieved by an exchange server.
Of course it’s a failure to boycott. Every time you send email to a Microsoft recipient, you feed profitable data to the MS ad surveillance machine. You also open the door to give the recipient an email address so when they reply you effectively facilitate more food to MS to the extent that you have no control over. And worse, you also signal to the recipient that their email setup works… that it serves them and rewards their choice.
If you boycott MS effectively, then you use snail mail (absent other channels). You feed nothing to MS and block your recipient from using you to feed MS more. You also give badly needed help to the postal service. Look what happened to Denmark. They lost the option to boycott MS. Those people will soon be entirely disempowered, forced to support whatever tech giant naive recipients choose.
Microsoft loves it that you think you can simply avoid running some of their binary code and work under the illusion that you are not supporting MS.