Boycott WalMart for Democracy and Humankind in General

Hecate has  a post up at Eschaton that asks people to lay off the therapy shopping until we get free and fair elections.   I'm glad to see both ideas get some frontpage time on a blog with such huge traffic, but I wish Atrios et al would throw their weight behind a more targeted boycott.  Of course, I mean WalMart, the World's Largest Retailer and Enemy of the People.  It's great to suggest that we all stop buying until we have the vote restored to us, but it just isn't going to happen. 

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure we could get a healthy six month boycott  rolling if we limited the pain to avoiding only WalMart.  And there would be pain involved, make no mistake about it.  For a lot of people WalMart isn't just cheap, it's easy.  For some people it's the only discount store in town.  The sacrifice people will make to avoid that store is a real one. 

But we don't need every WalMart shopper to join us.  If we got half of them to stop for six months, we'd be reading about WalMart entering into limited discussions with unions.  We aren't going to have this kind of power for long.  As soon as China steps up and starts buying consumer goods with the same ease that we do, we're sunk.  It's pretty much no or never.

Hecate also asks readers to stop running up credit card debt by shopping.  On that point, I couldn't agree more.  Less debt is bad for the predatory lenders and good for us.  Win-win!