Change V: Boycott BP

I covered the "Move Your Money" campaign in my first cynical change post. Well, Boycott BP may have the advantage that there's plenty of reliable other gas stations to fuel up. But they're at a disadvantage. Here's an email from some progressive group (Democracy for America) declaring victory in the Boycott BP campaign, quoting from Convenience Store News:

A chain of Convenience Stores in Philipsburg, Pa decided to debrand three of its BP-branded stations:

"We are debranding BP. We will no longer be associated with BP by the end of the month. We are doing this because of the backlash and bad publicity from the handling of BP's catastrophe," Sean Lay, vice president of operations, said in the report. "We don't want to be associated with them anymore. We've had enough."[Convenience Store News]

They are, rightly, declaring that their action is having a positive response because BP gas station operators don't want to be connected to the company. But clearly they're able to adapt. In Los Angeles, there's a big refinery that used to be owned by Arco. It had a massive, three story tall flag over the front that said "ARCO." When it was bought out by BP, they put the name BRITISH PETROLEUM on it -- at the time, they were not called BP. There was some displeasure at that, so they rebranded the factory with a flag that said BP. Then they tried putting up a flag that said "BETTER PETROLEUM" (the 'Kitchen Fresh Chicken' of the oil world). That didn't take. So now the flag is just a gigantic American flag. And people are basically mollified.

Do you know where the name Exxon comes from? It's actually the result of a multi-million dollar consulting project that concluded that the best name for the brand would be a completely neutral name that no one had any associations with. Then Exxon-Valdez happened, and all of a sudden we all had associations with that name, so the tactic was ineffective. But if they'd waited a year and then changed the name, people might not have noticed.

Have you heard of Altria Group? That's the name that they came up with so that you would no longer associate Kraft with Phillip Morris -- even though they're part of the same company. God forbid your disdain of tobacco influence your taste in cheese.

I hope that the American consumer keeps tabs on brand ownership, or they're going to have a hard time figuring out what they're boycotting. Otherwise they might get duped, like the whole CREDO Mobile thing.

Change II: Can David Beat Goliath?

So, people are angry at Facebook. Honestly, I looked at the updated privacy controls today, and I have trouble understanding what the hubbub is all about. I don't put anything on my Facebook that I consider to be private, and most of the content is pretty easily put into Friends Only mode. I feel like the same hubbub came up when Google's algorithms started pitching me ads based on what I wrote in emails or was searching for, but I find it difficult to get my ire up.

That being said, if people want to protect their information, their only real choice is to quit Facebook. And honestly, at this point, Facebook is deeply embedded in my life. I hire actors by going through my list of friends on Facebook sometimes; I find about a majority of my friends' events on Facebook; I keep in touch with people I would have lost touch with all the time on Facebook and it often amounts to big stuff.

Some people, however, are determined to leave Facebook, but to create their own. And these people are four NYU students behind a project called Diaspora, and the many many people who appear to have donated (including, allegedly, Mark Zuckerberg himself -- maybe he's hoping to appropriate it later, like Toyota's part-ownership of Tesla).

Diaspora isn't even done yet, but it is an interesting question -- when it is ready, what will it take to shift the vast majority of users from Facebook to Diaspora? New social networks have, at times, been able to create themselves in the face of larger, more connected social networks (Friendster to Myspace; Myspace to Facebook). The question is, can Diaspora leverage its advantages over Facebook in the face of Facebook's ultimate advantage: its existing community?

It's interesting to see whether it is possible, or whether this will also fall prey to the same individual-lethargy-to-action as Move Your Money did (which I wrote about here).

CREDO Mobile

I'm on a lot of mailing lists for assorted Democratic groups, and though I dislike most of the propaganda I get, I find it useful to see what Democrats want me to think. One of the groups is Democrats.com, which today sent me a mailing which was simply an advertisement for CREDO Mobile, billing itself as a mobile network alternative to AT&T, because AT&T donates to conservative candidates. Basically, it's the Move Your Money campaign for mobile phones... except it, itself, is the phone company you're supposed to move to.

Also, it says at the bottom, in tiny letters:

Sprint is the network provider only; your service is handled exclusively by CREDO Mobile, and all representations regarding issue advocacy, contributions and donations to nonprofits apply to CREDO Mobile only. Sprint is a trademark of Sprint Nextel.

Hrm. So basically you pay CREDO, and CREDO pays Sprint, who are your real carriers. They also make no guarantees about who the money they get from CREDO goes to. And a quick search shows that Sprint Nextel Corporation has donated to:

• Roy Blunt (R,MO), a former Republican Party Leader (between DeLay and Boehner) and party whip;
• Richard Burr (R,NC), who opposed Health Care after being #2 in recipients in the country from Health Insurance Companies;
• Jim DeMint (R,SC) who wrote a book called Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism.
• Joe Lieberman (I,CT) who is on the list of people CREDO Mobile accuses AT&T opposes.
• Blanche Lincoln (D,LA) who we all remember from the shit list of Democratic Senators who nearly cost us Health Care.
• John McCain (R,AZ) also on the list that CREDO Mobile calls out.
• John Shadegg (R,AZ) who called the Public Option "full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care" before saying "I would support single-payer" until someone told him what that meant.
• John Thune (R,SD) who defeated Tom Daschle in 2004, saying "You know, the Second Amendment, gun owners' rights, abortion – those are not wedge issues in South Dakota" and blasting Tom Daschle for opposing a Federal Amendment banning gay marriage.

By the way, I'm being unfair to Sprint -- they also donated to Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Bart Stupak, Ike Skelton, Barbara Boxer, Clyburn and John Conyers; it looks as though their donations are not so much ideological as they are pro-Incumbent.

I don't know if Sprint dreamed up CREDO Mobile as a way to get gullible progressives to give them money instead of AT&T, or if CREDO Mobile are gullible saps that thought that giving Sprint money would be cleaner than giving Verizon or AT&T money.

I compared with AT&T's donation history, which is admittedly seemingly more right-wing (the only company of the three to donate to Michelle Bachmann, for instance), and with Verizon's. The case against AT&T is compelling, but the case against Verizon is silly. Verizon apparently donates $161,000 across the country, to small candidates of a number of political stripes. AT&T is more in the $2,000,000 range, which is significant money. But still, Sprint (between the two in donation amount) isn't exactly a left-wing saint.

It turns out that if you patronize a major corporation, there's a 2:1 chance some slim part of that money will go to a conservative loon candidate. Even Google gives to Eric Cantor, Mike Pence, Lamar Smith, John Thune, and James DeMint. Basing a business model on avoiding that eventuality reeks to me of opportunism.

Anger II: A Little More on Malcolm X

I took a moment in the last post to poke at Malcolm X, as quoted by Don Hall, and I did want to mention a profound influence Malcolm X had on my life.

I'm actually a big sucker for speeches -- great flourishes of rhetoric like the one I cribbed from after HCR passed, or the one that nearly makes me cry sometimes, LBJ's speech on behalf of civil rights. The part that always gets me is when LBJ says, in his deep southern twang:

There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem.

And I know that the moment I was 100% behind Obama was the moment when he cribbed the same speech:

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

So I definitely went through a phase where I was hell-bent to uncover all of the great American speeches and be sure to listen to them all -- really listen to them. I had them on my iPod (where they more than once came up on shuffle when I was trying to liven up a party... my social life, she suffers!), and I liked to walk or drive while letting the words really sink in.

Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech was one of those landmark speeches I came across. And I was most interested by a passage that I had never heard associated with Malcolm X before, which goes like this:

The economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure and simple. It only means that we should control the economy of our community. Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should white people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the white man? Why? If a black man can't move his store into a white community, you tell me why a white man should move his store into a black community. The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.

Then you wonder why where you live is always a ghetto or a slum area. And where you and I are concerned, not only do we lose it when we spend it out of the community, but the white man has got all our stores in the community tied up; so that though we spend it in the community, at sundown the man who runs the store takes it over across town somewhere. He's got us in a vise.

So the economic philosophy of black nationalism means in every church, in every civic organization, in every fraternal order, it's time now for our people to be come conscious of the importance of controlling the economy of our community. If we own the stores, if we operate the businesses, if we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we're developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind. Once you gain control of the economy of your own community, then you don't have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business.

It's an amazing principle, that's based on the idea that any system can be transformed, given an understanding of the system. Unfortunately, history proved that it wasn't that easy -- probably for similar reasons to the "Move Your Money" campaign that doesn't appear to have much traction (reasons like me).

It's just a pity that this isn't what Malcolm X was known for -- or the parts of his philosophy where he talks about the social health of the community.