Panelists say large-scale boycotts will help
Margaret Engel thinks the Amish tradition of shunning can dismantle power and wealth from conglomerate corporations.
“I’m recommending that we become morality snobs,” Engel said to a full Macky Auditorium Monday afternoon during the CWA panel “The Orgy of Corporate Greed.”
Engel, the managing editor of the Newseum (the world’s only interactive museum of news), was joined by panelists Roberta Baskin, an acclaimed journalist, Jello Biafra, vocalist of the seminal punk rock band Dead Kennedys and Andrew Kassoy, the co-founder of B Lab, a nonprofit organization to harness the power of business for public benefit.
The event was moderated by Peter Behrendt who began the panel with a joke that sent laughter resonating throughout the older salt-and-peppered crowd.
“My name is Peter, and I’m a recovering CEO,” Behrendt said.
Engel said Americans have passivity and paralysis in the midst of corporate greed. Adding the wealth of the obscenely rich is viewed as the pinnacle of the American experience and success.
“We’re really all the enablers of this new gilded age,” Engel said.
Instead of participating in corporate consumerism, Engel said individuals should take action by shunning and boycotting corporations involved in human rights and environmental atrocities.
Panelist Roberta Baskin agreed with Engle. As an investigative reporter of big business, Baskin said she witnessed conditions of a Nike shoe factory in Vietnam. Thousands of women, she said, aren’t even receiving the minimum wage, which is $40 per month for six-day workweeks.
Baskin said other examples of mistreatment included women getting their mouths taped shut, not being allowed to go to the bathroom and being beaten by supervisors with the heel of a Nike shoe for not meeting quota.
The story was supposed to be a broadcast piece on CBS, but it never made it into the living rooms of Americans. Baskin said she realized why when she tuned into the Nagano Olympic Games and saw her correspondents wearing blue Nike windbreakers. As it turned out, thousands of CBS employees receive hordes of Nike merchandise. Baskin said the story went unheard.
Baskin told the audience to become agents of change, and reaffirmed Engle’s earlier notion of shunning corporate business and its leaders.
“Gather yourselves together and create an avalanche,” Baskin said.
Panelist Andrew Kassoy said in American society, there is a schizophrenia of two different trends: the desire to grow and expand through globalization and a large amount of “ism” movements.
“It is an expression of people’s desire to have meaning in their lives, and to take some sense of control back in society,” Kassoy said.
Kassoy said social change will happen most effectively through business, not nonprofit or governmental entities. Through B Lab, Kassoy is building the capital market’s infrastructure to unify sustainable business and social enterprise through the creation of B Corporations.
“It is very hard to tell the difference between a good company and just good marketing,” Kassoy said.
B Corporations harness the power of private enterprise to create public benefit by allowing entrepreneurs, consumers and investors to distinguish “good” companies from good marketing. Kassoy said this can be accomplished through transparency and inserting a code of human and environmental ethics into the “DNA” of a company.
Kassoy said even in current society, there is an opportunity for individuals to choose to act according to their values. By being a conscious consumer, where one invests his or her capital, shareholder activism and especially young people’s choice of employment can start to ease the vice-grip corporations have on the market and country.
“If the last 50 years has been about intelligent investing to maximize wealth, the next 50 years can be about intentional investing to maximize health,” Kassoy said.
Animated Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra said he hasn’t eaten McDonalds in 30 years, and is yet to spend a dime in a Wal-Mart store. He said privatization of the market is what has created the current economy.
“That’s not even capitalism anymore,” Biafra said. “That is feudalism . Let’s call these people what they are – privateers.”
To cure the wealth addicts of their destructive habits, he proposed a maximum wage. The proposal made the audience break out into pools of applause.
Senior environmental studies major Miles Daly was one of only a handful of students that attended the panel.
“It got me thinking that the companies that use all these taglines like ‘go green’ and ‘sustainable’ aren’t really like that,” Daly said. “It makes me want to research more before I purchase things.”
Biafra did keep with the theme of noncooperation in the system, and shunning the corporations from daily life.
“Make a vow to yourself: I’m not cooperating with corporations or their agenda anymore,” Biafra said. “They can’t have me. I’m going to shun all of them. No more money to chain stores, no more money to chain restaurants. Spread the word everywhere.”
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Monica Stone at monica.stone@colorado.edu.
