Boycott nation: Don't feed the billionaires

Kind of feels like we should be boycotting everything these days. But it’s daunting when you look at the lengthening list of Stuff to Avoid:

• Anything controlled by Jeff Bezos: Amazon, the Washington Post, Blue Origin, Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos.
• Anything controlled by Mark Zuckerberg: Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads.
• Anything controlled by Leon Musk: Tesla, Starlink, X, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, the United States of America.

That’s just the beginning. All three men control dozens of other companies I’m too lazy to list. Then you have all these other conglomerates that happily sucked up to Trump on the whole DEI question: Target, Google, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s – to name but a few. 

You see the problem: Fighting back is no longer as easy as shunning Hobby Lobby or Mike Lindell’s shitty pillows. This might involve some hardship.

It’s our own fault, really. We’ve been taking low-cost convenience for granted; now the oligarchs have grown so fat they can take us for granted too. They’ve thrust their slimy gold tentacles into pretty much every corner of American life. They hooked us first with cool products, then began reducing the quality, raising the price, and making them ever more invasive. All the while, the rich have gotten exponentially richer, amassing enough wealth to easily sway an ignorant electorate. Especially with two venal crooks in the Oval Office, lighting the way. 

The wife and I were talking about what we can do without, going forward. Amazon Prime comes to mind. We like the free shipping, the ease of getting items without having to hunt for them in a real store. We’ll miss the video streaming and the Kindle books. We were long subscribers to the Washington Post, but that’s done now and we won’t miss its new pseudo-libertarian, profits uber alles slant.

Then there’s Facebook, a platform I detest but can’t seem to quit. I still find it useful for keeping in touch with friends and family, maybe the odd neighbor or two. But it’s so riddled with ads, click-bait and AI slop that it’s also kind of an ordeal. Rather than quit completely, I think maybe it’s enough now to just never click on any ad or stupid "reel," and never respond to anything except a true post or picture from a known friend. 

We were never going to get anything Musk-related anyway, so that’s easy enough. Not so easy with Google – I’m aware of the irony of posting this screed on a Google-run platform, via a  link from Facebook. 

I guess we’ll sort it out in the days to come. It’ll make a difference in our lives, not one whit of difference for the billionaires. 

But small gestures are better than none. Things are getting real now. Feels like waiting for the next election is not enough. Remember, we're now in bed with Putin -- the guy who won his fifth term with 88 percent of the vote. No doubt Trump’s got people working on that as we speak.