Preaching the anti-shopping gospel – latimes.com
I wonder how many people actually get the irony of Rev. Billy? Using the consumer culture against itself. Turning the mass market of televangelism into a way to expose the putrid masters of push..
[...]Rev. Billy has spent much of the last decade parading through the streets of Manhattan, shouting through a megaphone messages such as: “Mickey Mouse is the anti-Christ!”
Accompanied by a robed choir belting out gospel songs, the Rev. Billy condemns the “Disneyfication” of Times Square and warns that Wal-Mart is part of the “consumer axis of evil.”
The Rev. advocated the re-empowerment of the people and choice. To turn our back on big-box retailers and their small town crushing ways. Given choice and the power to move beyond the big-business retailers.
Still, I would like to know what Rev. Billy would say to those that can only afford to do their shopping at these retailers. I’d honestly like to stick it to Wal-Mart but with the purchasing muscle that the corporation versus the prices offered by smaller outfits I can’t pay the prices to shop other places sometimes.
“Don’t go shopping in a big-box store if you can help it,” he said. “Don’t go to a chain store if you can help it. Those are sweatshop products. Those are union-busting companies.”
Yes! I couldn’t agree more with these sentiments. I think that the union in America needs to be empowered again. To carry some real clout and to influence politics on the left. The little guys for the little guys. But it twists that we all can’t move beyond these retailers because of our class status.
So where do people like us go? People without the material worth to shop elsewhere at all? It feels like these places have people like us in a stranglehold. So…where do we go?
With most common-sense people figuring out that Iraq ≠ Afghanistan and Saddam ≠ Osama, they are also realizing that Bush & Co have pulled a fast one on them since pretty much day one. Running out of the the same trick, the new candidates for Overlord have had to make something else up that’s just as frightening. Immigrants. 
