Boycotts

I have a few companies or places to whom I will never give my money. This comes from my belief that the only effective consumer voice is your money. So I choose to not give my money to those with whom I disagree. It likely sounds a little pretentious, but it’s my damn money. The places I choose to boycott for one misconstrued reason or another are:

• McDonalds: When I was 16 these bitches gave me food poisoning. You only have to try and kill me once before I learn to avoid you. It only helps my resolve that they are also horribly exploitive of people and the environment. They are the model of everything that a company could do to make a dollar at any expense. Plus I hate clowns.
• ExxonMobil (aka Esso): The villain in the worlds energy fascination. You’ll have to google up all the bastard things they do yourself, or just trust me… they’re bastards. Exxon’s record runs from the famous oil spill all the way to the rape, torture and murder of Indonesians. Top that off with the millions and millions they spend every year trying to undermine renewable energy research. They have done more than any other company to stop the world from tackling climate change. I’ll walk to the next gas station, thanks.
• Kleenex (Kimberly-Clark): An unlikely boycott, I know. Kimberly-Clark deliberately purchases their pulp/paper from old growth forest logging. Despite public protest agains this, they keep doing it. They make Kleenex, Kotex, Huggies and Cottonelle and I’m not buying any of them.
• Citgo: I’m dubiuos enough about Chavez and that whole “scene” that I just write off Citgo. If you’re not up on the drama there, you’ll have to google it all.
• Seaworld: This is a no-brainer. Capture young whales from their parents and keep them in your swimming pool doing tricks so you can charge admission until they die, and I will boycott you also. Should I someday be a billionaire living above the law I want to capture Seaworld employees and keep them in my pool so they can do tricks for my friends. The only downside is that they wouldn’t get the relevance.
• Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC): I’m just going to quote kentuckyfriedcruetly.com - “Chickens raised for KFC suffer from the day they are born until the day they are killed, and KFC has refused to make the minimal changes recommended by its own animal welfare advisors to prevent the worst types of cruelty in suppliers’ factory farms and slaughterhouses. Imagine what life is like for KFC chickens—if you’re a breeder chicken, your sensitive beak is burned off shortly after you’re born, and the pain is so great that many around you starve to death because they can’t bear to take food into their raw, bloody mouths. If you’re one of the 850 million chickens killed by KFC for meat each year, you spend your short life confined to a filthy shed with tens of thousands of other chickens—the shed isn’t cleaned, and the smell of ammonia and rotting excrement is so heavy that it burns your lungs with every breath. You’ve been bred and drugged to grow so obese that you can hardly walk, and you watch as others become crippled under their own weight and die of thirst just a few inches away from the water nozzle. After only a few weeks of life, you are slammed into a crate and trucked over many miles through all weather extremes without food or water to the slaughterhouse. There you are hung upside-down and your throat is cut while you cry out in terror and struggle to escape. If you don’t lose consciousness in time, you’ll still be alive when you’re dragged through the scalding water of the defeathering tanks.”

You’re welcome to boycott these jerks too if you’re feeling it. If you hear about any of these companies addressing their issues by all means please let me know.