One of the best time-tested ways to engage in nonviolent protest is to boycott corporations with abusive power structures that directly engage in anti-consumer behavior.
Unfortunately, this is a long list.
In a consumer, corporate-monopoly environment, this would be a long list, so the best approach is for boycotters to focus on a limited list of companies.
In a boycott, there are a few easy steps:
- First, stop buying their products or services.
- Tell your friends to boycott the same companies. Word of mouth and social media are very important for boycotts.
- Notify investment firms and large institutional investors (Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Chase, Bank of America, Vanguard, and state pension funds) that a boycott is underway.
- Let the company know you are boycotting their product, and why.
- Publicize your results.
- Watch for the impact of the boycott. This could be seen in quarterly sales reports, media coverage, a drop in deposits, or other data in stockholder financial reports.
The Target List of Companies to Boycott
This is a suggested list, which can be modified for local circumstances.
Target, for instance, headquartered in Minneapolis, is the largest employer in Minnesota. As such, they have significant political power and can be harmed in both sales and through reputational damage. “Reputational damage” is a fancy term for PR. If consumers are dissatisfied that Target is not doing enough to prevent ICE raids, boycotters could exert pressure on the company. Even after the ICE raids have stopped in Minneapolis, if the company is still supporting ICE raids in its other stores nationwide or its policy has not changed, continue the boycott.
Global Banks. Banks wield significant political power, and their credibility shapes how investors, retail checking account holders, and borrowers view their ethics. Ethics and banking in modern capitalism are mutually exclusive. If you look at the fines imposed on major national banks, you can see how they abuse customer trust via fraud and illegal business practices. Banks usually do not suffer any consequences for these actions. Banks may be fined, but the amounts are often insignificant and can be considered the cost of doing business.
Among the top banks to boycott are those that have received the highest penalties from regulators. This would include Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. In this chart, we can find other banks and other financial institutions to boycott.
But when it comes to boycotting banks, consumers have a much better alternative: close their accounts.
When you close your account, tell the bank manager or supervisor why. Maybe you do not like their record of customer abuse and violations, as shown in this table.
So, after you close your account at a global bank, where do you go?
Credit Unions. Open an account at a credit union. Credit unions are member-owned. They are co-ops. (The Vanguard mutual fund company is also a co-op.) This means they are owned by the depositors and are focused on customers who share a “common bond,” not shareholders, whose only concern is maximizing profits at any cost.
Since credit unions’ non-profit, member-owned structure, national and global banks contend that credit unions have “an unfair competitive edge,” mainly because they are exempt from federal income taxes. This means credit unions can deliver better loan rates, lower fees, and higher savings yields than the large banks.
Naturally, the global banks think this is unfair, especially because credit unions reinvest earnings back to members rather than paying them out to shareholders. In essence, big banks object when profits are redistributed to co-op owners, rather than to CEOs who take home hundreds of millions a year in salaries, bonuses, and perks.
Credit unions offer many of the same services as global banks—checking, savings, mortgages, car loans, business loans, credit and debit cards, and student loans—but at much lower rates than large banks. This is because their goal is to keep costs down, including paying fines to regulators. They are also more lenient on overdrafts and other fees that generate billions of dollars in revenue for large banks each year. 
There is also the misconception that you must be in a union to join a credit union. This is not necessarily the case. Some credit unions, such as the Boeing Employees Credit Union (BECU), are open to everyone. If there is a credit union near you, check its website to see its membership requirements. The only exception I have seen is military credit unions, which require that someone in the family has served in the military.
While most credit unions are chartered in a specific state (some have national charters), they can still serve you if you live in another state via an agreement with a local credit union and through ATM machines.
Here is a link to finding national credit unions.
Companies that are big donors to Trump. These companies support the MAGA-Trump movement and everything it stands for. Any one of these companies should be boycotted.
Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental Petroleum have contributed to Trump’s inauguration committee.
Tech giants Amazon and Meta also donated $1 million each, along with Uber and Qualcomm.
Cryptocurrency companies are major donors to Trump and his crime family. These include: Coinbase, Kraken, Galaxy Digital Holdings, Crypto.com, and Paradigm Operations, each contributing $1 million. Note: Crypto is a global scam and is the preferred medium for tax cheats, fraudsters, and others who want to evade taxes and destabilize the Federal government. Crypto is not an “investment.”
CoreCivic and GEO Group, private prison companies, each donated $500,000 to benefit from Trump’s planned immigration policies and the construction of indoor prison camps to support ICE arrests and deportations.
There is a long list of companies and top executives in this Newsweek article that have contributed hundreds of millions to Trump. Unfortunately, this is a long list of corporations and their CEOs who believe in the MAGA agenda. Pick your boycott list from here.
Rage Against the Corporate Machine by Boycotts
So the No Kings Movement and other groups in The Resistance should take boycotts as a serious strategy. This strategy will never be proposed by the corporate Democrats who get millions in corporate donations and cannot bite the hand that feeds them. This is an old story that goes back to President Bill Clinton, who moved the Democratic Party to the right in 1993 after he could not raise enough money from unions due to declining membership. Clinton then courted corporations that found a pliable president, who welcomed donations in exchange for favors.
Clinton then deregulated telecommunications through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which led to massive industry consolidation, limited improvements in rural access, and continued reliance on the FCC rather than market forces, according to the conservative Cato Institute. This produced a near-monopoly on cell phone providers, movie producers, video entertainment, and social media. It also gave consumers higher prices for cable and telephone services due to reduced competition.
Activists should re-evaluate the Clintons, who made millions from their foundations. Bill Clinton, as president, also introduced draconian “welfare reform,” increased the prison population 60% from 1993 to 2001, increased the number of crimes subject to the death penalty, and conducted “special operation” bombing campaigns in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Somalia between 1993 and 2001.
So, from the Clinton administration to the Trump administration, corporations have gained more control over American society, the prices we pay, the quality of services, and the choices we have. In this powerful report by labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards from Bloomberg, she notes that corporations are making more in profits, paying less in taxes, while workers’ salaries have decreased and their benefits have been cut.
“As corporate profits soar, the labor share of income in the US has cratered. The last two years saw wages and compensation fall to the lowest levels since 1941. And these two developments — workers get less money, corporations get more — are absolutely related. Meanwhile, CEO compensation has skyrocketed over the past six decades, rising from 21 times that of the average worker to 281 times,” Edwards said.
If anyone denies that the US today is a monopolistic corporate state, operating against the interests of average citizens, they probably also believe Trump is a successful businessman.
