I got to thinking the other day about the last time I voted.  It was 2002 in west Mesa, AZ at a church with a bunch of really Mormon-looking people.  The voting “booth” was a long table with a series of cardboard dividers set up past the eye line and it reminded me of my work cubicle and that it cost me an hours pay to come down and vote in a election that I could give two sh*ts about.  Then I started I started doing the math about how valuable my vote was to the overall electoral process - if a million people voted my vote would be worth .000001%.  And that ain’t worth a whole lot.  There’s more than .000001% of mercury in your drinking water, but that small amount is deemed harmless, like your one vote to a politician.

My point is based upon this premise: If you acknowledge that U.S. politicians are beholden to the corporate overlords who fund their campaigns and not necessarily the people that vote, than the best way to effect political change is to wisely allocate your money to the proper corporate overlords, not voting.  So why waste your time voting when you could be working to earn income to spend on the corporations who are the real architects of political change?

Granted, one could make a similar argument that your measly $27,000.00 a year is a drop in the bucket to the over all economy even less than .000001%, and that would be correct, but if you have to make/spend money to live anyway, you should do so with businesses that are not evil.  For instance, if everyone agreed that BP having the worst safety record of any oil company and destroying the Gulf of Mexico is a bad thing and stopped buying BP oil, the company would disappear.  We surely can’t count on politicians to hold them accountable (unless you consider having to listen to Senator Waxman as sufficient punishment, which, don’t get me wrong that’s pretty bad).

This will take more work on your part, in terms of researching companies and going out of your way to consume goods from good corporations, but I would argue that it is a better use of your time than voting and has a greater effect on the outcome of elections.  Vote with your dollars and the corporations that are not evil assholes will thrive while the evil assholes themselves will parish in the free market.

This idea isn't new or original, you can read more about it by following these links:

Wiki-Guide:

Learn where your favorite companies allocate their funds (and web 2.0, no less):

Always quality, sometimes wacky, AdBusters:

Oldie, but a goodie:

Quick tips: