economic terrorism

I often get depressed by the incredible lack of imagination displayed by most revolutionaries. Most fall into one of two categories, those who advocate mass violent coup de etat and those who essentially advocate a lot of ineffectual bitching. In the first category we find, for instance, the revolutionary communist party... and we can all see how that turned out. They never figured out that the ends never justify the means because there are no ends, only means. On the other side, animal rights activists. Pansy demonstrations and petty vandalism ain't never gonna get people to stop eating meat, dupes, and as long as a person is willing to have an animal killed to eat is certainly not going to object to them being cut into if there's even a remote chance that it's going to save their ass from cancer some day.

Economic terrorism is perfectly open to any group that can organize a million members, and what's more, it's legal. Try this at home!

1. Gather a million people who agree with you about a certain point of view. Let's say, you want to take a swipe at proctor and gamble because they're so damn mean to bunnies.
2. Over the six months, get your hands on as much p&g stock as you can. In this day and age of easy high-interest electronic credit and internet trading, this will be easy as pie. Just put out a message to your minions: I intend to buy p&g stock from January 2000 through June 2000. Not advocating anything: just announcing an intention that is presented in a format that allows a tacit understanding of goals. Hint: this doesn't work very well unless you spend few thousand dollars. Committment is never cheap, kids.
3. Then, over the next six months, same thing, announce an intention to start buying the target company's product. Not all at once, but on a progressively rising curve. Your final six month expenditure should match, more or less, your stock purchases. A simple equationary guide: divide your total intended purchase amount over the 6 months by 63. That amount is your X. First month, spend 1X. Second month, 2X. Third month, 4X...and so on, 8X and 16X and 32X. Simple stuff. If you want to refine further you can take any given month's calculated amount, and run the same pattern, dividing by 15 and running the pattern up to the fourth iteration, 8X. The point is to induce an artificial geometric expansion in income. Believe me, they'll notice, but they'll just assume it's something they're doing right and what's more they'll project into the future and make business plans accordingly.
Stock up, buy things you use and that will keep well. That way you don't really waste any money. of course the terrible thoughts of the poor wittle bunny wabbits being towtuwed may make it difficult for you to stomach using the products.
4. Stop buying product. This can be more difficult than it seems. You have to be assiduous, cut them off completely. Start scanning for "earnings drop" stories in the financial press. As soon as you see a couple, publish a small segment on the same forum you've made the prior two announcements.
5. On that signal, sell all stock as quickly as possible.

See, a million smart revolutionaries who are minimally organized can do pretty much what they want. Our whole system runs on the graces of four billion 700 million stupid, disorganized people and is run by 300 million evil, greedy ones. But there's still a thousand million of us who ought to know better. Think about those thousand points of light.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.