Consumers on Strike against the War!

Taking a page from Gandhi, Oklahoma peace activists are advocating that consumers go on strike against the "War Party" which presently has control of the United States government. "Money is the foundation of American political power; the voice of the average American is not heard inside the beltway these days," says Robert Waldrop of the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City. "But the politicians pay close to attention to how we spend our money and how much we spend."

When Gandhi was faced by an apparently insurmountable problem (the British occupation of India and the lack of unity among his people), he selected tactics and strategies that went to the heart of the Indian experience of the time, e.g., the tax on salt, home weaving of cloth. The Oklahoma activists' focus on spending money goes directly to the heart of American culture.

"These days nobody can live without spending money, but we can shift our purchases away from the corporations and the white collar big money psycopaths that are running them," says Waldrop. "If we spend less in the corporation dominated globalized economy, we can spend more in the local grassroots economy, and that is where we should target an economic attack on the War Party's plans." Waldrop notes that the big corporations have power because we give it to them, voluntarily, with our cash spending, and says "that kind of mindless indifference to the consequences of our economic choices is dangerous."

The Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House in Oklahoma City is an intentional community in the tradition of Dorothy Day of New York, named after the Archbishop of San Salvador who was murdered in 1980 by his own government with bullets sent from the United States, shortly after he publicly appealed to President Carter to stop sending military aid to the El Salvadoran government because it was being used to murder innocent people.