It's Time to Boycott Arizona

[dreadgeek]

There were two more points I wanted to make on this subject.

1) A number of posters have suggested that anyone upset about SB 1070 should move to Arizona so that they can vote against the bill. There's only one problem: SB stands for Senate Bill. This was a bill passed by the Arizona legislature not by popular referendum. The critique several of us have leveled at the voters of Arizona has to do with them electing a governor and a number of state representatives who supported the bill and, in doing so, giving their explicit approval of that bill. Which leads to the core point: why on Earth should people not living in Arizona move there when 53.51% of Arizonans didn't bother to vote! The numbers I'm working with aren't something I pulled out of the thin air, those numbers are available on the web.

The numbers I used came from here: http://www.azprogress.org/content/vo...lowest-yuma-co

So it seems to me that the people who should be pushed to the polls aren't those of us who live outside of Arizona and have no interest in relocating but those who live INSIDE Arizona who were comfortable enough with the prospect of Ms Brewer being elected (she was appointed governor when Napolitano left for Washington) that they stayed home. Which is, as has been said a number of times now, a vote for whomever wins by default.

2) This idea that boycotts are bad. If you really believe that then you need to seriously question any reflexive admiration you might express for Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr. The reason why you know the name of Parks is BECAUSE her action of asserting her dignity and being arrested for it, precipitated the Birmingham Bus Boycott. Was the Birmingham Bus Boycott an attempt, as one poster has characterized the Arizona boycott, an attempt to kill the families of Birmingham Bus company workers? Martin Luther King came to national prominence *because* of the boycott. As I said a few days ago, I'm sure that if you had polled the workers and families connected to the Birmingham bus company in 1955 you would have heard that they were opposed to the boycott even if they thought that blacks should be able to sit anywhere. They would have said that there must be some OTHER way to get the bus company to change policy (without actually saying what that might be) and if blacks were just a little more patient one day, in the full measure of time, justice would be had.

While we're on that subject, boycotts and strikes work because business owners want to keep making money. They will change unjust policies or, in this case, lobby the government to do so. If Nevada passes such a law (and I hope that the Nevada legislature will learn from the lesson of Arizona) let them. And let Nevada face a tourism boycott. Nevada's economy rises or falls on tourism and tourism alone. Suck the tourism out and you've sucked all of the oxygen out of the Nevada economy. I think that as hotels in Vegas and Reno saw their bookings dry up and particularly as conferences moved from Vegas to other cities in, say, California or Utah or Oregon that the chamber of commerce would make their displeasure known to the legislature in a heartbeat. The bill wouldn't survive the ink drying.

There is a reason why plutocrats hate strikes and boycotts--they can be *very* effective. I realize that after 40 years of labor being decimated in America, we no longer realize what the Europeans do--that striking is an effective way to get business to behave itself--but perhaps we need to relearn that lesson.