Votes can head to the mall

You know what store I don’t mind? Urban Outfitters. I know that I should hate it – duh – but… You know what store I don’t mind? Urban Outfitters. I know that I should hate it – duh – but no matter what I do, I can never quite work up the bile to forever cross it off my Christmas card list of institutions. It’s sort of like that friend you don’t really care about, but because you don’t care that much, you can’t hate him.

Of course, it does suck. It’s “turning rebellion into money,” as the Clash sang on one of their singles that promoted sales for their new album, which featured revolutionary advice on haircuts and movements against the state. Urban is one of those absurd fake stores that purport to be selling the underground in a manner that still anesthetizes the underground from the influence of the mainstream. It’s like Hot Topic, you know, just less black on red and more really expensive jeans.

While I was coveting a Lacoste polo in there the other day – because I have what a Marxist would call “commodity fetishism” and what an American would call “birth right” – I saw some anti-Bush book on one of their large tables full of board games, beer glasses and edgy coffee table books. The book was some sort of countdown to 2008, or maybe it was “Bush-isms,” I don’t know, it was something making money off of the popular discontent with the current administration.

There is, however, a bit of irony at work here. Buying this anti-Bush book from Urban Outfitters means that Urban Outfitters gets a chunk of the money you spend. This money goes to all sorts of things in Urban, including political contributions that attempt to get a better deal from the government. And what political party receives the largess of Urban’s gratitude, its helpfulness and its loving support? Well, it’s the Republican Party of course, the recipient of 96 percent of all of Urban Outfitters’ donations for the years 2003-2004.

I learned this fact, and many other fascinating facts about political contributions, from the helpful book The Blue Pages, a guide on sale at your local Borders – no contributions in 2003-04 – and Barnes and Noble – $80,000 to Democrats, zero to Republicans in 2003-04. This book is an absolutely fascinating as well as essential tool for shopping in today’s world, where the strenuously constructed public identity of a corporation can be at odds with its actual practices and policies.

This book suggests that one can “vote with one’s wallet.” The idea of “conscious shopping,” as it makes clear in the introduction, is that one can affect social change through consumer influence. One is able to reward companies that reflect one’s political likes and punish those that don’t. Like New Balance, for example.

Now, I think that New Balance makes wonderful, comfortable, brightly colored shoes, but the company also donated a staggering $104,500 – 98 percent of its total contributions – to the Republican Party in 2003-04. All of a sudden, I’m less concerned about how nice their shoes seem and more about how their shoes paid for some really annoying people to maintain political power in this country. Lousy Republican shoes.

So I’m done with New Balance, and I’m cautiously optimistic about consumerism as a positive shaping force, an actual influence that I can exert. Maybe if more people “voted” by supporting politically aligned corporations, we would see more effective change in the world rather than just voting for someone who is the candidate we dislike the least.

But then again, is everyone really going to stop shopping at American Eagle because 97 percent of its contributions went to the Republican Party? Or that the same company has “sourced from countries with widespread, well-documented human and labor rights abuses?” No, of course people won’t, that’s the point. We love cheap jeans and hoodies, don’t we? Capitalism is such an insidious force that we don’t even see that we are creating policy; we are insuring complacency with every single dollar we spend.

Let’s all fall into the Gap, – 54 percent Democrat, 46 percent Republican – and ignore where the money goes. That’s America, right? Maybe it isn’t possible to have clean hands in a society based on maintaining a profit line, but I like to think that, when it comes down, most of us will make the right decision. Or maybe we would just vote W. back into office. Hopefully the publishing company who puts out the Blue Pages at least shares my concerns; they don’t list their own contributions, so I can’t tell.

It’s snowing, not raining. Put down those umbrellas and e-mail kjs34@pitt.edu.