For the past ~15 years I have tried for the most part to boycott:
- American Express for being an #ALEC member (which supports #climateDenial and obstructs public healthcare, public education, immigration, gun control, etc), and for participating in the #Wikileaks donation blockade
- Visa for pushing the #warOnCash (member of #betterThanCashAlliance.org and offering huge rewards to merchants who refuse cash), for participating in the #Wikileaks donation blockade, and for blocking Tor users from anonymously opting out of data sharing on their credit cards
- Mastercard for pushing the #warOnCash (member of betterThanCashAlliance.org), for participating in the #Wikileaks donation blockade, and for blocking Tor users from anonymously opting out of data sharing on their credit cards
Discovercard has always been a clear lesser of evils. So Discovercard has earned the majority of my business whenever cash is not possible. But now I hear chatter that #Discovercard might merge with a shitty bank that had an embarrassing data leak by an Amazon contractor: #CapitalOne. I was disappointed when Samual Jackson promoted #CapOne. Capital One supported Trump’s Jan.6 insurrection attempt among other things.
So what’s left? JCB (Japanese) and UnionPay (China). JCB pulled out of the US like 10 years ago. People outside the US can get a #JCB card but then IIRC it uses the Discovercard network in the US and the #AmEx network in Canada.
I already favor cash whenever possible. In other cases it will be hard to choose the lesser of evils between CapOne and Mastercard.
update
Found an insightful article detailing a loophole that the fed gave to Discovercard which is why Capital One intends to buy it.
Maybe PayPal in-house balances for payments where it’s accepted? That’s a pretty small network (by comparison) and, really, if PayPal is your least-evil option you may as well either suck off the other corporations or suffer the inconvenience of cash.
#PayPal is one of the most evil:
https://git.disroot.org/cyberMonk/liberethos_paradigm/src/branch/master/rap_sheets/paypal.md
I got burnt personally by them but even if I hadn’t they are among the least ethical options. There are some vendors selling products I would like to buy but they accept paypal exclusively, so I walk… and go without. Recently I have encountered some small brick and mortar shops/cafes that use “Zettle”. #Zettle is paypal. So if I see Zettle and they don’t take cash, I walk out. They share data with over 600 corporations so I will not allow Paypal to serve as a payment processor of my credit or debit card. Paypal are rotten to the core scumbags. They have some sneaky tricks for keeping people’s money under the guise of AML/KYC/anti-fraud, even though they are not a bank and escape those regulations anyway. It’s no surprise Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were involved with the founding of that company.
Exactly; I view them as the worst of the lot. But, like gasoline for my car and biometrics on my driver’s license and passport, I end up holding my nose because I know that - effectively - there is no clean, convenient way to circumvent them. And paypal - I use it for business transactions when I have to. Not because I like them, but because - for a business my size - there is no other way to take a payment remotely that doesn’t carry ridiculous fees and minimums.
I never have to use PayPal. Goods and services my life depends on can all be bought without PayPal. If a hospital emergency room were to only accept PayPal/Zettle, they would treat me then I would simply refuse to pay the bill until they change their payment terms. It has been over a decade since I made a PayPal transaction. Exceptionally, PayPal may have processed some of my card transactions without my knowledge (before I knew what Zettle was), but if I knew I would have walked.
I spoke to a small cafe owner who only accepts Zettle, no cash. He was the owner and cashier. He said Zettle was the cheapest for him. But as an ethical consumer I have choices and price is low priority. I don’t have to buy my coffee from him. In some cases I have managed to compel a cashless shop to accept my cash. If I have exact change or their staff has change, the staff will use their own personal payment card and take cash from me. I normally boycott cashless brick and mortar shops, but sometimes I do an experiment of forcing cash on them. But in the case of Zettle that’s not an option because PayPal still profits from the transaction even if PayPal does not obtain or profit from my data.
I don’t know your situation with gas or how trapped you are, but if you must buy gas you can probably boycott Chevron and ExxonMobil and buy from one of the other lesser evils. Or if you have a diesel engine you can do what a friend does and collect waste oil and convert it to bio diesel.
I really do boycott Exxon - at least when it’s branded. In 35 years - since the Valdez spill - I’ve bought 1 gallon of gasoline from Exxon, and that was because I needed that much to get to another station without running out of fuel. It’s a trivial exclusion, though, as their drilling and refinery operations are so large that it’s likely I’m purchasing from them, or BP, (or Chevron). I don’t know of a major supplier who isn’t tainted by some part of the process. And I’m not rich enough to have the luxury of selection most of the time.
All the oil companies quite rotten slimeballs. But if you look closely enough there is still significant variation in the extent of the evil. Off the top of my head:
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Chevron - a right-wing ALEC member, thus contributes heavily to the politicians who are the most environmentally destructive, who neuters the EPA. ALEC also finances climate denial propaganda. Chevron was also caught financing the cloakroom project to arrange secret meetings between politicians and corps like Chevron.
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ExxonMobil - Notable for oil spills and also because Exxon discovered climate change in the 60s and kept it secret, thus enabling it to have a much more harmful impact.
Those are two worst. Chevron and Exxon are also both partnered with a quite evil tech giant: Microsoft, who uses AI to help those two shitty corps find places to drill for oil. Google partnered with Total, and Amazon partnered with BP and Shell for the same purposes. The greater evil to boycott is Microsoft, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. MS also has a quite long list of unethical conduct, such as helping Israel acquire facial recognition tech to weaponize against Palestinians. So if you boycott Israel you also boycott MS.
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I dont use credit cards at all due to the high interest. I borrow against my crypto holdings for ~5% when i absolutely must and use crypto to purchase most things in my life. In fact, the only things I cannot use crypto to buy is things that require an ACH transfer, such as my mortgage payment, car payment, and credit card bills.
I would love to be using cryptocurrency in cashless situations instead of just nixing those options. I’ve reached a point where if it’s not sold locally for cash I don’t buy it. Cryptocurrency has failed me because most exchangers are in Cloudflare’s giant walled garden and I will not patronize a Cloudflare user. There are cryptocurrency ATMs but the fees are extortionate.
Have you considered peer-to-peer options such as Bisq or LocalMonero? Bisq runs all trades over tor at least.
I installed Bisq a few years ago the 1st hurdle was buying cc required having some cc escrowed to start with. I’ve also heard that some banks are so hostile toward cryptocurrency they freeze accounts of people suspected of trading it. I got the impression Bisq transactions would be detectable by the bank but my memory is fuzzy on that. I suppose I need to use a burner bank account I don’t care about, and use a bitcoin ATM to get the escrow money. It’s a shame the Bisq escrow money can’t be in fiat money.
Well, with a transaction like that, you are paying a peer instead of a company. So as long as you don’t do it terribly often, you’re probably not going to get your account shut down because it won’t look suspicious. If you are trading hundreds of times per month with different people all the time, that could be a problem. You could use local Monero cash by mail because there’s not much of a fee increase for it, although it takes a while. Any online payment method you use is going to be higher fee simply because it’s easy to reverse in most cases. As an example, the common fee for a cash-by-mail transfer is 3% where the typical fee for a PayPal transfer is 10 to 15%. I go by the methodology that once I am in crypto, I stay there because in my opinion, crypto is the future and I do not want to go back to fiat currency. So I get into it and then rarely, if ever, sell any for fiat again.
Edit: if you setup a monero wallet and paste your address I will be glad to send you some to get started. If you are a beginner, I suggest monero.com wallet, which is available on the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, or if you are very based you can use the fdroid repo https://fdroid.cakelabs.com/