The Non Co-Op News - June 2017

As I hinted in my last post, when it comes to opposing oppressive regimes, I have a certain preferred style of fighting.  A couple of prominent features of that style consist of non-cooperation - both economic and political - and building of parallel institutions.  So I tend to get really happy when I see other people adopting a similar style.

I think that's what I (and several perceptive others) have begun to see over the last six months.  Consider the following items:

• Retail sales have been declining steadily over the last six months throughout the United States.  (See this also.)
• New car sales have been steadily declining since late last year.
• Applications for new credit have begun to fall within the last three months.  (See this and this also regarding the drop in May applications.)
• Ever since the first outbreaks of the most recent wave of police violence against unarmed people of color (from 2014 onward), the number of recruits and applicants for police work have been declining.  There is now a severe shortage of applicants for jobs as police officers in the U.S.
• The U.S. military is now beginning to experience personnel shortages in key areas of expertise.  (See this also.)

The mainstream media all have various explanations for these phenomena.  But what if, among the various explanations, someone were to hypothesize that not a few Americans are deciding to stop feeding a predatory system?  I am thinking of a conversation I had with a co-worker who told me about a Keurig coffee maker she had been eyeing as a possible new addition to her home, and how she decided not to buy it in order to deny support to the Trump regime.  I have been in similar conversations with others lately who are coming to the same conclusion.  According to Gene Sharp's book The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle, economic non-cooperation was one of the key elements that brought down the Tsarist regime in Russia during the nonviolent struggle that lasted from Bloody Sunday in 1905 to 1917 (before the Bolsheviks, by the way).  What can be done to help accelerate the trends that I have listed in this post?