A reminder about Walmart, now that the holiday spending orgy is about to begin: Don’t shop there. If you do, you are helping to kill your community and digging your own grave, economically speaking.

Sure, I feel bad for Walmart employees — they have to wear clown vests and kiss ass for the privilege of being badly paid — but we’d all be better off, ultimately, if the big-box stores were boycotted, shut down and replaced by independent stores that sold American goods and treated employees with dignity. This is only a pipe dream for now, but so was Occupy Wall Street, last summer.

For now we can at least look into buy-local strategies, since much of the money we spend in corporate chain stores is being used to help elect the liars who look after the interests of the wealthy, at our expense.

Footnote: Don’t forget, today is Buy Nothing Day:

Occupy gave the world a new way of thinking about the fat cats and financial pirates on Wall Street. Now lets give them a new way of thinking about the holidays, about our own consumption habits…

… This year’s Black Friday [marks] the first campaign of the holiday season where we set the tone for a new type of holiday culminating with #OCCUPYXMAS. As the global protests of the 99% against corporate greed and casino capitalism continues, lets take the opportunity to hit the empire where it really hurts … the wallet…

Clarification: I’m well aware that what I write and link to won’t reach most of the people for whom it’s meant. For every person camping out to occupy Xmas there will be hundreds camping on the parking lot of a Best Buy, waiting to take advantage of “bargains.” Already, a woman in L.A. allegedly pepper-sprayed other consumers in order to get to the new Xbox 360.

It’s encouraging that some people are waking up to how we further empower our enemies by purchasing from them. But consumerism is a religion, very much alive, and not about to be dislodged until most Americans can no longer afford to buy toys — on credit, of course — to distract themselves from the fact that they continue to lose ground to the one percent of the population that owns most of the country.