What They Need's a Damn Good Whacking--Boycott BP

I've been keeping the TV on today, checking in every so often with CNN for news of the "top kill" plan to deal with the oil leak that got underway a couple of hours ago.
It's not often that I turn on TV during daytime, except possibly to check in on the markets. I think now I remember why.
As I waited for British Petroleum to get things going, I heard the following:
*Q and A with a financial guy on whether the USA could become the next Greece (not that likely), along with another story wondering if Italy will be the next Greece.
*A leaked BP memo that explained a cost analysis on worker housing to find the cheapest dwelling structures acceptable. The on-site trailers chosen allegedly put the workers at higher risk for injury if there was an explosion. Incredibly, that's not the worst part. The worst part is BP used the Three Little Pigs as a twisted analogy to decide "which type of houses should the piggy build?"
*The investigation into plant conditions that led to a recall of children's name-brand medicines widens. This one has been off my radar because we no longer use children's medicine at our house. But people have complained of becoming ill, smelling an odd odor in the medicine, small black flecks that are possibly metal, and an unnamed bacteria contamination.
*There's some kind of drug war starting in Jamaica now. The one in Mexico has border people so scared they've convinced President Obama we should put up a wall and have National Guard troops patrolling the border.

Every so often, someone writes a beard-scratcher asking why Americans are so fearful.
Well, ahem....
Maybe it's because we realize we're hooked into a type of capitalism so extreme that it is immoral. This type of capitalism doesn't care about your sick children or the ecosystem or whether the products are good for you. It doesn't care about the long term. It exists only to earn the maximum profit for business owners or stockholders. And it had a part in every one of these horrible things that have happened.
In this type of capitalism, government (in other words us, the people) has no will to regulate the financiers who brought down economies, or raise taxes to enforce drug laws or inspect medicine plants. Ideally--for the corporations--we'd have no control at all.
Proponents of this type of capitalism have been working a long time to get things to this point. Some of them will tell you that the free market will take care of itself. In this world of unicorns and waterfalls, business will not behave badly because they won't want to be shunned by customers later when they're found out. Right. Excuse me, hippies, while I go bake some hash brownies.

Now we see that those boys and girls in suits need some tough cops on the job just as much as anybody else. Trouble is, we aren't showing any signs of a backbone yet.
So how to be empowered, as an optimist?
Well, yesterday I signed the petition to boycott BP. I know, I know. It's largely symbolic. (In fact, CNN also ran a story today about the many invisible arms of BP and how we're powerless against them.)
But then, I am a consumer who knows how to hold a grudge. Remember Rely tampons? The ones that caused all the deaths from toxic shock syndrome in the early 1980s? I held a personal boycott against Procter and Gamble--widely mocked by my co-workers--for two or three years. I got a list of products. I bought only Lever Bros. soap. It wasn't all that undoable.
The Internet has made it much easier to get that same product information. Maybe my pocketbook voting won't do anything. But it will make me feel good.
Now, off to check on progress on the oil leak.