NOT A JOKE! App Lets You Boycott Koch Brothers
Remember Darcy Burner? She was Goldy’s (and other liberals’) favorite candidate first to run against Reichert and then to run against Delbene. Darcy is a good person, and idealist, but more than a bit doctrinaire for the middle-of-the-road folks living between Bellevue and the Canadian border. Nonetheless, Darcy had a great idea!
Two years ago, in her keynote speech at Netroots, Candidate Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch owned the company selling you stuff in the supermarket.
At the time, Burner created a mock interface for her app, but that’s as far as she got. The idea of boycotting these Repricans is not so easy because they own so dammed much stuff! There is Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper and Dixie cups all owned through subsidiaries of Koch Industries through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific.
BUT! while Darcy was skjy writing, 27-year-old freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, developed Buycott. BUYCOT is available for download on iPhone or Android. You can scan the barcode on any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to the top (or deep in the muddy bottom if needed). Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson JNJ that also owns Tylenol!
To watch Forbes test drive the app in a supermarket aisle, click here.