• A similar logic, even more clearly distinguishing between the “us” of consumers and “them” the businesses, is given by CEPA activist and founder Max Weiner when confronted with this question by a young Terry Gross in an interview on a Philadelphia radio station in 1981:
  • TG: “What does engulf us together as consumers? Because we’re all consumers. Even the people who raise the rates are consumers of something.
  • MW: “Well, it’s true; but we look upon the consumers as sort of as “We against them;” “Us against them.”
    • It’s true, the people who raise the rates are consumers. But we’re talking about the people who pay the bills, not those who raise rates. And we’re trying to organize the bill paying… the average, ordinary, everyday bill-paying consumers.
    • We know that bank presidents, insurance executives, utility executives are also consumers, but they have very little difficulty in paying the bills that we encounter. […]
    • We realized that what consumers had to do was to organize and confront the people who control the marketplace. We realized that we had to come into opposition with those who are setting the rates, making the decisions upon which and with which we had to live.”⁷⁴
    • The communications of CEPA give ample examples to such oppositional rhetoric of “us against them”, especially in its newsletter, Consumers Voice, which adopted the slogan “Let the Seller Beware.”

2022 – AP – Sociology - Mobilizing Consumers: The American Consumer Movement In The 1960s-70s As A Social Movement - A Dissertation Submitted To The Faculty Of The Division Of The Social Sciences In Candidacy For The Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy - Department Of Sociology, By Yaniv Ron-El -355p-knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/4840