The Guy Behind the ‘Economic Blackout’ Was On the Sex-Offender’s Registry

Last week I wrote about the planned “economic blackout” which was scheduled to take place on Friday. The idea was to hold a nationwide boycott for the entire day as a way to protest the system. The guy behind it was John Schwartz a Midwest meditation trainer who created a group called The People’s Union and announced his plan for the boycott on his social media accounts. Through a combination of luck and good timing he got a lot of attention from the media and celebrities. He gained about 200,000 followers and lots of people were planning to participate in his blackout.

Schwartz posted a bio on is group’s website but as the NY Times points out today, he left out something pretty significant. He has a record which includes serving time for a sex-related offense.

In 2007, Mr. Schwarz was sentenced by a Connecticut judge to 90 days in jail and five years’ probation for disseminating voyeuristic material, according to a representative from the Middlesex County criminal court clerk’s office who reviewed court records while speaking with The New York Times earlier this week…

“I have nothing to hide,” Mr. Schwarz said when reached by phone for comment on Friday. “Yup. I was convicted in 2007 of something that never should have happened and it is completely fabricated.”…

“This whole thing was a big scam,” Mr. Schwarz said during Friday’s interview. “It’s going to be expunged. I passed my polygraph test three times. Three times. I did not take a photograph. I did not do anything inappropriate to anybody.”

So what was the “big scam” that got him convicted? According to a newspaper article from 2007 this is what happened.

Court records show Schwarz, a former owner of a Cromwell coffee shop, sent an 18-year-old employee a text message laced with vulgarities and a photo of her with her breast exposed. She identified the picture of her passed out and told police she may have been drugged…

The woman told investigators she and a friend visited Schwarz’s residence on Sept. 13, 2006, to watch a movie, court records state. The woman recalled eating chocolate pudding Schwarz offered, but stopped after several bites because it tasted odd. She remembered waking up and leaving the residence to take home her girlfriend, who had also passed out. She told police she later felt nauseous and weak, the arrest warrant states.

In court Thursday, the woman, now a college sophomore, said Schwarz’s actions “repulsed” her, in part because she trusted him as both a friend and supervisor.

The judge in the case said the drugging allegations remained unproved but noted that having two girls eat some pudding and then pass out “doesn’t make sense.” The judge also noted that he was disturbed by a photo that showed a male hand pulling aside the unconscious victim’s clothes to expose her breast. Yeah that’s pretty damn creepy all right.

So I’m going to guess that this guy is now going to return to obscurity once people on the left decide having a former sex-offender as their lead organizer is a bad look. But these days who knows. Maybe they’ll stick with him anyway.

So did the economic blackout work? At this point no one really knows because the boycott was targeting so many different retail outlets at once. You’d have to collect data from dozens of national chains and see if their take declined on Friday relative to previous weeks. One thing we can say is that Amazon had a pretty good day Friday despite being specifically singled out for the boycott.

E-commerce consulting and analytics firm Momentum Commerce found that transactions on Amazon during the Feb. 28 boycott ended the day 1% higher than the average across the past eight Fridays.

“Overall we’re not seeing a major downturn in sales on Amazon U.S. today, although the peak hours are a bit softer from the average Friday,” John T. Shea, CEO of Momentum Commerce, told me.

So maybe there was some impact for a few hours midday but it was more than made up for by the end of the day. Or maybe people shopped less at other retail chains like Target and WalMart but made up for it by shopping at Amazon? Again, we don’t really know. What we can say is there’s no evidence of a big impact so far which is what several outside experts predicted would happen.