Cutting Off One’s Healthy Foods to Spite One’s Grocer’s Health Reform Ideas?
August 19th, 2009 . by economistmom
The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein offered up lots of reasons why the so-called “public option” is not the “be-all and end-all” of health care reform. That’s why it’s all the more puzzling why liberal organic-food lovers would choose to cut themselves off from their beloved Whole(some) Foods just because the CEO of Whole Foods weighed in with his personal opinion (and not his company’s profits) on health policy, which happened to not include endorsement of the “public option”:
Whole Foods aficionados who assumed the company’s management was as crunchy as the brand are feeling betrayed.
They have stormed Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere to vent their rage at John Mackey, the chief executive. In an op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal last week, he argued for health-care savings accounts and declared that health care is not an intrinsic right– ideas with a conservative bent, which made Whole Foods’ liberal customer base go ballistic.
They are even talking about a boycott…
What’s wrong with this picture?
“A lot of people have been paying a premium for the Whole Foods brand for years,” said Mark Rosenthal, a playwright living in Massachusetts who founded the Boycott Whole Foods group a few days ago. It has nearly 14,000 members. “A lot of people are sad to look at this corporation and see that it is just like any other, if not worse.”
Whole Foods spokeswoman Libba Letton said that Mackey was expressing personal opinions in the op-ed and that the company has no official position on the issue. Whole Foods has sent letters to customers apologizing for any offense and created a forum on its Web site to discuss the issue. There are more than 10,000 posts, compared with 77 posts on the raw foods forum…
Why are these Whole Foods customers so willing to give up all that’s good about Whole Foods company policies and Whole Foods FOOD? And how do those Whole Foods, pro-public-option customers know that the CEOs of the other places they could buy food from are any more aligned with their political views? Imagine how hard it would be to buy anything if we had to interview every seller first to make sure we liked their soul as well as their merchandise?
Madame,
I think I know the roots of the reaction: Mackey’s statement is just so “can they not eat these lovely little cakes?” Organic, free-range cakes, of course.
For extreme partisans ideology is a religion. Political differences trigger religious wars (often called the culture wars). This quasi-religious fervor is the same mentality that killed tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union. It cannot abide opposing free speech, so it attempts to silence opponents by any and all means.
There are degrees of this disease, but it does seem much more common now than it was in the 1960s.
Back in 2008, this Whole Foods, CEO John Mackey (how old is this kid?), was caught posting negative comments (trash talk) about a competitor on Yahoo Finance message boards in an effort to push down the stock price. So now I am suppose to take this loser seriously? Please, snore, snore.
It’s funny we hear Republicans say that they do not want “faceless bureaucrats” making medical decisions but they have no problem with “private sector” “faceless bureaucrats” daily declining medical coverage and financially ruining good hard working people (honestly where can they go with a pre-condition). And who says that the “private sector” is always right, do we forget failures like Long-Term Capital, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Enron, Tyco, AIG and Lehman Brothers. Of course the federal government will destroy heathcare by getting involved, Oh but wait, Medicare and Medicaid and our military men and women and the Senate and Congress get the best heathcare in the world, and oh, that’s right, its run by our federal government. I can understand why some may think that the federal government will fail, if you look at the past eight years as a current history, with failures like the financial meltdown and Katrina but the facts is they can and if we support them they will succeed.
How does shouting down to stop the conversation of the healthcare debate at town hall meetings, endears them to anyone. Especially when the organizations that are telling them where to go and what to do and say are Republicans political operatives, not real grassroots. How does shouting someone down or chasing them out like a “lynch mob” advanced the debate, it does not. So I think the American people will see through all of this and know, like the teabagger, the birthers, these lynch mobs types AKA “screamers” are just the same, people who have to resort to these tactics because they have no leadership to articulate what they real want. It’s easy to pickup a bus load of people who hate, and that’s all I been seeing, they hate and can’t debate. Too bad.
I am always glad to see Americans voicing their opinions, I may not always agree with them, but I enjoy it, so please keep boycotting Whole Foods Market, Inc., companies keep dropping sponsorship of the “Glenn Beck” BS, Astroturfers keep showing up at town hall meeting and get your shouts in (we all know you can’t articulate your position and are all about hate) they hate and can’t debate, sweet.