You know folks are getting desperate when they decide to boycott health food stores. Carrying crude signs reading: “Boycott Whole Foods – CEO says he doesn’t care about your health care”, disgruntled protesters pace the streets, hoping to salvage what remains of the effort to retool America’s health care system. 5’ll get ya 10 most of the sign-bearers haven’t read the Wall Street Journal in the last 15 years. Which is where Whole Foods’ CEO (John Mackey) laid out his plan to solve the current health care miasma.
To make matters more fun, we now learn that the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) has jumped into the fray, perhaps with both feet. Head-butters unite! And just in time for football season!
But it gets seriously sizzling when a big investment company, ostensibly concerned over their shares of Whole Foods, demands that John Mackey be dumped from his lofty position (saving the share holders a whopping $33,000 yearly salary!).
What’s next? Perhaps the Three Stooges can be resurrected, whipped into fighting shape, given a few hits of mescaline, and aimed at America’s leading purveyor of “natural foods.” That Whole Foods employs thousands of colorful youngsters who actually like working there shouldn’t play into the equation. Or that Mackey’s salary, along with other high-ranking WF’s wonks is capped (can we say the same about the UFCW?).
But, in the long run, I guess it makes sense to punish the innocent in order to make a point. And that point is that America’s political “progressives” are becoming the nation’s least tolerant people. It can be argued that CEO’s should keep their eye on the bottom line and their mouths shut. But to tar and feather Whole Foods over the opinion of their CEO is akin to shooting yourself in the foot because your shoe is too small. Opinions are, as we all know, like proverbial elbows – everybody’s got one (or two).
Count me out – I’m low on organic oatmeal and “green” bananas. Later today I’m driving my 50 mpg sedan over yonder to the evil Whole Foods, slurp some fair trade coffee, flirt with the cute hippie gals in the bakery department, and throw away a few dineros on a hunk of free range chicken.
E-gad – I’m an omnivore!
posted by Mudd
One Response
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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.