Whole Foods Walk-Out

Now I used to be a shopper at Whole Foods in Annapolis way back when it was a homely Fresh Fields with a better bakery. Way better. So when I dropped online to try to scrounge up its website to get its store number (I’m was looking to see if they had my brand of organic Mexican coffee in stock), I did not expect a news feed story from Common Dreams to pop up. After all, Whole Foods is a hippie organic earth-loving grocer. Although Common Dreams does not report accurately about the price per pound of cherries, $9 is what I pay for guilt-free coffee beans.

Anyways. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has just endorsed a book by the Cato Institute with a back-cover blurb: “John Hasnas shows that new laws and regulations too often force CEOs to choose between acting legally and acting ethically.” The offending book is ‘Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law,’ whose thesis is that all corporate crime should go unpunished. Looks like Ken Lay of Enron will have something to read while in prison.

‘Cato’ isn’t a watch word that tips you off to the fact that Whole Foods is dating a right-wing think tank, but it should be now. The Cato Institute employs Steven Milloy, ‘the Junkman’ of the right-wing Fox “News” beloved contributor site ‘Junk Science.’ Milloy in turn leads the charge against government regulations that protect public health or halt global warming. “Junk Science” is any science at all that might diminish the profits of the Robber Barons, while Milloy’s ‘Sound Science’ is anything that can be waved at a congressional committee to ‘disprove’ global warming. Pretty much all they have is the cover of the fictional book by Michael Crichton, “State of Fear.” So Whole Foods has spent several years tip-toeing into the country club of the oil industries to use our “green” money to buy mint juleps.

No more. With my jaw banging into my keyboard I began to peruse through the web, and only now catching up on Mackey’s activism against the movement towards a national health plan and his love of union-busting. In order to crack it’s only union store back in 2002, Mackey threatened to pull advertisements from any publication that reported favorably on the union efforts or ran the union’s ads. Recently, Mackey took a long leisurely stroll through the mountains with a valet trailing behind to carry his laptop in order to dream up ways to steal earned vacation hours and shred his company’s 401k under the smoke of being able to pay for Whole Foods trimmed down ‘health care’ plan. Just so that he could afford his mint juleps in a silver cup with a silver spoon.

No more. I’m taking my $150 a month grocery bill anywhere but Whole Foods until Mackey gets fired and Whole Foods stops secretly funding global warming through the Cato Institute. ‘Cause I mean it when I say I’m green with rage.

Technorati Tags:wicca, wiccan, witchcraft, witch, pagan, paganism