Whole Foods Boycott: 20,000 Facebook Members.

Mackey offers his two cents, buys boycott

August 19, 2009 in news with 3 CommentsTags: Economist, free market, market justice
Mr. Mackey gets more than he bargained for, and now one of several reasons why the boycott of Whole Foods will work:

From the Economist Magazine, August 18, 2009:
It is no good arguing that consumers are being unreasonable in boycotting the firm: Mr Mackey, who often celebrates the authority of the market as a mechanism for allowing people to vote with their money, knows as well as anyone that they are entitled to spend their hard-earned cash as they please. Customers are free to take their business elsewhere if they don’t like the views of the person running the firm, just as they might if they were disappointed that its Senegalese carrots were not organic.


Washington Post: Whole Foods Devotees Lash Out at CEO
August 19, 2009 in news with Leave a CommentTags: media coverage, washington post
From today’s Washington Post:
“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.”
Read the rest at the Washington Posts’s website.

NPR Radio preparing segment on WF boycott
August 19, 2009 in action items, news with 2 CommentsTags: austin, npr
Austin, TX. Central Market North. 10am. Outdoor deck. NPR correspondent John Burnett will be there to measure the pulse of the group.
John Burnett: Correspondent, National Desk, Austin
Former Whole Foods Shoppers and supporters of the boycott should attend to express your disapointment with Whole Foods Market CEO and Founder, Mr. Mackey. Don’t forget to show your support for the boycott. If you have a Whole Foods bag, please consider using tape (removable is good), paint, or other material to deface the trademark, then bring with you. If you have Whole Foods receipts laying about the house, bring the most expensive one. (Also take a picture of it and send it to us. Please mark out personal information. We will post them publicly for you. )

Where to shop: nationwide alternatives to Whole Foods
August 18, 2009 in more info, where to shop with 6 CommentsTags: local, national, shopping
Shop at a farmers market:http://apps.ams.usda.gov/FarmersMarkets/
Join a CSA:http://www.localharvest.org/csa/
Find a food co-op near you:http://www.coopdirectory.org/directory.htm
Search for other organic food stores:http://www.organicstorelocator.com/

CNN: Whole Foods caught in health care flap
August 18, 2009 in news with Leave a Comment
From CNNMoney.com:
Whole Foods’ CEO John Mackey is known for his tendency to shoot from the hip.
This time, Mackey may have shot himself — and his company’s brand — in the foot by getting too personal on the very public issue of health care reform which has sparked calls to boycott the grocer.
“Certainly when our customers tell us they are unhappy to extent that they are boycotting our stores, we are concerned,” said Libba Letton, spokeswoman for Whole Foods. “We don’t want them to leave us.”
Read the rest at CNN.com.

Why we’re here.
August 18, 2009 in about us with 9 Comments
John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on August 12, 2009 quoting Margaret Thatcher and suggesting that healthcare is a commodity that only the rich, like him, deserve.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html
Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.

For more information go to the Boycott Whole Foods website: http://wholeboycott.com/

How American Health Care Killed My Father

Another view of the current condition of American healthcare. Worth the read.

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.
by David Goldhill
How American Health Care Killed My Father

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

Dave Lindorff: 10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

1. If Canada's single-payer system is so god-awful, why have repeated Conservative governments at the provincial and national level in Canada never touched it? Canada is a democracy. If Canadians don't like their health care system, why haven't they gotten rid of it in 35 years? Since the system there is run by the separate provinces, many of which are very politically conservative, why has not one province ever tried to get rid of single-payer?

To read questions 2-10:
Dave Lindorff: 10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

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"Rome teaches"

"Rome teaches"
Most of the world has lived five centuries since the 16th Century. Some professional anti-Catholics, however, have merely lived the 16th Century five times and are now heading into their sixth century of barren, clueless, pedantic disputations. In the course of this, they have managed to work themselves into a curious state wherein they carefully scrutinize the Catholic tradition for any loopholes they can find, while almost completely missing the forest for the trees. A great deal of this is due to the fact that they continually attribute to "Rome" ideas which are all over the place in the apostolic teaching, including in Churches that have not been in communion with Rome for a thousand years (for instance, the sinlessness of Mary and her Assumption (or Dormition as our Eastern brethren call it)). Working on the bizarre notion that the Catholic Church is a sort of spiritual totalitarian police state where that which is not forbidden is compulsory, all ideas found within that tradition are prefaced with the simple declarative state "Rome teaches", as though the entire Catholic faith consists of a series of bulletins issued by the Pope, which the faithful read, salute smartly, and march out in ranks and rows to proclaim. The notion that there could be broadly believed ideas which the faithful understand in varying ways, talk about, wonder over, and which Rome "teaches" only in the sense that she recognizes as part of the mind of the faithful for many long aeons.... none of that seems to be present to the ardent anti-Catholic. It's all a world of binary dogmas delivered by fiat from the Chair of Peter.

I like this post on Mark Shea's blog read more here: http://markshea.blogspot.com/2009/08/rome-teaches.html
What do you think?

From Little House

I take a momentary break from my re-posting to give you this, my effort at an article for the Roundtable. Feel free to tell me what you think.

This is now the second time in a year I have been asked to write the Roundtable piece: From Little House. Each time I think, what do I have to say? It is the people we share our lives with who have compelling stories and much to say to us mostly comfortable and affluent writers and readers of the Roundtable. Maybe next time I will pass the buck to someone who lives with us at Little House or who works with us with the Downtown Teens. But for now, I will tell a little of my story.

Pope Benedict recently issued a new encyclical entitled: "Caritas In Veritate" ("Love in Truth") Among other things, it brought to my mind two of the essential tenets of social justice: solidarity and subsidiarity. Please be careful of the knee jerk to the word subsidiarity and I will try to explain. I liberally borrow a favorite phrase from my friend, Miguel, who always says “I moved to Honduras to live and pray with the poor”. After a two year retreat of sorts learning to live simply in rural Maryland, I decided it was time for me to move back to the Midwest to live and work and pray with the poor. It is not enough for me to live in solidarity, but I, as I am closest to the situation, must contribute something to the lifting of the burdens others bear—susidiarity in so far as I am able and competent. Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, closest or least centralized competent authority. In other words, I cannot expect the government or some other distant entity to take care of what is directly in front of me if I have the means to do so. This does not mean that I don’t expect governments and other institutions to do their part. I mostly hope they don’t get in my way and that they help me with the resources to deal with the matter at hand. I already knew that with my privileged background and wealth of friends, I could never be poor in the economic sense. Because of the resources at my disposal, if I chose to live in solidarity with the poor, I was obligated to also work and pray practicing subsidiarity with the poor.

After a year of living in Saint Louis and working for the National Farmworker Ministry, I longed for something more concrete and closer to home. The farm workers, after all were in California, and Oregon and Washington and North Carolina. I was in Saint Louis.

When the opportunity arose, I jumped from the frying pan into the fire of housing opportunity and community organizing in my neighborhood. I began working with Pruitt-Igoe Development Corporation (PIDC) for the next eight years developing and maintaining low-income housing which is decent and affordable. During that time, we faced many challenges and tragedies from Goliath developers to the death of loved ones and friends. One of our triumphs in the face of these hardships was the formation of a neighborhood, youth, workforce training program. Resurrected from the ashes of the death of a young man in our neighborhood named Christian, arose the PIDC sponsored group calling themselves the Downtown Teens.

With the support of our friends and numerous benefactors the Downtown Teens is in its eighth year. During those eight years, we have demolished (I prefer to say disassembled), built, painted, plastered, landscaped, and cleaned to the tune of $153,000 in payroll for over 125 teens. We have seen our teens through high school, some in college and others in their first jobs. Our oldest “teen” is now 27 and has a house and family. Though the program has cost me much of my life savings to run, I am much richer for it. My love for each of our teens is like that for my own child. The heartaches and the pride are the same as well. I feel their pain to the extent I am able—solidarity, and try to do something about it—subsidiarity.

Another opportunity presented itself five years ago. Mary Ann McGivern was moving to New York and needed someone to takeover and to maintain Little House, a.k.a Ella Dickson house. Teka and I did not exactly leap at the chance, but after praying, we felt a mutual calling to continue the work of Little House. Throughout the past eight years, including these past five at Little House, Teka continues to ask me the question: “why do you want to be involved in low-income rental housing?” My answer is always the same in one form or another: “if not us, who?” The principles of solidarity and subsidiarity are in my face again. There are so many people out there who for various reasons do not qualify for other housing opportunities. But let’s face it, during any given month one or more of our residents can’t pay all or sometimes any of their rent. This can create hardship on us to pay the bills that come with owning and maintaining a very large and very old house. It also affords us the opportunity to continue to act in the best interest of the least of these—who are each much more heroic then ourselves. They face obstacles I have never faced--and they overcome.

So in light of the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, who am I? The Samaritan, taking from my own pocket or do I look for an institution to solve the problem? Do I do to the least of these or do I seek a government agency to do something? I must do both. Relieve the immediate problem to the extent I am able and work for systemic change to counteract the causes of suffering. But who am I preaching to but the choir? Their stories and yours, their faith and yours, their lives and yours are truly inspirational and inextricably linked to one another and to me—but thanks for listening to me anyway. Pray with and for me as I live and work and pray with the poor-who I found out is really me.