Single Payer Action has a blog posting on the Whole Foods Boycott in response to a WSJ Op Ed by Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey opposing single payer and any other kind of government run healthcare plan.

Whole Paycheck may market itself to liberals, but it is a nasty rightist corporation. Here are some examples from the Op Ed piece.

John Mackey is a right wing libertarian.

He’s a union buster.

He believes that corporations should not be criminally prosecuted for their crimes.

He has just launched a campaign to defeat a single payer national health insurance system.

And he’s the CEO of Whole Foods.

Isn't that just grand.

Alternet has more information on Whole Paycheck and its CEO.

Mr. Mackey, you just shat all over your best customers. Given the years of pseudonymous postings on Yahoo finance slamming a competitor you were quietly trying to acquire at the time, double talk and unethical behavior arguably seems to be becoming a habit for you.

I had forgotten about those postings.

Mother Jones provided an example of Whole Paycheck's union busting and intimidation tactics against its workers.

Shortly before the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the manager of a Whole Foods grocery store in the San Francisco Bay Area gathered his employees in a conference room for a chat about labor organizing. “This is not a union-bashing thing whatsoever,” the manager began, adding, however, that he’d called the meeting because Whole Foods believed Obama would sign the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation intended to ease unionization that was opposed by the company’s lobbyists. According to a tape of the meeting obtained by Mother Jones, the manager went on to imply that joining a union would lead to reprisals: “It’s interesting to note that once you become represented by the union,” he said, “basically everything, every benefit you have, is kind of thrown out the window, and you renegotiate a contract.”

These kind of meetings are scripted by anti union consultants and pushed on local managers by CEOs of all sorts of corporations.

Michael Bluejay lists 14 practices of Whole Paycheck. I'll list the titles, you can read his blog posting for the details.

(1) Aggressive monopolization.
(2) Failure to support farmworkers.
(3) Fierceless devotion to profit.
(4) Refusal to carry only turtle-safe shrimp.
(5) CEO posing as someone else on the Internet.
(6) Poor working conditions.
(7) Anti-Union.
(8) Low Wages.
(9) Refusal to come clean on the use of GMO's and toxic chemicals in its products.
(10) Selling dangerous food.
(11) Misleading shoppers about its support of small farmers.
(12) Gagging shareholders.
(13) Obfuscating executive compensation.
(14) Forcing smaller competitors to hand over private financial data.

This boycott has been quite educational indeed.

I think the things that have gotten such a strong reaction are first the fact that Whole Foods is luxury consumption. No one really needs to shop there, so it's easier to give up. More importantly, customers justifiably feel that they have been deceived. Whole Foods presents itself as this warm and fuzzy, progressive company when it's CEO is a hateful rightist.

Anyway, Americans have an inalienable right to government provided healthcare. We have every reason to fight back against greedy CEOs who are trying to steal from us what is rightfully ours.

Image: gezellig-girl.com