Right-wing Nut John Mackey Of Whole Foods Jumps On The Obama-Is-A-Fascist Bandwagon

I haven't gone into a Whole Foods store in a couple years so maybe my info is out of date, but I remember it as being a chain trying to paint itself as health-conscious and organic when it was pretty low down on the evolutionary health scale. And far less likely to be carrying organic produce than conventional produce. And really expensive. Last week, through no fault of my own, I was in Dubai and I stopped by the world's biggest mall, the Mall of Dubai, and stumbled across Organic Foods and Cafe, a far better and more healthy eating conscious enterprise than Whole Foods. In Dubai!




And on top of being a tremendous disappointment for health-conscious consumers, Whole Foods has long been a right-wing, libertarian hellhole politically-- and one working to monopolize the retail health food industry. No unions and no healthcare for employees and a greed-obsessed robber baron type in Texas, John Mackey, running the show. Mackey was on NPR's Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep this week, trying, as always, to mislead the public about what Whole Foods really is. Inskeep didn't hold his feet to the fire.

[W]hen Whole Foods decided it wanted to stop selling overfished species of cod and octopus at its seafood counters, it didn't just abruptly cut off its suppliers. Instead, the company gave its suppliers three years to come up with a better way of fishing; during that time, the seafood stayed for sale-- but with a label of "unsustainable."

In the end, Whole Foods, working with the Marine Stewardship Council (we'll have much more on them later), was able to find one supplier of sustainable cod.

"You take a risk when you do that because some of your customers ... who don't care about sustainability, they're going to go shop at your competitor's store who has the fish, so you lose some business that way," Mackey says. "But it was the right thing to do."

What he doesn't think is right is President Obama's health overhaul and the new costs that coverage requirements will place on businesses.

When Inskeep asks him if he still thinks the health law is a form of socialism, as he's said before, Mackey responds:

"Technically speaking, it's more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production, but they do control it-- and that's what's happening with our health care programs and these reforms."

Still, Mackey sees room to cooperate with the administration on another front: efforts to reform the American diet, a pet project of first lady Michelle Obama.

"People in America are addicted to sugar, and to fat and to salt," he says, and as a nation, it's holding us back. "Food is intensely pleasurable, and people are afraid that if they change the way they eat, they'll stop having pleasure."

Still, he acknowledges how hard it can be to stick to a health-conscious diet. Restaurant meals, he says, rarely meet his personal dietary rules-- not just no meat, but also no oil or refined flour. Luckily, Mackey jokes, there's a Whole Foods to be found wherever he travels.