tonight i stopped at the whole foods at third and fairfax to pick up my weekly organics, only to find a couple sign-waving protesters outside urging me to boycott--i figured they were worked up about grape-pickers or something, ignored 'em, went in and bought my usual shit.
when i got home, still curious, i googled "whole foods" and "boycott", and found the real reason.
see, this is what happens when i sober up and slack off on my blog-reading--i lose touch with not only the idiot right, but the idiot left as well. sorry this one's a day late and a dollar short.
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i remember a couple years ago, abc's john stossel devoted a whole hour of 20/20 to healthcare--called the show "sick in america."
i like stossel a lot--he's a pure libertarian so i don't always agree with him, but he's one of the smartest guys on tv (not saying much, i know), and he has a way of cutting through all the bullshit surrounding a given issue in a way i admire.
what i remember most about this particular show was a segment he did with john mackey, the hippie-vegan who not only co-founded what would become whole foods back in 1978 with a few thousand dollars, but who then masterminded its mass success throughout america and the united kingdom.
this was a guy who, even when faced with razor-thin profit margins and fierce competition from non-organic grocery chains who could offer food for far less, still managed to not only take his company public, but then turn a healthy profit for its stockholders, while at the same time offering great pay and primo health-insurance coverage to his employees--i.e., the prototypical american success story.
how did he do it? well, that's what fascinated me--in fact, everything he said in his segment with stossel made so much goddam sense to me that i've never forgotten it, and it's informed my opinions on healthcare ever since.
i managed to find the segment (thank god for youtube). watch it--you'll find it instructive.
basically, what he did was involve his employees in the cost of their own healthcare--which is, of course, as it should be. in so doing, he saved his company a bundle of money, which allowed him to offer insurance to part-time employees as well as full-time employees--and how many corporate employers can you name who have done that?
even better--after initial resistance, the employees fuckin' love the new system. win-win, right?
yeah, you might think.
problem is, he made the grave mistake of laying out not only his philosophy but the principles by which he made health insurance so affordable for his company and employees in a recent piece in the wall street journal--and omigod, the fallout that has ensued.
he was immediately branded an evil capitalist by the left for even daring to propose that healthcare should be cost-effective, and the boycott was on.
good god--the rhetoric i've just read on liberal blogs and other websites concerning this issue easily equals in both stupidity and ignorance anything i've seen from the right-wingers who wanna see barack's "real" birth certificate.
case in point: on the one hand, the boycotters are slamming whole foods because it's expensive (and therefore, elitist)--and then at the same time, slamming mackey because he's anti-union (because god knows, going union wouldn't make the place even more expensive). in other words, he's being pilloried because he stubbornly refuses to take his company down the road to bankruptcy hell previously paved by gm and chrysler, and thus put most of his employees outta work--that bastard.
and do these same critics take into account the fact that whole foods' employee salaries and benefits are such that people fuckin' fight for those jobs when they come available, even without union "enhancement"? somehow that subject never comes up in the boycott hysteria.
but back to the topic at hand: am i saying mackey's way is the entire solution to our healthcare mess? of course not.
what i'm saying is, it's thinking like this--from successful, bottom-line-oriented professionals who have been in the trenches and solved the problem in their own companies--that needs to be brought to bear in order to cost-effectively and comprehensively solve the healthcare problem on a national basis.
and this is my main bitch with obamacare--i see this bottom-line thinking nowhere in obama's solution. has he brought john mackey (or anybody else who's actually figured out a way to make healthcare cost-effective) into the process? hell, no--instead, it's all pie-in-the-sky horseshit from a bunch of politicians and policy wonks who have never met a payroll or turned a profit in their whole goddam careers.
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maybe here's where i should reveal my own bias: in austin, texas in 1979, if you were a college student like me and wanted real food, you had but two choices: wheatsville co-op up on guadalupe, or this ramshackle little store called whole foods market down on south lamar.
30 years later: wheatsville is long gone, but today i can walk into any one of hundreds of slick new incarnations of that original whole foods market and not only find the same high-quality foodstuffs i found back then, but even inhale deeply and be greeted by the same smells i smelled back then when i walked in the goddam door for the first time.
yeah--let's punish this company for its success in bringing the ethos of healthy food to fat america.
idiots.
