Boycotting Whole Foods

If you're like me, you've been watching steam gather behind the boycott of Whole Foods (WFM) over CEO John Mackey's anti-healthcare reform op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.  The New York Times has a handy round-up of the various rationales behind the boycott - I'm partial to Matt Yglesias's point that it challenges the outsized "social and political power" of CEOs in this country.  I'm also delighted to see Mackey's customers - typically affluent, politically liberal - push back on Mackey's political ideology.  WFM, from most accounts, provides generous healthcare and is a comparatively good retail/service job - so this isn't a boycott about workers' rights in the traditional sense.  Instead, it's a pointed rebuke of the idea that we lack the right to healthcare.

Beneath our fight over the proposed ingredients in the different healthcare reform bills is this deeper ideological struggle.  Mackey rolls out some typical fare - our Founding Fathers didn't guarantee us the right to healthcare (or food or shelter); these items or "service"s are best provided via voluntary associations or mutual aid societies.  In effect, charity is the answer.  That, and personal responsibility.  If Mackey and his customers can eat organic, why can't the poor?  Why won't the poor?  This boycott is about one of our most traditional anti-poor memes - the irresponsible behaviors of the poor - in this case, those w/o healthcare.

Jason Rosenberg offers a comparison that I'm seeing come up more and more - we effectively have a right to free education in the US; why is the right to healthcare out of the realm of possibility?

As an activist, I believe not only in pursuing specific opportunities for change, but in trying to shift the terms of the debate.  More than for Mackey's punishment with lost revenues, I'm into this boycott because it weakens our acceptance of individualist, free-market solutions to social welfare in the US.  The more we can raise our voices that all of us have a right to a home, a good job, adequate healthcare, sustainable wages, the more we can get beyond incremental changes in our tattered safety net and really begin to challenge the root causes of poverty and inequality.

UPDATE: We've created a petition targeting the CEO of Whole Foods — send him email and express your outrage.