Thursday, January 17, 2013

Whole Foods CEO: Obamacare not “socialism,” it’s “fascism”

Whole Foods has played a key role in propelling organic foods into the mainstream. The specialty supermarket chain has more than 300 stores and plans to continue expanding. But outspoken founder and co-CEO John Mackey is not the crunchy granola liberal one might conjure while perusing aisles of earnestly labeled blue corn chips and gently misted red peppers.

In fact, he's a self-styled libertarian: a vegan who sells sustainably raised meat, a man who compares the government's health care overhaul to "fascism" but wants to improve American diets.

And he thinks big businesses have an obligation to change customers' perception that big corporations are "primarily selfish and greedy." (Not that he's opposed to profits. In fact, Whole Foods posted a 49 percent boost in quarterly earnings in November.)

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.

More HERE


Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

1 comment:

Doom said...

He almost sounds like he almost knows what he is talking about. The problem is Mussolini was the fascist, Hitler was a plain old socialist. And, to be quite honest, fascism is just a different name for socialism. If anything, though, Hitler was probably more facist, using modern (though not real) speak, and absolutely technically at that, and Mussolini was more socialist. If the truth about what those parties actually were is pure fiction.

Mussolini was in the socialist party, but when things didn't break his way for leadership in the party, he 'rolled his own', what is known now as the fascist party. That is where the technicalities come in. His motto, translated, means: All for the state, nothing but the state, nothing against the state... give or take.

As for the forms of pagan state religions, there is a lot of room for variances. Some socialisms, such as communism (or forms of that, they do like to change names and definitions on the fly and the msm eats up whatever is shoveled into them) prefers that the state holds control of manufacturing, production, distribution, and the rest. Socialism swings between that and limited (by control) private ownership of some or all of the manufacturing assets, land and it's use(s), even public transportation. China, for example, is probably more socialist than communist, allowing some ownership now. Or, in modern-speak, fascist.

So... he isn't even right, in a more technical sense. Still, good show. At least it means he is trying to think his way out of the corporate paper bag. While a solid libertarian/conservative today, those where my heroes in my early teens... until my reading ran on into history, and I saw that the human blood cost of socialism wasn't worth it, and later when I dug into economics and realized that those parties were pure scams, on top of everything else. Good try though.

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