I realize this is a patriarchal analogy, but consider this. Your daugher is 20. She’s in debt deep to her eyeballs because of stupid decisions she has made, and instead of letting her declare bankrupcy, you “lend” her money so she can recover her life.

Then she tells you she has these horrible symptoms, and you’re thinking, maybe this kid’s got cancer, but you say: we’ll help you only if it doesn’t cost me anything.

America has it backwards man. Let the kid declare bankrupcy, and help her with her health so she can regain her strength and recover herself and THEN earn the privilege of using credit again and become financially healthy.

Interesting times ahead.

That could lead to chaos in the nation, with no trusted leader to bring us though it. We’d be on our own. And with the number of guns in this nation, the resulting struggles would be very ugly. Hence, the possibility that America ends.

As for the market, the DOW sure seems to have recovered. But that recovery just highlights how diseased this nation really is. How could the stock market bounce back, when unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies, etc., continue at record pace?

This dichotomy shows clearly that the nation is owned by the Corporations, against the interests of the People.

People are slowly waking up to that — both on the left and the right. Frank Rich posted an op ed on exactly this point in the New York Times this week saying that even Glenn Beck is right twice a day.

All of this says that this market “recovery” is an illusion.

But who knows? I still avoid the market like the plague. But my neighbor invests in it daily as his main source of income.

We all have to make our bets in this life, and live with the results.

I’m glad I live in Canada. Even though my family doesn’t use the healthcare system because we take great care of ourselves (we eat “whole foods”), I’m sure glad it’s there just in case we need it.

I pay $108 per month for any type of healthcare that my family may use. For those who don’t make much money, they don’t have to pay anything for healthcare.

I think everyone should be entitled to this type of system.

Are people afraid that Obama’s healthcare reform ideas will cost too much?

It’s not a good thing when only the rich can afford healthcare.

Anyway, it was interesting reading everyone’s comments and ideas even if I could only understand only 15% of it.

What do you mean if Obama doesn’t come through again with his plan, that America will be lost for good? (I’m paraphrasing here).

Oh yeah, by the way, I think the stock market is in recovery mode, isn’t it? My father-in-law said he recovered all his money after the fall 2008 dip. I totally got out of that because the whole system made me nervous and I didn’t like worrying.

LoL

My fundamental “animus” toward Mackey is that he is 53-year-old that describes himself as an Ayn Rand acolyte Libertarian.

As such, I see him as a peer of my 3-year-old who is deep into her “Barbie” phase. To my chagrin, my wife lets her watch Barbie movies. The other day, I was standing on our 2nd floor balcony watching her outside. She called up to me, saying that I could fly down to the ground on a horse. WTF? I thought. Then I watched part of her Barbie movie and I saw it had a flying unicorn. Mystery solved.

Which brings be back to Mackey. I’m sure the business tycoon Mackey sees himself as a latter-day John Galt. Yeah, I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and the other one the title of which escapes my memory. And yeah, when I was in my 20s, I sort of liked the stories and the ideology.

But then I grew up and noticed that the ideology was a myth, with cartoon characters that don’t exist in nature.

Recall that one of the core tenets of Rand’s “superman” ideology was the superman/businessman conquering nature (see, e.g. “they paved paradise, put up a parking lot”). Rand hated nature. She loved parking lots and skyscrapers and trains. Anything that demonstrates man’s subjugation of Nature.

These ideas of Rand were Public Enemy Number One of the Sixties Left. And Whole Foods espouses Sixties Left ideas.

So WTF does it mean that John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods is a penitent in the Church of Ayn Rand? Does this mean he is mis-reading Rand, cutting away the meat of her theory, leaving behind nothing but a generic “superman”? Or is he a charlatan, cynically spinning a Sixties Left business, all the while deploring the “values” of that business?

Given that he is a vegetarian, and a natural health kind of guy, I think the answer is the former. i.e. I think Mackey is the kid who never grew up. He read Ayn Rand as a kid, dropped the Man-enslaves-Nature half of her ideology, but kept the cartoon superman half.

If so, why go to the trouble of calling yourself an Ayn Rand Libertarian? Much more simple to just say you watched Superman in your childhood, the show moved you, and it still motivates you to this day.

I guess even the average American would laugh at that. But calling yourself an “Ayn Rand Libertarian” sounds kind of mysterious and sexy to the average illiterate American.

I dunno. You might be right. I saw Bush doing what he did in 2000-08, and said: “Well, what would you expect from the scion of the first family of the Military Industrial Complex?”

Then I, as you, see Obama matching Bush on the Corporations, then raising him a trillion or so, and I now say: “Wow, that Obama fellow must be really up against these powerful Corporations. Guess they’ve got him by the short hairs.”

Why would I assume the worst of Bush but the best of Obama? Maybe it’s because, as you suggest, I’m a mindless “team fan”.

Maybe. Maybe not. I would guess that my difference in view of the two men arise from reading biographies of both, and from certain beliefs of mine about child development, personalities, race in America, the social nature of humans, markers of intelligence, and so on.

Basically, I believe that Bush drove the country off a cliff by handing the nation over to the Corporations. If Obama turns out to be a Corporate stooge as well, then, IMHO, there is absolutely no hope for this country. America will be dead in our lifetimes.

Because I think the world needs America, maybe it’s just wishful thinking of me to believe that Obama is a man of the People, not of the Corporations.

But hey, you gotta at least agree, Matt, that during this summer of health care, Obama does seem to be “going after” the insurance corporations. Sure, sure, he bent over for Big Pharma. But he seems to be bringing the wood out for Blue Cross and its ilk. No?

It’s pretty clear now that all the thing that you most hated about the last 8 years was that it was the right wingers in charge, not any kind of principled stance on your part – because from where I sit as an true independent Obama has not enacted a single thing that I would not have expected Bush to do had he somehow wrangled another 4 year term. We still have Guantanamo, Iraw and the Afghan War, we still torture peope, and instead of the billions that Bush handed out to Goldman Sachs and JPM, Obama has handed out trillions instead. And now we have the health care and cap & trade dog & pony shows to add to the hilarity.

I wonder if you bothered to go read what Mackey even wrote and made an effort to make up your OWN mind instead of parroting the filth that poses as thought from your side of the political spectrum these days – like the ‘VPILF’ headline you had last fall for example or your ‘teabagging’ commentors.

As an independent, I would have to say Mackey made some excellent points and all the progressive left wing has done is vilify him for pointing out the obvious – that health care, one way or another WILL be rationed – either by income & access to insurance as it is now, or by some faceless bureaucrat if your cronies get their way.

Speaking as someone whose family does not have health insurance – I would have to say that I don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see union thugs beating up old people on youtube to keep them out of ‘town hall’ meetings to loudly express their feelings.

Enough tho – I don’t have time or energy to debate the minutiae of the little person’s viewpoint. Here is your biggest problem Peter – you are so totally enamored now that your ‘team’ has taken the ‘lead’(and you are a ‘team’ type person) that you have submerged your critical thinking abilities so far down that they practically no longer exist.

What you ignore is the tornado bearing down on the arena.

Your blind spot is so big that when Mackey handed you a revelation on a silver platter, you still didn’t get it.

Here is the tornado : the federal govt is spending about $4 trillion a year (give or take a war or two or a few thousand failed banks) and that same govt is taking in about $2 trillion in taxes.

I gotta go – no more time. You tell me how your life, your family’s life, your CHILDREN’S life continues on as it has been as long as govt spending continues as it has ?

Stein’s Law – It a thing can’t go on forever – it won’t.

You better wake up Peter – the rug is just about to get pulled from beneath your feet and it won’t be you who will suffer the most for it – it will be your children.

The point I’m making is that the reactionary coverage of the Whole Foods boycott (see, e.g. Fox), and the arguments they raise, seem childish to me. In other words, the questions they raise are so simply answered that one wonders if these people could really be that simple.

I mean, Sarah Palin, sure. But everybody on Fox?

I just suspect the right in America has a blind spot about the Sixties. The right figures that it won the Culture Wars of the Sixties, and can’t even imagine that there are reasonable people and successful businesses that favor the Sixties left. Hell, since 1984, the right has been pruning back the “excesses” of the Sixties left (e.g. drugs, sex, abortion, “weird” religions, regulation, etc.). Their mindset can’t imagine anything good coming from that domain.

That’s why, I believe, such people completely miss the “Whole Foods as a Sixties Left Experience” dynamic, which is key to understanding the “betrayal” and “hypocrisy” of this story.

The only non-left people who seem to “get” this aspect of this story are the PR-type people. i.e. the people who ask: “Who cares what positions Mackey holds. Was it a good business decision for him to spout them in the WSJ?”

Most such people who I have read conclude that it was a grave business mistake by Mackey, even if they agree with his positions.