Yesterday, Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey called Obamacare “fascism”. Today he stands by his assessment of the situation yet regrets using that term because of all the “baggage” that comes with comparing a law designed to provide health-care to nearly 40 million uninsured people with a political system that was responsible for the deaths of nearly 40 million people, including the systematic murder of 7 million Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and political detractors.
So basically, Mackey regrets using the term fascism because it has “baggage”? He can call the death of 40+ million people baggage if he wants, though it just illustrates how painfully out of touch he is from reality and undercuts any point he has, or thinks he has.
To be fair, in Mackey’s little mind, Spain and Italy are also fascist dictatorships. Yet both were Nazi collaborators and were more or less puppet states of Hitler. While Franco survived into the 70s (due to his anti-communist stance), he was an awful man who has his own list of atrocities. My point is that pulling out the fascist card is nothing more than an example of Godwin’s Law, in which arguments degenerate into someone pulling out he Nazi card, or what you say when you have nothing to say.
Oh and what is the grand point that is being missed as we focus on his painfully clear lack of judgment? Making companies pay for health care is bad because if you just give them the freedom, they can do it better. A fair, but naive point, since they have been free for a great many years and produced the most expensive and ineffective (per cost) health care system in the world, dead last last among the major industrial nations. It’s fair to say that our health care system is a giant money making scam. Yet ol’ Mr. Mackey is mad because his little mediocre health care plan is working miracles in his eyes. Remember when Mackey said that shopping at Whole Foods would solve the health care crisis?
Just take some of Mackey’s elitist right-wing medicine and you will feel right as rain
I find it very interesting that in the clip he tries to make fascism seem less scary of a menace than socialism, which every other industrialized nation in the world has in their health care system (and I mean every single one, and to be fair, so do we in a little something we call Medicare, the VA System and health care we provide to the Armed Forces). It’s only worked out incredibly well for everyone else, with health care costs in the under 10% of income range and great preventative health care and services that are enormously popular in their respective countries.
Yet his definition of fascism is equally flawed. Fascism and corporatism are not equatable, though he is right to point out the similarities. Giving power to corporations over the will of the people IS wrong. However, corporatism is when corporations heavily influence or even run the state, (which is what the US is pretty close to this point) and fascism has a crucial, let’s say extra, component involved. In fascism the state is run by a single party and all decisions are embodied in the highest echelons of government focused on an elevated, oh let’s call him a great, supreme and “caring” father-figure or grand dictator.
Mackey appearing on right-wing program Stossel offending his Liberal customers
Federalist America can never be fascist as their are too many checks and balances. Local governments control most of the things that impact our lives while States and a divided Federal government make control of the state in one party nearly impossible. Remember when the Republicans like Tom Delay were openly calling for a one party system and a permanent majority while their fearless leader Bush was expanding executive power to unprecedented levels? There was open talk (even proposed legislation) of rounding up millions of illegal immigrants and homosexuals were being blamed for everything from 9-11 to Hurricane Katrina. Muslims were being tortured in secret prisons and we were aggressively invading nations for the first time in our history. The threat of a pro-corporate fascist regime seemed legitimate at the time to many people, including myself. The term “Bush crossed the Rubicon” was bandied about as the talk of a new American Century was being pushed by the Neo-Cons who had openly signed a manifesto declaring as much (Google Project for the New American Century, I refuse to give those bastards a link but the page still exists). We warned of the hatred that we came in contact with on the radical right that spoke of some pretty kooky and scary ideas. Today, we call those people the Tea Party and their craziness is on display. While the fears seemed pretty substantiated, in retrospect it seems a little pessimistic. We certainly weren’t crying about a single piece of legislation, or even a few laws, suddenly changing the entire nation, we had years of policies, court appointments, executive orders and bills that demonstrated Bush’s disastrous pro-corporate, anti-freedom, militarist elitism to draw from. In the end, however, it is a true testament to the Constitution that only a few years later, the Republicans had lost the White House and Congress.
Has Mackey forgotten why he should have kept his big mouth shut already?
Besides, I don’t think you will ever see Obama rounding up the best-looking high-school girls to breed a supreme race, euthanize the mentally ill or kill millions of his own citizens due to their beliefs. Ya know, baggage.
Just because you hate somebody it doesn’t make him (insert evil dictator here) and enacting a health-care law that forces employers to take care of their employees does not make a state fascist. Just like selling organic vegetables does not make Whole Foods a liberal company and starting a successful business does not make you an expert on health care, or a decent person for that matter, you have to earn those titles.
I haven’t set foot in a Whole Foods since the last time Mackay opened his big mouth and I’m going to go right on past the Whole Foods to Trader Joe’s, Ralph’s and a few other places where I shop.
I get everything cheaper at these places anyway.
Comes down to this doesn’t it?