The taste of a Whole Foods customer boycott

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 - 0 Comments

Co-CEO John Mackey’s comments on Obamacare don’t sit well with his shoppers

Will liberals’ devotion to organic food trump their dislike of right wingers? Whole Foods founder John Mackey has been testing that question by accusing President Barack Obama of “fascism”—certainly not what you’d expect from a man whose food chain is the No. 1 choice for back-to-nature environmentalists.

But the Texan libertarian, while plugging his new book, Conscious Capitalism, likened the President’s health care reform to totalitarianism. In fascist states, “Government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it,” he explained; that’s what Obamacare does, he added.

Whole Foods’ many liberal customers didn’t take kindly to the implication they support fascism, and sent the company so many angry messages that Mackey was compelled to take his statement back, writing on his blog that the f-word was “a bad choice of language,” and that “I won’t be using it in the future.” But the fracas is already causing green types to take a closer look at some of Mackey’s positions, like his denunciation of “hysteria about global warming” or his statement that unions are “like herpes.” And with a “Boycott Whole Foods” hashtag gaining prominence online, Mackey might find out it’s not a good idea for a health-food business to alienate the hippies.

‘Diplomatic overkill’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 12:49 PM - 5 Comments

Adam Chapnik explains the wisdom of dysfunction at the United Nations.

To suggest, however, that North Korea’s accession to the presidency of the conference on disarmament – not to mention the conference’s failure to play a role in any recent progress on global non-proliferation initiatives – justifies a Canadian boycott, which could eventually lead to the decline of the conference altogether, misses the point.

The United Nations is nothing more than a framework through which its members can sort out their political, economic, and security-related disagreements. It cannot do the negotiating for them, but it can make it easier to negotiate when the time is right.

The State Department says the United States won’t be boycotting the conference. Continue…
Is the BP Boycott unethical?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 5:10 PM - 20 Comments

That the boycott is useless is a given. But is it also unethical?
That’s…

That the boycott is useless is a given. But is it also unethical?

That’s the claim that Chris Macdonald argues for at his Business Ethics blog. As Chris (and others) have pointed out, BP is no longer in the retail gasoline business. Almost all its outlets are privately run operations, not all of which sell exclusively BP gasoline. Other stations sell BP gasoline under different brand names, and besides, there aren’t many other companies out there that are ethically much better than BP. So, the boycott will hurt innocent small business owners, and not hurt the target at all. Sounds like a bad idea to me.

So how can you hurt BP, if that’s what you feel inclined to do? The best, and probably only, thing to do is radically reduce your fossil fuel consumption. Sell your car, buy a smaller house, stop flying, and so on. Alternatively (or should I say, in addition) you can redirect that anger to something positive — give money or time to one of the organizations working to mitigate the effects of the spill. Ultimately, the only serious solution will be a collective one, that keeps a lot more fossil fuel in the ground where it belongs. Might be time to sign up for the local chapter of Canadians for a Big Fat Carbon Tax.

Meanwhile, on a mostly unrelated topic, I’m having a contest over at my other blog. Entries more than welcome.
Tough crowd

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 10:10 PM - 59 Comments

AFP tallies the walkouts.

Delegations from Argentina, Australia, Britain, Costa Rica, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand and the United States left the room as Ahmadinejad began to rail against Israel, a European source said.

Israel had already called for a boycott of the speech, and was not present when the Iranian leader began his address. Canada had already said it would heed the boycott call.

Judging from photos such as this, it might’ve been easier to figure out who didn’t leave.
How to stage a walkout

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 3:33 PM - 54 Comments

The CBC’s Margo McDiarmid explains in this clip.

Essentially, our foreign minister, Lawrence Cannon, isn’t actually physically sitting in the general assembly proceedings today because his speech isn’t until Saturday. But just before the Iranian president speaks, Mr. Cannon will walk into the assembly, go to his place in the actual room, and when the president starts to speak, he and the other Canadian delegates will leave.
Protests and a Nokia boycott

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 1 Comment

Rafsanjani’s movement is targeting the cellphone maker

Thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets of Tehran last Friday after Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an influential cleric and former president, publicly called for the government to release those detained in protests following the controversial June presidential election. But even as those demonstrations were underway, a different kind of protest was unfolding as companies deemed complicit in the post-election crackdown were targeted with a boycott.

An opposition daily, Etemad Melli, reported that Nokia sales have been slashed in half because the Finnish ﬁrm provided Iran Telecom with the ability to monitor local communications from ﬁxed and mobile phones late last year. For members of the “Twitter Revolution” who used their phones to tell the outside world of the protests and government crackdowns, there is a very real worry that their texts and videos will get them thrown in jail. An online watch group, OpenNet Initiative, recently reported that arrested activists were shown transcripts of their texts. Continue…
The amnesiac, the control freak, and the 'woman scorned'

By selley - Thursday, May 29, 2008 at 2:13 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: …Christie Blatchford on the National Day of Action; Lawrence Martin on Maxime Bernier;

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on the National Day of Action; Lawrence Martin on Maxime Bernier; Greg Weston on the Olympic boycott fizzle.

Left behind
Maxime Bernier, Julie Couillard and Stephen Harper sift through the post-apocalyptic rubble.

The National Post‘s Terence Corcoran doesn’t think much of Julie Couillard, her “glamour-puss makeup,” her TVA interview with its “preposterous dialogue only a soap opera writer could create,” and her insistence that she’s not a security threat despite calling her lawyer, and then the media, instead of Bernier himself when she discovered the documents. He also doesn’t think much of Bernier’s taste in women. And he doesn’t think hardly anything of Stephen Harper’s decision to pull Bernier out of Industry, where he was “continuing a telecom revolution,” and ship him “to outer Afghanistan, a country he possibly couldn’t locate on a map prior to running for office,” and where he had no independence to put his considerable talents to good use.

Indeed, The Globe and Mail‘s Lawrence Martin notes, the leave-behind affair exposes a paradoxical and crippling weakness in Harper’s management style: he won’t suffer insubordination, but he’s quite “prepared to suffer fools.” This problem goes back to the Reform days, Martin notes, as chronicled by Preston Manning in his book. (We can’t recommend poking around Manning’s website highly enough, incidentally, starting with this.) If anything’s going to convince the Prime Minister to dial back the self-defeating micromanagement, Martin says the Bernier fiasco might be it. Making it happen will be Guy Giorno’s job one.

Continue…