Whole Foods’ John Mackey Is Scum. Discuss.

Tip of the hat to Blue Texan for passing this along:

Last August, John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, sparked outrage in the liberal blogosphere and a customer boycott by publishing a full-throated critique of Obamacare on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. He argued that the country should “move in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment,” and held up Whole Foods’ own health plan as an alternative: “Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.”

But it turns out that Mackey’s claims, which also fueled conservative opposition to the Democrats’ health-care bill, were misleading. In a memo that he sent to all employees last month, obtained by Mother Jones, Mackey concedes that Whole Foods is actually sinking under the weight of its health care expenses. In the past seven years, he writes, the cost of the company’s health care plan as a percentage of its sales has gone up 60 percent. This year’s tab is “equal to about 10% of the total Team Member compensation of $2 billion,” Mackey complains. “On average over the past three years we have spent more on health care costs than we have made in total net profits!”

It gets worse from there. Mackey pleads poverty and plans to cut back on coverage — even as Whole Foods profits shot up 58% in its latest quarter.

And yes, he’s a libertarian, in case you were wondering.

Financial crisis, 2.0

We really haven’t seen a second wave to the financial crisis. I believed, wrongly it seems, that commercial real estate and jumbo mortgages would lead to defaults large enough to force action of the size that was taken with the collapse of Lehman and the seizure of Bear. Much of the first wave crisis has been written down. Bank profits have been artificially boosted through a kind of corporate socialism involving giving them cheap money to lend at higher prices, taking shaky assets off their books long enough for those assets to stabilize, and engaging their services to buy financial assets in quantitative easing (though estimates that QE2 will cost 50% greater because of this seem ludicrous to me).

But there’s still a number of possible catalysts for a second financial crisis. Today, the hubbub is about Europe: Ireland’s banks are still insolvent, Greece is finding it difficult to impose austerity, and the resultant nervousness is driving up yields in the much larger economies of Spain and Portugal, raising the potential costs of preventing collapse. Certainly there are questions about whether European banks have written off enough of their assets. But although these kind of things may lead to or aggravate depression, they are not the kinds of things that create panics. They have been, at least in part, anticipated.

Panics stem from unanticipated financial changes. Mortgage “fraudclosure” is one of those. If the courts decide to actually enforce the law, the foreclosure process could grind to a halt. That could trigger a decline in the price of mortgage backed securities, threatening bank stability. And now a new potential source for panic emerges. Susan Pulliam, Michael Rothfield, Jenny Strasburg, and Gregory Zuckerman, Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture:

Federal authorities, capping a three-year investigation, are preparing insider-trading charges that could ensnare consultants, investment bankers, hedge-fund and mutual-fund traders, and analysts across the nation, according to people familiar with the matter.

[continues below the fold]

Gold, standard

From Doctors Without Borders. Click to enlarge.

Making money off of gold?

You’re making money off of blood.

Mica Wants To Privatize Pornoscans, Not End Them

David Dayen has the scoop, discussing how John Mica’s (R-Florida) sudden opposition to Opt-Out Day reveals the true aims of Mica and of Republicans in general:

Now, Mica’s long-term goal is to get the TSA out of the transportation screening business. He wants to leverage public anger against “gate-rape” (h/t Marcy) to basically privatize the operation. I haven’t met anyone who thinks that would lead to a kinder and gentler security procedure, however. Mica and his cadres don’t really want to end the security state – they want to profit from it. Some of the civil libertarians in their midst may have different ideas, but when push comes to shove, their principles are being used by establishment Republicans to 1) hurt President Obama’s TSA and 2) legislate it out of existence, with private security taking over at airports.

Hell, the only reason TSA exists is because Bush’s brain Karl Rove and his fellow Republicans thought it would be a good way to try and break the Federal unions, using “national security” as the pretext. It must really burn their butts that TSA workers are now allowed to unionize. The fact that TSA employees now can join unions, just like their Customs and Border Patrol and DC Capitol Police brethren and cistern, is likely a big reason why Republicans who just loved TSA when Bush was in charge are now using the pornoscan controversy as a reason to dump TSA (but not the pornoscans).

By the way, if you’re looking for more effective and less costly ways to do screening than don’t involve repeated doses of radiation along with loss of dignity, this Mother Jones article has a few suggestions.

The new PTSD: Papal telling-it-like-it-is shock disorder

Pope Benedict shocked the world a lot more than with his announcement that use of condoms under certain circumstances is ok with this declaration (Sarah Delaney, Catholic News Service; full text of Benedict’s address to Pontifical Council on healthhere):

Pope Benedict XVI and other church leaders said it was the moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay.

Access to adequate medical attention, the pope said in a written message Nov. 18, was one of the “inalienable rights” of man….

“Justice requires guaranteed universal access to health care,” he said, adding that the provision of minimal levels of medical attention to all is “commonly accepted as a fundamental human right.”

Governments are obligated, therefore, to adopt the proper legislative, administrative and financial measures to provide such care along with other basic conditions that promote good health, such as food security, water and housing, the cardinal said.
…
The governments of richer nations with good health care available should practice more solidarity with their own disadvantaged citizens and help developing countries promote health care while trying to avoid a “paternalistic or humiliating” way of assisting, the cardinal said.

I have my problems with the Catholic hierarchy, but I myself am so shocked by this declaration and its obvious needling of American “conservatives” that I didn’t call him Pope Ratzinger. Why it has taken the Catholic Church this long to enter the 20th century remains a mystery, but thank God for miracles.

Another sidelight. A quick google at this hour shows no major news organization is carrying this story. Oh, that liberal media.

Unexpected Consequences?

I am often mindful of the fact that the Magna Carta was intended to, at most, be a sop on the part of a harried Angevin king to a small group of powerful barons interested solely in their own grievances. It wasn’t intended to lead to greater overall freedom for all English subjects.

With that in mind, I think that the effect of Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision that condom usage isn’t all bad all the time, especially for gay male prostitutes, may be not what he intends it to be — or maybe it is.

On the one hand, if he seriously thinks he’s going to score points with the medical community, particularly those involved in fighting HIV, for this apparent humanitarian gesture, he’s sadly mistaken. Worse yet, he’s going to inflame the hardcore reactionaries, as they will see this as the first step towards accepting condom use in general.

On the other hand, consider Africa. It’s the last semi-open frontier, as far as the major organized religions are concerned — the last one where a non-trivial number of the indigenous people aren’t already subscribed to one of the big faiths. (It’s one reason why the Mormons, whose faith was built to a large degree on anti-black racism, have opened the door to blacks in the priesthood.) There’s a big problem, though: The spread of HIV, particularly via heterosexual contacts with hookers, threatens to eliminate these potential converts before they can be converted.

What to do? How about preparing the ground for a tacit, if not official, acceptance of condom use among heterosexual couples by allowing it for homosexual contacts? That’s exactly what I’m guessing will result from this announcement of Pope Benedict’s.

Lunatics, asylum, running

CTJ:

Wisconsin Governor-elect Scott Walker and Ohio Governor-elect John Kasich want both of their states to stop any work on high speed rail projects that are funded with federal stimulus dollars. Yet, both newly elected governors seem to want the millions of dollars the federal government is offering. (For Ohio that amounts to about $400 million, and Wisconsin was slated to receive $810 million).

Neither governor wants to put the transportation money into high speed rail programs. Instead they want to use the money to fix roads and bridges. The newly elected Republican governors apparently like federal spending — when it means money they can spend as they please.

It turns out that Ohio has already been given federal dollars to help with the transportation issues Kasich mentions. A letter from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood reminded Kasich that Ohio has already received over $1 billion for road, bridge, and airport projects. As for the rail funding, LaHood clarified that, “none of those funds may be used for anything other than our high-speed rail program.”

I, too, confess that I would like to take a salary for doing specified work then, instead of doing the work, spend my time playing video games and get paid anyway–twice, if possible. Unlike Walker and Kasich, I am not crazy enough to think anyone would go along with this.

Alert!

From FAIR:

Tonight’s broadcast of the Charlie Rose Show will feature a discussion of the budget deficit with progressive economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.).

Getting two progressives on TV to discuss the deficit is like Haley’s Comet. Most of us only get to see it once in a lifetime.

Malwhere. The attack on Iran.

OK, our best ally in the Middle East is now all but openly boasting of using computer malware as part of a strategy of warfare (Broad and Sanger, NYT):

Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.

Their conclusion, while not definitive, begins to clear some of the fog around the Stuxnet worm, a malicious program detected earlier this year on computers, primarily in Iran but also India, Indonesia and other countries.

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.

So, now, how exactly do we go about getting China to rein in its script kiddies, whether state-sponsored or no, who have been rifling through the Pentagon’s computers?

Completely losing our moral authority is a a very bad development. Probably less bad than bombing a country which constitutes no threat to us, but bad.

Finally, whoever wrote the code included a series of clues as to authorship inside it, and they’re things that Israel’s enemies would be unlikely to think of. So, add to the downside of undermining US leadership the fact that (a) the Israelis get the blame (b) it didn’t work, and (c) it included a bit of hubris of the kind that Whoever or Whatever is in charge of this world loves to punish.

Friday Cat Blogging

Special Guest Cat: Mia has just consulted the Toshiba manual and is about to begin nibbling the Ethernet cable to improve data transfer rates.