TPM reporting: Lanny Davis: Whole Foods Dust Up An Example Of Extremes On Both Left And Right
Yes, Lieberman ally Lanny Davis is defending Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, and admits he helped Mackey write the Op-Ed! Lanny's support and his co-authorship is even a more compelling reason to boycott Whole Foods.
Here's Lanny:
"The John Mackey piece, which I actually helped him a little bit on, has really been distorted as often happened in the blogosphere where people have short attention span," Davis told me.
Davis says the dust up over Mackey's op-ed is "an example of how we on the left start to mirror the extreme tactics on the right."
Short attention span?
John Mackey has a history of such behavior, and for some, this is just the last straw.
Just a few examples:
"The union is like having herpes. It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover."
http://www.ibiblio.org/...
Also, Mackey anonymously trashed a company he was about to buy on a Yahoo stock bulletin:
On July 20, 2007, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Mackey was, for at least seven years, using the pseudonym "Rahodeb" (an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah) to post to Yahoo Finance forums referring to himself in the third person and criticizing rival supermarket chain Wild Oats Market. The Federal Trade Commission approved a complaint challenging Whole Foods Market’s approximately $670 million acquisition of its chief rival, Wild Oats Markets, Inc., and authorized the FTC staff to seek a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in federal district court to halt the deal pending an administrative trial on the merits. After an extensive regulatory battle with the FTC, a federal appeals court consented to the deal and Whole Foods officially completed their buyout of Wild Oats on August 27, 2007. His approximately 2000 or more posts are still available online (8000 according to MSN Web Search), by searching for site:finance.yahoo.com rahodeb.
In May 2008, after an SEC investigation cleared him, Mackey started blogging again. In a lengthy 2,037 word diatribe he wrote about why he began blogging in the first place and how his upbringing drove him to defend himself and Whole Foods. He admitted he made a mistake in judgment, but not in ethics.
sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://online.wsj.com/...
http://www.ftc.gov/...
http://www2.wholefoodsmarket.com/...