John Mackey, the dishonest CEO  of Whole Foods, has caused quite a stir
with his foolish editorial about why we do not need health care reform.  Many people, myself included, have
decided to boycott the chain until Mackey is looking for another job.  We’ve had it with the idiocy, venality,
heartlessness, and greed of so much of the right, and don’t want to subsidize
them  with our dollars.  When I shop there some of my dollars go to Mackey’s pay check. 

But there is more to it than this, and I hope my reasons will
interest Pagans.

When Spirit permeates the world, all our relations with the
world are in part relations with Spirit. 
We do not live in a place where we go to an Esbat on the Full Moon (or
church on Sunday) and  ignore our
religion the rest of the time.  Our
world is not fallen and we are not freed from a nonexistent original sin just
by believing something.

Our world makes a good deal more sense.

Corporations are constitutionally incapable of acting in an
ethical fashion.  They are
organized only to be concerned with stock value.  Crooked executives can steal a little on the side, but when
the system is working it has all the moral sensitivity of a rational sociopath.

This means that corporations cannot treat the natural world
as a place of intrinsic value.  A
farmer may or may not do this, so long as it is dominated by the interests of
share holders investing for money, a corporation cannot.  Whole Foods is the pretty face of
industrialized agriculture, where money is the only real standard, and whose
inner logic manifests as industrial hog and chicken factories and huge fields
of monoculture supported by political subsidies and life destroying
agricultural practices.

Corporations can do good things that might not be entirely
bottom line related, such as WalMart buying organic food.  They do so because it is so profitable
that some conscientious executives can shave a little off and do the right
thing without starting a shareholder revolt. (From what I hear in WalMart’s
case I think this is the case.  But
I could be wrong.)

When I buy groceries I shop at farmers’markets (which are
not available year round even here in Sonoma County) and at locally owned
stores or the smallest chains I can find. Its both because there is a far
greater likelihood that the organizations I shop from do not worship only
money, and may live in an ethically more complex world that John Mackey, and because it is a way to support where I live. I still shopped at Whole Foods very very occasionally, but now I won’t even do that until MacKey is fired.  .

I would argue this kind of action is part of the only way modern society might come
to exist in a respectful way with the rest of our home.