Considering that this blog called the President a thief last week, it was surprising that the Whole Foods blog generated the most responses of any entry to date.

Just to be clear, we agree that much of the foods they sell are not actually ‘organic.’ Their fresh produce can be very tasty and they have a nice cheese selection. Also, their pizza is excellent.

The point was that Whole Foods is cashing in on the ‘green’ movement and a quasi-hippie anti corporate ethic, which is a sham. Come on, Whole Foods, all the good things you do can easily be accomplished without the attitude, so get off your high horse and admit you are just a grocery store.

While the world most people inhabit rarely adopts Hollywood and Berkley fads, the ‘green’ movement has indeed caught fire with people who actually work to eat. Bemused by Kabbalah, Scientology, earth auras, and the like, regular America seems interested in being ‘green.’ Naturally, wherever there is a fad, an enterprising company will step up to exploit it. In this case, the practice of exploiting the public’s concerns is called ‘green washing.’ While most green washing is simply characterizing established practices as somehow environmentally friendly, the grocery chain Whole Foods has magically turned one of the least green practices into a core sacrament of the new religion.

Whole Foods pushes ‘organic’ products. While regular foods sold in the US have been conclusively proven to be safe through extensive testing, reporting, and regulation, Whole Foods was basically founded on the idea that organic foods were healthier and better tasting. Whole Foods eschewed the ‘corporate’ food industry in favor of a more commune like diet. Whole Foods customers responded to slogans like ‘organic,’ ‘macro-biotic,’ ‘unprocessed,’ and ‘preservative free.’ Whole Foods sold yoga magazines instead of gossip rags; they and their customers were enlightened. Many Americans bought into a healthier, purer lifestyle, and Whole Foods fueled their spiritual mission.

Of course Whole Food’s health claims were at best exaggerated. Regular foods are every bit as healthy as organic. Dreaded pesticides, in the quantities found on grocery foods, are perfectly safe. Best of all, regular foods taste just fine. At worst, the anti-corporate attitude of Whole Foods’s suppliers kills people. The juice company Odwalla, for inexplicable reasons, touted that its fruit smoothies were not pasteurized. Since pasteurization is what prevents the spread of deadly diseases through food products, it was only a matter of time before a young girl was killed by Odwalla products. Since then Odwalla has pasteurized its products using a special ‘flash pasteurization’ process. Flash pasteurization, by the way, is more health food hype, as all pasteurized foods must be heated for the same amount of time to have any benefit.

Aside from peddling snake oil, Whole Foods has morphed in to the environmentalism racket. Without changing much of their product line, they are now a temple to the green religion. Organic foods are the answer to evil corporate farms and processed foods that kill the planet. Whole Foods stores are plastered with green propaganda, and their recycling area is so complicated as to be a self parody. More than a few Priuses drop by Whole Foods on their way home from the yoga studio.

Of course hardly anything is worse for the environment than organic foods. While some organic products, like bananas, are about the same as their regular cousins, most organic foods take far more resources to grow and distribute. The average organic product requires about a third more land per unit of output than its FDA approved equivalent. Organic food subsequently requires more water and tractor fuel as well. Because the organic cannons preclude preservatives or irradiation, the ultimate amount of food consumed by the end user is smaller still.

Organic foods burn more fossil fuels, clear more wildlife lands, and consume more fresh water than regular foods. This is further evidence that the green movement is not so much about helping the environment as it is a counter culture backlash against everything deemed ‘corporate.’ The most environmentally safe diet choice is vegetarianism, since meats require up to ten times the natural resources as staple plants. Because even Whole Foods cares about its profits, it proudly sells the full range of animal produce.

Still, nobody is forcing the Whole Foods faithful to pay extra for inferior products. What people do with their own time, money, and bodies is their own business. Blessedly, unlike in Europe, the US does not preferentially subsidize organic farmers over their more efficient competitors. So, the next time you consider Whole Foods to fill your refrigerator, ask yourself if you are not buying food so much as buying into a green washed, counter-culture religion you might find objectionable.

President Obama seems intent on reducing the US to the status of a third world nation. For a politician who lauds ‘sustainability,’ Obama’s spending plans are the zenith of unsustainable excess. Not content to simply spend the US to bankruptcy, Obama is also bent on destroying the capitalist system that ultimately feeds Washington’s greed. The Obama currency is power and influence, and if money or the rule of law is in conflict, the Constitution is pushed out of the way. The banks’ stress tests, the California budget, and the Chrysler bankruptcy are the latest examples of Obama’s lack of respect for limited and enumerated powers.

As has been widely reported, many banks like Bank of America wish to repay their TARP loans as soon as possible. This is not because the TARP rates are unfavorable, but because every second Washington is in their pocket, politicians devise new ways to coerce the banks to do their bidding. Washington will micro-manage the bank’s lending policies to favor special interests. Washington will dictate hiring policies and force out top performing officers. Washington will direct how banks invest their capital reserves.

Naturally, Obama is not having any of this loan repayment nonsense. The banks are now his tool to affect his policies, and they will remain so. The stress test is little more than an avenue to prevent banks from repaying the government. Barring that, the Obama administration has also tied more traditional bank funding sources to the TARP funds – if they repay the TARP loans, other funding will be withheld as a punishment. Considering how unpopular the bank bailouts have become, why wouldn’t Obama wish for the immediate repayment of the funds? The cynical political calculus is that those who oppose TARP are a broad swath of the US, while the political power over the banks can be targeted at swing states to win elections. Left wing politics is always about punishing many to benefit few.

Similarly, the Obama administration has blocked California from making even the most modest of spending cuts. Despite California’s basket case public spending, Obama has blocked any cuts in their overly generous union pay scales. Moderate? Pragmatic? Unifying? No. Obama’s actions are a divisive partisan sop to the public unions that fund the Democrat party. Again, Obama punishes all of California to prop up his special interests.

TARP banks and California unions are ugly special interest politics, but they are only new in that their scale is enough to bankrupt a nation or a state. Anyone who thought a Chicago politician would play it clean is probably still resting on an Obama cloud nine. Obama’s most recent betrayal of the people, the Chrysler looting, takes government thievery into uncharted territory.

The US has a well established system to reorganize a company that cannot pay its obligations: Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Chrysler, and also GM, are ideal candidates for such a reorganization. Chapter 11 is nothing more than the orderly transference of ownership from existing shareholders to debt holders. The system provides for the distribution of the company’s new shares to debt holders in a hierarchy defined in advance by law. Such a system of laws allows investors to clearly understand the risks they are taking. Secured lenders – those at the top of the hierarchy – feel safer because even in the event of bankruptcy, they will still be repaid. That is unless the government pokes its nose into the case.

Obama has pressured several of Chrysler’s secured lenders to accept far less compensation than they are due. Several mutual funds and hedge funds bravely refused to accept the Obama deal, knowing they would fare far better in court. After all, the courts are impartial and do not bend to political pressure. How naive, the poor fools. They clearly forgot that Wall Street is public enemy number one. The Obama Administration made it clear that they would not prosper by pursuing their lawful rights in court. In addition to having the President bash them on TV as killing off the auto industry, this group was strong-armed into submission by an administration that clearly knows how to coerce behind the scenes. Of course the beneficiary of this looting is the UAW.

Obama has gone far beyond simply stealing from a few mutual funds with this thugery, he has broken the legal system that enables investment. He has stabbed at the heart of the US system of capitalism. The new proclamation is that a contract is no longer valid whenever a capricious President sees political opportunity in upending it. That is how business is done in Haiti and Zimbabwe, and now the US as well. The bedrock of investments in private enterprises is the surety of property rights. Such a system generates more investment and lending at lower rates. All of that is now in jeopardy thanks to a President that either doesn’t understand or disdains capitalism. Such niceties as centuries of property rights are of no concern to Obama when there is an opportunity to grace the UAW with unpopular people’s money.