Given the highly selective nature of morality put forward by "Christian" pastors such as Steve Andrew, it is painfully evident that they use the Bible as a fig leaf for what would otherwise be easily recognized as naked bigotry. It's quite amazing the things that these people can say with a straight face. For instance, they will claim that hate crime legislation is an infringement on freedom of religion. Show me the court of law which recognizes the murder of homosexuals to be a protected form of religious expression. Among the many bad bills working their way through the Tennessee General Assembly now is one that would require any school to write a provision into its bullying code that expressly recognizes First Amendment protections for religious groups; evidently TN legislators are more concerned about protecting the bullies than the bullied.

How strong is the fundamentalists' commitment to freedom of religion? These are the same people who are using frivolous appeals and harassment to prevent a mosque from opening in Murfreesboro. And they see not even a hint of irony.

But I will nevertheless offer Steve Andrew my thanks, if his appeal means that I can enjoy a coffee at Starbucks without being harassed by proselytizers.

I hope that Mossback intends this sentence to be sarcastic. I'm neither a Republican nor a conservative, but I do understand that bad behavior is part of the human condition. I'd assume that most conservatives, like most libertarians, find bad social behavior on the part of businesses an unavoidable byproduct of a free society. There certainly are legions of accounts of bad behavior on the part of government agencies, but I don't hear many on the left defending them as "good government practices."

As far as Pastor Andrew goes, unhinged preachers have been leading boycotts for centuries. Have those boycotts ever yielded any results?

Just when I thought the far right Christian crazy train couldn't get any more weird, up steps another disciple. The problem with Pastor Andrews and all of the Baptist Churches is that they don't recognize the Constitution as the governing document of this country. They only recognize the bible.

It's very odd how he makes no mention of Apple Corporation, who not only supports gay rights. They have a GAY CEO! Perhaps the iPhone, iPad and iPods have seduced even Pastor Andrews.

Tim Cook: Apple’s New CEO and the Most Powerful Gay Man in America

http://gawker.com/5834158/tim-cook-apples-new-ceo-and-the-most-powerful-gay-man-in-america

"far right Christian crazy train"
That pretty well sums up the 2012 GOP presidential bid.

But yes, Starbuck's is a sugary hedonists coffee plyed with jazz music. Whereas a real Christian brew will come from a stainless steel decanter, placed on a fold up laminate table, in a modest room with brown and white checkered linoleum tile floor.

It's funny how the alleged 'Christians' are just obsessed with gay people and gay marriage that these tech companies support. However, you don't hear one word from Pastor Andrew about the inhuman working conditions for the tech workers who make their products. Apparently these 'Christian' churches don't care that young children are working in tech factories or that they've had to install suicide nets in the factories to catch people who are jumping to their death. THAT apparently is OK with Pastor Andrew. It's really a sad reflection of the lack of mental clarity and compassion in these churches.

All the more reason to keep Christian obsessed people far, far away from the Presidency.

I disagree with Pastor Andrew's reasons for boycotting these places, but the idea of holding businesses morally accountable is not. Currently I will not patronize Shell, adidas, Lowes because of their social policies; I would now support Nike (if I needed anything they design) because of its good work in Honduras and Indonesia--but stay tuned; Nike has a checkered past. If I want my university's logo on a sweatshirt, I will only buy Alta Gracia apparel, the single most ethical manufacturer out there. Consumer choices are moral choices, not just economic ones.

bkochis, your point is well taken. But this article is about the far, far right targeting companies because of their support for gay rights and gay marriage. What's particularly stunning is how religious people like the pastor or Rick Santorum don't even acknowledge the U.S. Constitution and seem to think the bible is the document that rules our country. Further, it's THEIR interpretation of the bible that they feel so confident about.

It's hard to believe how politically tone deaf these people are. Both Santorum and Romney opposed saving the US auto industry and preferred to have a lockout instead. This would have taken nearly every auto parts store and car dealership with it. Rick Santorum has taken an aggressive stance against gay rights, just like pastor Andrew, even though the U.S. Constitution clearly supports equal rights for all Americans. They just ignore the existence of the Constitution.

If you want to target these companies, there are plenty of valid reasons:

ie:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

or Foxconn (that's where Amazon makes their Kindles.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

Starbucks vs the Farmers
http://www.newint.org/features/special/2008/04/01/starbucks/

Nike using child labor:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43024998/Labor_Issues_Still_Pervasive_In_Contract_Factory_World

Those are plenty of good reasons for a "Christian" person not to want to cooperate with the corporate mantra of "more is better."

Why bother to harp on the sexuality issue of their employees, when you could harp on their inhumanity in general?

Gary. It's because the Christian evangelicals that have taken over the Republican party don't care about human rights. They are obsessed with sex and abortion. Abortion and sex. That's it. The new Evangelicals believe that God blesses rich people and it's poor people's own fault that they are poor. Pretty twisted and I'm not sure where that twisted view of life is in the bible but that's what they believe.

Microsoft is god --

from supporting Franken-crops -- GMOs or genetically engineered crops -- to loving that geo-engineering blues, i.e., turning on and off the planet's systems using geo-engineering like iron shavings in the seas or massive pollution plants spewing out heavy smoke to cool the earth -- to pushing empty charter school initiatives -- to loving that Monsanto, Coca Cola and the entire continent of Africa as a testing ground for neo-liberal economics and science -- the infamous AGRA.

Starbucks and greenwashing and exploiting workers? This company is god too!

On the third anniversary of the founding of the IWW Starbucks Union, baristas in Chicago marched into a shop and told the manager they were signing up. (Starbucks workers have chosen to organize without government-mediated elections, through an interesting model called "solidarity unionism.")

Meanwhile, baristas in Grand Rapids, Michigan announced that they were filing a legal complaint against the company for violating their organizing rights through unlawful surveillance and other questionable tactics. All over the world -- Austria, England, Spain and Australia, as well as the United States -- Starbucks workers demonstrated in front of stores to protest the company's union-busting practices.

When you pay $4 for a cup of coffee-flavored foamy milk at Starbucks, part of what you're buying is an illusion of corporate social responsibility. The store exudes a warm glow of righteousness, from the recycled paper napkins to the empathetic messages about sustainable trade and ecological practices (Our farmers are happy! Buy a better lightbulb! Have some more foamy milk!).

The workers behind the counter are hoping the public will look beyond all the greenwashing and support their campaign, which has succeeded in raising wages and improving conditions for some workers.

at --

The Nation / ByLiza Featherstone

Workers of the World Unite Against Starbucks

....Or, Amazon? God?

How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid

Amazon offers infinite choice and rock-bottom prices: those aren't necessarily good things.

July 19, 2010

The Nation / By Colin Robinson

How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid

Jeff Bezos loves numbers. In a speech in May to graduates at his alma mater, Princeton University, he recounted a childhood memory: when driving with his grandmother, a heavy smoker, he calculated how many years her addiction would reduce her life expectancy. Announcing the result from the back seat of the car, he expected praise for his deft maths. But his grandmother just burst into tears.

The Amazon founder's geeky obsession with numbers evidently formed early, and despite the glimmer of discomfort revealed by his Princeton anecdote, his fervently quantitative take on the world still predominates. In a letter accompanying the 2009 Amazon annual report, for instance, he sets out a mind-boggling 452 goals for the company in the coming year. The word "revenue" is mentioned only eight times, yet revenue growth is central to the Amazon story. Expanding both internationally and across other products—nonbook sales represent 75 percent of total Amazon turnover—Amazon's global business has increased fifteenfold over the past decade, 28 percent last year alone. Sales in 2009 topped $24.5 billion. To put that in perspective, in 2008 total sales by all US bookstores were less than $17 billion. In other words, the company is significantly larger than the entire American book business.

Of all the goals in the report, Bezos proudly points out, no fewer than 360 deal directly with customer needs. The customer has always been king in the Bezos ethos, and the formula for keeping the king happy is straightforward. "Amazon gives the customers what they want: low prices, vast selection and extreme convenience," he told a shareholders' meeting. On these terms, Amazon's success is stellar. It has more than 2 million titles on sale; bestselling books are routinely discounted by 50 percent or more; and it ranked first in BusinessWeek's "customer service champs" awards last year. But dig beneath the surface of the numbers and a more complex picture emerges, one suggesting that readers and writers may ultimately not be best served by Amazon's race to become the biggest, cheapest and most convenient bookseller around.

Amazon has not grown to where it is today by being touchy-feely. Sure, it adopted the informal trappings that characterized many of the new technology start-ups of the 1990s. But if Bezos's first desk at the company was an old door on trestles, the business conducted from behind it has been as ruthless as anything he encountered in his previous gig as a Wall Street broker. Soon after Amazon's launch in 1995, Bezos told his employees that he wanted a place that was both "intense and friendly" but that "if you ever had to give up 'friendly' in order to have 'intense,' we would do that."

This hard-nosed approach has not endeared Amazon to publishers, who have consistently felt the pressure of the company's intensity, especially when it comes to setting terms. In researching this article, I uncovered widespread resentment about the aggressive way Amazon pursues its objectives, matched only by dread of being publicly identified as a critic of publishing's largest customer. "They have no sense of collegiality," complained one publisher, who asked not to be identified. "They behave like pigs," said another, his voice dropping as he checked around to see if anyone was within earshot.

(Disclosure: the new publishing company with which I am involved, OR Books, does not deal with Amazon. We sell direct to customers, channeling money that would otherwise go on discount and distribution to extensive promotion, primarily on the Internet.)

Dennis Loy Johnson, co-publisher of the Brooklyn-based independent Melville House, is one of the few publishers who have dared to speak openly about Amazon's bullying. His story is far from atypical. In 2004 a representative of the retailer contacted Melville's distributor demanding an additional discount. Such payments are illegal under antitrust law, which precludes selling at different prices to different customers. Large retailers circumvent this restriction by disguising the extra discount under the rubric of "co-op," money paid to the bookseller for promotional services, often notional. In this case the distributor did not bother with such niceties, describing what Amazon was after as "kickback."

Johnson resisted Amazon's pressure and complained to Publishers Weekly about what he saw as the retailer's capo-like tactics. What happened next evidently still rankles. "I was at the Book Expo in New York and two guys from Amazon came to see me. They said that the company was watching what we were doing and that they strongly advised us to get in line. I was shocked at how blatant the pressure was." Within a couple of days Johnson noticed that the buy buttons for his books had been taken off Amazon's site, making Melville's titles unavailable.

In the end Johnson, faced with an offer it was nigh impossible to refuse, agreed to the co-op. His books' buy buttons were reinstated. Today Amazon is Melville House's biggest customer, and though Johnson still regularly flays the company on his popular publishing blog Moby Lives, he also concedes that it is highly effective at bookselling: "They make buying so easy. It's impossible to resist."

Another man who recently lost his Amazon buy buttons is John Sargent, head of Macmillan, the US arm of German book giant Holtzbrinck, home to many authors familiar to Nation readers, including Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Barbara Ehrenreich. In January Sargent confronted Amazon over its insistence on setting the prices of e-books it sold on its site, generally at under $10. This was a concern throughout an industry worried that low prices of electronic versions would undermine profits from printed books and generally lower the perceived value of the product. Sargent informed Amazon that he wanted to move Macmillan to an "agency agreement," meaning that he, as the publisher, could price books at whatever level he chose, paying Amazon a fixed discount.
*******************

....Read on ---------------

Funny stuff, this preacher blathering on accidently tripping over the three heads of god.

GaryP -- You probably have this one under your belt -- add to the list of human exploiters many more/many more of the companies that just keep adding to the planned and perceived obsolescence junk "we all just have to buy to keep this growth economy humming," and they -- workers -- have to die for our wonderful tastes.

Again, the country's paper of record --NYT -- washes away the real guts to the story behind Foxconn -- New York Times and the war drums of generations of editors and writers there are no surprise in terms of their neo-liberal agenda. But, catch this --

http://www.alternet.org/story/154043/iempire%3A_apple%27s_sordid_business_practices_are_even_worse_than_you_think

By Arun Gupta

iEmpire: Apple's Sordid Business Practices Are Even Worse Than You Think

New research goes beyond the New York Times to show just how disturbing labor conditions at Foxconn, the "Chinese hell factory," really are.

....And this:

http://rdln.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/pun-ngai_chan-jenny_on-foxconn.pdf

The CRJ -- http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_morning_call_probes_amazon.php

September 23, 2011

The Morning Call’s Amazon Sweatshop Probe

An excellent investigation exposes poor conditions at a big Pennsylvania warehouse

By Ryan Chittum

....Nike? God too --

http://www.organicconsumers.org/clothes/nikesweatshop.cfm

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/04/16/squeezed-vietnamese-workers-strike-back/

http://www.alternet.org/story/10240/

USAS Update: Anti-Sweatshop Groups Take on Broader Issues of Worker's Rights

Students take over administration buildings...Nike CEO takes back millions from alma mater...Code of conduct signed for entire University of California system...The battle against sweatshops is being waged across the country. In this update on the group, Olivia Greer details the current actions by United Students Against Sweatshops and reviews the goals and strategies of the organization.

Does one become a right-wing Christian nut because one has some very unhealthy fixation on other peoples' sex lives? Or does one become a right-wing Christan nut and then become unhealthily fixated on other peoples' sex lives?

I am not a christian but my observation is that the original ones must have been bad as they seem to all have been poor fisherman and wandering barefoot mendicants or disciples. When did rich become part of the christian way?
There doesn't seem to be a wife among them unless Mary Magdalene was truly married to Jesus. I like that story.
My subtle implications are what I am subtly implying.

"Consumer choices are moral choices, not just economic ones." (from bkochis).

ALL choices are economic, though some may not be financial.

Its amusing that a religious bigot such as Pastor Andrews draws so much comment; you'd think that the religious far-right actually constitute a majority of the thinking (and voting) populace...

aasheal

The reason I boycott Charbucks is the lousy coffee they serve.

The saddest thing about politics today is that any random prejudiced guy who calls himself a pastor gets his BS in the news.