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If I had a list of wishes, pretty high up would be that people realize that Whole Foods Market... well... sucks.

Here are a few reasons to avoid them and support your local grocer instead (if you're lucky enough to have one, that is):  

• Whole Foods violates their workers' rights to unionize, including busting up a union in Madison, Wisconsin and hiring armed guards to stand outside the Tysons Corner, West Virginia, store, in response to workers starting to talk of unionizing. 
• Whole Foods doesn't buy locally. They centralize their food buying and favor large corporations, at the expense of local farms and economies. Can you imagine a world without small farms?
• They're complicit in perpetuating the brutal conditions facing farmworkers.
  

Clearly I'm not one of those people who can keep my blog up-to-the-minute, but I want to mention two more things about my visit to Detroit, even though I'm actually two states beyond at this point.

Before I left town, I had lunch with some staff members of Labor Notes, an incredible and radical organization/magazine that provides a forum for union activists to honestly examine problems within the labor movement (i.e., not just ever-weakening labor laws and employer offensives, but problems like weak unions and union leaders not doing their job). Similar to Bitch, they're a nonprofit organization that publishes a magazine. They also publish pamphlets and books (including one of my favorites, The Troublemakers Handbook: How to fight back where you work and win) and organize a bi-annual Labor Notes conference. I highly encourage everyone to read what happened at their most recent conference in April. There's some f'd-up stuff going on in union organizing these days.

In the frenzy of preparing for my first Women, Action, and the Media (WAM!) conference, I'd arranged a flight that arrived in Boston a day before the conference actually began. Not cool since my hotel room share wasn't starting until tomorrow.

I wasn't too worried because I had a layover in Minneapolis and I managed to convince myself that surely the fine folks at Northwest would let me bump my flight to tomorrow and let me spend a day with my mom.