Starbucks for President? Yes - Howard Schultz's Trial Balloon Is Up!

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

04 November 14

The smooth Schultz-for-President rollout is rich with deniability

tarbucks head honcho Howard Schultz had his hat tossed to the fringe of the presidential contender ring on November 2, adding his name to speculative list of those who might be President in 2017. Howard Schultz, 61, is the chairman, president, and CEO of Starbucks, with a reported income of $28.9 million a year in 2012 and a net worth on the north side of $2.2 billion. He doesn’t need the White House job. And he’s not clamoring for it. Yet.

And if the groundswell of “We want Schultz” supporters fails to materialize, he’s perfectly positioned to say he wasn’t running for president, he was just trying to help.

Schultz’s presidential trial balloon gets instant credibility by appearing in The New York Times’ high-circulation Sunday edition, with a wet kiss from Maureen Dowd’s syndicated column that leads with free-floating remorse over the way the country treats the veterans of its all-volunteer military. While suitably impressed with the ability of the “coffee czar” to sell coffee, Dowd is most taken with Schultz’s recently discovered fondness for military veterans. So how are those credentials significantly more deserving than anyone else? That’s just a question, not an endorsement.

Dowd’s column isn’t an endorsement, either, it’s more of a promo for an HBO program, “The Concert for Valor,” billed as “a first-of-its-kind concert to honor the courage and sacrifice of America’s veterans and their families.” The event is “hosted” by HBO and Starbucks Coffee Company and will be available free to non-subscribers to HBO. But that’s not all, as Dowd explained:

Schultz produced glossy film clips for the concert. One shows the macchiato mogul, wearing an Army-green down vest, greeting troops with his blonde wife, Sheri, as heart-tugging piano music plays. I note that it is bound to make viewers wonder if he’s partly motivated by a desire to run for president.

“I have an interest in trying to make a difference,” he said. “I don’t know where that’s going to lead.” He believes that “the country is longing for leadership and for truth with a capital T.”

Schultz’s conversion to military worship accepts war as good

Schultz’s awakening to veterans’ issues came, he says, when he was invited to West Point in 2011 to speak about leadership to undergraduates, not veterans. He’s says he’d “never spoken to anyone in uniform” before 2011, which sounds like a possibly representative metaphor. If it’s the literal truth, as presented, it raises some amazing questions about this man’s first 58 years of life experience.

According to Schultz, his trip to West Point provided an epiphany similar to St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus. Veterans became an important cause for Schultz, prompting him to recruit Robert Gates, 71, former defense secretary, to the Starbucks board. Gates, also former CIA director and Washington insider, brings qualities desirable to almost any corporate board (he serves on several), though Gates’s efforts on behalf of veterans are less well known than his lack of effort to get troops in Iraq protection against roadside explosives.

For Schultz, ironically, Gates’s failure to protect the troops contributed to the availability of veterans with post-traumatic distress disorder, brain damage, and amputation that Schultz now expresses concern for. All this misses the more fundamental – more presidential – point: that the best way to care for damaged veterans is not to create them.

If there is anything on record, it’s hard to find Schultz stating the obvious: that in his lifetime, the United States has fought nothing but illegal, disastrous wars against which he has apparently had nothing to say. Not even in retrospect does he make the banal point that NOT sending young people to fight in unconstitutional wars fought for dubious or dishonest reasons is the very best way to treat them, by not turning them into wounded, disillusioned veterans badly served by their government. Somehow, a concert doesn’t seem to make up for that.

Veteran concerns getting a whole package of Schultz’s attention

To his credit, Schultz has apparently had his foundation give $30 million to support research in ways to help veterans heal. The Schultz Family Foundation, started in 2000, has two primary programs, “Onward Veterans” and “Onward Youth.” Schultz is also credited with having co-written a book, “For Love of Country,” described by Random House as:

A celebration of the extraordinary courage, dedication, and sacrifice of this generation of American veterans on the battlefield and their equally valuable contributions on the home front.

Because so few of us now serve in the military, our men and women in uniform have become strangers to us. We stand up at athletic events to honor them, but we hardly know their true measure. Here, Starbucks CEO and longtime veterans’ advocate Howard Schultz and National Book Award finalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post offer an enlightening, inspiring corrective.

Dowd’s column (along with a Schultz op ed in the Washington Post) turns out also to be part of the promotional effort for this book, which will be officially published November 4, in prelude to the concert. Page 5 of the news section of the Sunday Times is a full-page ad for Schultz’s book, with a rosy blurb from Gates, and the information that you can buy the book at Starbucks. Such ads cost $104,000 or more.

The point here is not that honoring veterans is not generally honorable. It is. Veterans deserve much more than broken promises from government, even a willingness not to make them veterans in the first place. The point is that honoring veterans in a self-serving and morally opaque manner may be worse than not honoring them at all. Having been used once as fodder for lawless, ideological fantasies, how are veterans made better by being used yet again to promote the fortunes of someone silent in the face of those lawless, ideological fantasies?

It’s not too late to prosecute torturers and other U.S. war criminals

Perhaps the difference between our collective memories of World War II, the “last good war,” and all the wars since then is that World War II veterans (who were hardly trouble-free) had good reason to feel that they served for mostly honest, decent reasons. All the veterans created since Korea have been lied to in greater or lesser degree by their government and the legions of “Bob Gates” careerists who remain unindicted co-conspirators.

No one who fails to address this reality has any valid claim to speaking “truth with a capital T” or even with a small “t.”

Even as Dowd participates in the promotion of book sales, and concert audience size, and presidential dreams, she also notes how bogus the promises of care really are, followed by a distraction from the insight:

The coffee czar joined a growing list of corporations getting good P.R. by pledging to hire a million veterans, even though there are only about 200,000 post-9/11 veterans out of work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Schultz has hired 1,000 vets and spouses and committed to give jobs to 9,000 more by 2019. [emphasis added]

The record appears to support the conclusion that Schultz’s politics are pretty mundane and centrist, so it’s no surprise he hasn’t spoken out against any of the wars in his lifetime. He has voiced no opposition to the absence of a draft that once made the military a better reflection of the country as a whole. The draft also made it harder, but hardly impossible, to send soldiers drawn from all classes and parts of the country to fight in useless carnage, from Viet-Nam to Iraq, defending lies. A country that doesn’t want perpetual war doesn’t have a professional (mercenary) military.

In 2011, Schultz was part of a campaign to get mostly rich moderates to refuse to contribute to either party until Democrats and Republicans came up with a “grand bargain” to resolve budget issues. In early 2012, Starbucks supported a Washington state legislation in support of marriage equality (which company policy had supported for 20 years), for which the company became the target of a boycott for awhile. Also in 2012, Schultz spoke out about unemployment and housing, observed that the country was “hungry for authentic, genuine leadership on both sides,” and in the end supported Barack Obama. In 2013, Schultz wrote an open letter to his customers not to bring their guns into Starbucks, but he certainly wasn’t in favor of gun control laws. In another public letter, a “global responsibility report,” Schultz wrote that “caring for people’s well being is a responsibility” that Starbucks tries to live up to.

Can the 1% even see themselves as a major cause of depression?

In early 2014, Starbuck was the target of a national day of action by the “15 Now” movement, supporters of a minimum wage of $15, which Schultz opposes. The average pay for a Starbuck “barista” in 2012 was $8.79 an hour. For fifty 40-hour-weeks (and two weeks unpaid vacation), that comes to an annual wage of about $17,580. That’s how much Starbucks pays Schultz for working roughly one hour and 12 minutes.

In August this year, apparently in response to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Starbucks issued a fact sheet that states:

We do not support any political or religious cause. Additionally, neither Starbucks nor the company’s chairman, president and ceo [sic] Howard Schultz provide financial support to the Israeli government and/or the Israeli Army in any way.

Howard Schultz pretty much embodies a classic version of the American Dream. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, lived in public housing, and went to public school. His father was a veteran who had become a truck driver. Howard was the oldest of three children and the first person in his family to go to college: Northern Michigan University, on an athletic scholarship. He borrowed money in 1986 to start what is now Starbucks and took the company public just six years later. Now, according to Maureen Dowd, Schultz is discontent. She ends her column with this:

The American dream is frayed, [Schultz] says, adding: “We’ve lost our collective and individual responsibility, and to a large degree our conscience, and that has to be addressed. And that is linked to a dysfunctional government and a lack of authentic, truthful leadership. Am I depressing you?”

The answer to that is no doubt a matter of perspective. The Starbucks employees making only $8.79 an hour are probably already depressed.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

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