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Exit Polls Indicate Nation Suffering From Severe Memory Loss |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 05 November 2014 07:22 |
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Borowitz writes: "Exit polls conducted across the country on Election Day indicate a nation suffering from severe memory loss, those who conducted the polls confirmed Tuesday night."
Mitch McConnell again? (photo: AP)
Exit Polls Indicate Nation Suffering From Severe Memory Loss
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
06 November 14
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 xit polls conducted across the country on Election Day indicate a nation suffering from severe memory loss, those who conducted the polls confirmed Tuesday night.
According to the polls, Americans who cast their votes today had a difficult time remembering events that occurred as recently as six years ago, while many seemed to be solid only on things that have happened in the past ten days.
While experts were unable to explain the epidemic of memory loss that appears to have gripped the nation, interviews with Americans after they cast their votes suggest that their near total obliviousness to anything that happened as recently as October may have influenced their decisions.
“I really think it’s time for a change,” said Carol Foyler, a memory-loss sufferer who cast her vote this morning in Iowa City. “I just feel in my gut that if these people were in charge they’d do a really amazing job with the economy.”
Harland Dorrinson, who voted in Akron, Ohio, and who has no memory of anything that happened before 2013, said his main concern was a terrorist attack on American soil.
“I really think we need to put a party in charge that won’t ever let something like that happen,” he said.
In Texas, exit polls showed strong support for George P. Bush, who was running for the Republican nomination for Texas land commissioner. “George Bush sounds like the name of someone who would be really good at running things,” said one voter.
The national exit polls revealed an electorate deeply fearful of a number of threats, including ISIS, Ebola, and, oh, what was that other thing?
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What's in Store for New Senate? Much of the Same Gridlock and Grind |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23758"><span class="small">Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Wednesday, 05 November 2014 07:19 |
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Tumulty writes: "Now that power has changed hands in the Senate, there are two scenarios for what is likely to get done in Washington over the next couple of years: not much, and nothing at all."
Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, left, and Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in September. (photo: Associated Press)
What's in Store for New Senate? Much of the Same Gridlock and Grind
By Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post
05 November 14
Obama is prepared to wield veto power on his most valued issues
 ow that power has changed hands in the Senate, there are two scenarios for what is likely to get done in Washington over the next couple of years: not much, and nothing at all.
The new Republican majority was elected with virtually no agenda beyond stopping President Obama’s — something the GOP senators were already pretty successful at doing as the minority.
Their leader, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), preoccupied with his own reelection, has conspicuously avoided setting out any grand ambitions — such as putting entitlement programs on sound financial footing, or overhauling the immigration system, or rewriting the tax code.
“There are some obvious things. We’d be voting on the Keystone pipeline” as well as several modifications to the Affordable Care Act, McConnell said at a campaign stop Friday. “A number of things that, I think, there’s a majority in the Senate for.”
But “voting on” legislation is not the same thing as enacting it. Republicans will be short of the 60 votes needed to overcome filibusters by a Democratic minority that is expected to feel little incentive to compromise. The Republicans would have to have even more — 67 — to override a presidential veto.
Thus far, Obama has used the veto only twice during his presidency, on bills that had technical flaws, but aides say he is ready to assert that power as frequently as it takes to protect the things he cares about.
That is why the goal most often mentioned by this year’s Republican candidates — repealing Obamacare — remains out of reach.
“Practically speaking, with President Obama in the White House, that’s probably not going to happen,” McConnell said.
“But we’ll certainly be voting on it,” he added.
McConnell and Obama each offered a gesture of cooperation Tuesday.
As results began to show the early signs of a strong Republican night, the White House let it be known that Obama had invited the bipartisan congressional leadership for a meeting on Friday. And McConnell, in his victory speech, pointed to an “obligation to work together on issues where we can agree.”
“Just because we have a two-party system doesn’t mean we have to be in perpetual conflict,” he said.
Meanwhile, House Republicans, who were expected to expand their majority Tuesday, say they will recycle a raft of bills, most of them relatively narrow in scope, that they’ve passed before but never gotten through the Senate. Among other things, those measures would open up more oil and gas drilling, require government agencies to disclose more about their process of writing regulations, and encourage employers to hire more military veterans.
On the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough has been holding regular meetings with Obama’s top aides in recent weeks to map out a strategy for the final two years of his presidency, factoring in the new alignment of power on Capitol Hill.
There is a sort of fatalism in their calculations. “We will be open to opportunities where we can work together but realistic about the larger political dynamics that have stymied progress so far,” said senior presidential adviser Dan Pfeiffer.
Barring an unlikely outbreak of bipartisanship, Obama plans to focus on things that remain largely within his control: foreign policy, the ongoing implementation of the health-care law, regulation of financial markets and other laws passed early in his presidency.
Obama also plans to use his executive authority, aides said.
One much-anticipated order would allow some yet-to-be-determined number of illegal immigrants to remain in this country, a move likely to inflame the issue just as both parties try to regroup before the 2016 elections and court crucial Hispanic voters.
Other executive orders could come on climate change, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday, adding a less-than-subtle suggestion that Democrats see political upsides in drawing the GOP into a more robust debate on that front.
“There are still, you know, too many Republicans in Congress who even deny the basic scientific fact that climate change is occurring and something that policymakers should be concerned about,” Earnest said. “So the president will use his executive action to take some additional steps, but he is also going to continue to talk about this issue in a way that lays the groundwork for action by future presidents and future Congresses.”
Obama also has an eye on his legacy, and on softening the turf for presidents who follow him to act on issues that matter to him.
Even after an election in which largely unregulated outside groups spent an unprecedented $500 million on congressional races, the chance of passing campaign finance reform legislation “is rather remote,” Earnest said. “But the president is going to continue to talk about that issue, and he’s going to continue to try to push that issue.”
Before the new Congress is sworn in, there will be a closely watched lame-duck session in which Democratic and Republican lawmakers will be able to test their realigned relationship.
Senior aides in both parties say that, at a minimum, the Senate will have to agree on a bill to fund the government, to reauthorize operations in Syria, prevent a tax increase on the Internet and pass a defense policy bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) is also expected to use his final days in charge of the chamber to push through as many Obama nominees as he can — possibly including the president’s yet-to-be-announced pick to replace Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.
Then Republicans will get the reins.
There is a case to be made that the new majority will feel compelled to rack up some achievements, if for no other reason than to show that the Republican Party that was blamed for a 16-day federal shutdown last year knows how to govern.
The electoral map in 2016 will be a hostile one for the GOP — almost an exact inverse of this year’s — with 23 Republican-held seats on the ballot, many of them in states carried twice by Obama. Those facing reelection may feel intense pressure to move toward the center.
But it is just as easy to argue that partisan lines will be hardened. About half a dozen Senate Republicans are seriously considering running for president, which means they will be playing to the party’s conservative base. One of them, Ted Cruz of Texas, told The Washington Post last weekend: “I think we have seen election after election that when Republicans fail to draw a clear distinction with the Democrats, when we run to the mushy middle, we lose.”
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are expected to hunker down. It will be in their political interest to resist giving the GOP any legislative victories to claim, and to keep the distinctions between the two parties as sharp as possible in the run-up to 2016.
The last two men who found themselves in McConnell’s situation say he will soon learn how much more difficult it is to be the leader of a fractious majority than the organizer of a block party.
“Minority leader is a lot easier. It’s much more defense, trying to stop things you don’t like,” said former senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.).
Former senator Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) noted that as majority leader, “you must work with the minority leader, the speaker, the president and your caucus. The latter is sometimes hardest of all, because there are some who believe they can do the job better than you can. And almost immediately, there is the next election.”
McConnell is an institutionalist who got his start on Capitol Hill as an intern and Senate aide in the 1960s. His first goal, those around him say, is to restore a semblance of “regular order” to the Senate: hashing out bills in committee, getting appropriations bills passed on schedule, allowing more amendments on the floor, making sure the Senate passes a budget — something that has happened only once since 2009.
And there are a few pieces of legislation in which significant agreement already exists between the two parties. Some that might actually get to Obama’s desk and be signed into law: new spending on infrastructure, trade bills, changes in the corporate tax code. And, yes, the Keystone XL oil pipeline that has been a point of tension between the parties and within the Obama administration.
Those may sound like small things compared with the grand bargains that once seemed possible. But, said Lott, who knows? “Do some of those things, and show you can get things done, and it becomes contagious.”
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If You Think DC Is Awful Now, Wait Until Wednesday |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33253"><span class="small">Jonathan Alter, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Tuesday, 04 November 2014 12:58 |
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Alter writes: "If, as expected, Republicans take control of the Senate, they will try to repeal Obamacare and pass a string of other outlandish bills, all of which President Obama will veto. Or they might block some judgeships but work with the president in a few areas in order to build an agenda to run on in 2016. In other words, we're told, this election is No Biggie."
(illustration: Elena Scotti/The Daily Beast)
If You Think DC Is Awful Now, Wait Until Wednesday
By Jonathan Alter, The Daily Beast
04 November 14
Think this election doesn’t matter? Then just wait to see what damage a GOP Senate will do, especially when it comes to climate change.
 ell before the midterms, a weary conventional wisdom set in: This is a “Seinfeld election”—an election, like the hit comedy, “about nothing.” If, as expected, Republicans take control of the Senate, they will try to repeal Obamacare and pass a string of other outlandish bills, all of which President Obama will veto. Or they might block some judgeships but work with the president in a few areas in order to build an agenda to run on in 2016. In other words, we’re told, this election is No Biggie.
This analysis, which you will hear again tonight on all the networks, ignores the ferocious radicalism of today’s Republican Party. As majority leader, Mitch McConnell might want to cut deals, but he will be dealing with a GOP caucus in the Senate that increasingly resembles the one John Boehner must contend with in the House, not to mention a base that has derailed several attempts to present a more moderate agenda on issues ranging from taxes to immigration.
The biggest impact of a GOP takeover will be on appointments. Many Obama administration sub-Cabinet positions (e.g. Surgeon General) have gone unfilled because of GOP opposition. Now many will likely remain vacant for another two years. Republicans don’t care. They hate government (except when it gives them a paycheck) and making it run worse just helps them convince the public that Democrats are incompetent.
The federal bench will be harmed by dozens of vacancies going unfilled, causing a case backlog. Meanwhile, none other than Sen. Ted Cruz is slated to become chairman of the subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee responsible for constitutional rights. Imagine the hearings he will hold. With any luck, the press won’t cover them, but don’t hold your breath.
Should Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a cancer survivor) or one of the other justices have to step down, all hell would break loose. Republicans would likely block any Obama nominee to the high court, especially for one of the conservative seats, leaving a 4-4 partisan split until early 2017, meaning that important cases would go undecided. Talk about gridlock.
The worst effect of a Republican takeover would be on the environment. The climate-change denial caucus would likely grow larger and more radical. Take Joni Ernst, a GOP darling now favored to be the next senator from Iowa. Ernst, best known for castrating pigs, doesn’t just want to ease environmental regulation; she favors abolishing the EPA altogether. That’s right—get rid of the agency created under Richard Nixon that has cleaned up the nation’s water and air. And if you think moderate Republicans are shunning her, consider that former President George H.W. Bush has been called in to help her campaign.
Moderates and independent voters in states like Iowa, Colorado, and North Carolina who cast their ballots for Republican candidates for the Senate should know that they are contributing greatly to the ascendancy of climate-change denial—a generation of politicians dedicated to burying their heads in the sand.
The ostrich-in-chief—and proud of it—is a former mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, who once compared the director of the EPA to Tokyo Rose and the agency to the Gestapo. If Republicans win the Senate on Tuesday, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, now in his fourth term, is set to become the next chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a position he held from 2003 to 2007, when the Republicans last held control. He will make it his business to carry water for the fossil-fuel industry, smear climate scientists, and do everything else in his considerable power to prevent the country and the world from confronting the slow motion crisis of climate change.
Inhofe is not just a climate-change denier; he is a warrior for corporate-funded half-truths and outright lies. While McConnell and other Republican candidates this year have adopted the mantra, “I’m not a scientist” to dodge pesky climate-change questions, Inhofe charges ahead with an Orwellian argument.
In his 2012 book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, Inhofe explains how he is a prophet without honor in his time. “First I stood alone in saying that anthropogenic [manmade] catastrophic global warming is a hoax,” he writes, launching into an attack on Al Gore. “Now Gore stands alone in his dismissal of reform, openness, transparency and peer-review to ensure good science.”
That’s a pretty good encapsulation of how Inhofe will run his committee if the GOP takes control and he succeeds Sen. Barbara Boxer as chairman. Notice how he says it is Gore who rejects “openness” and “peer review.” It’s the old I’m-rubber-you’re-glue approach. A reader commenting on Amazon put it this way: “Where are the publications in Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prizes in chemistry or physics? None. Zero. Nada. Absolutely nothing. Oldest trick in the bully book: Call the others a hoax so that the bully’s hoax goes unnoticed. This ‘book’ is a hoax.”
Of course pointing this out won’t stop Inhofe, who will use the gavel to pound away at environmentalists as if they—not the climate-change deniers—are the ones abusing science.
In the time since Inhofe was last chairman, the deniers received a gift from the gods in the form of what they predictably call “Climategate.” This was a scandal involving the disclosure of emails and documents at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University that suggest a couple of bad apples among the tens of thousands of scientists who believe climate change is real—scientists who ignored or twisted some data.
Inhofe will use his large megaphone to try to convince the world these this 2009 incident is proof of “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public.” The world’s most eminent climate scientists, who all believe climate change is real, are, according to Inhofe, “in it for the money” and apparently part of the vast conspiracy that he says he will devote the rest of his days to exposing.
Actually, Inhofe does a few other things in the Senate, too, like pushing for federal disaster relief funds for the residents of Moore, Oklahoma, which was devastated by a 2013 tornado, while voting to deny such funds for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Inhofe said the two disasters were different because the hurricane drew so many moochers.
When Inhofe last chaired Environment and Public Works, George W. Bush was in the White House and Inhofe reserved most of his barbs for Democrats and the press. In January, if the GOP wins Senate control, he will go after Obama and the EPA with a vengeance.
The first goal will be to reverse Obama’s recently announced regulation of carbon emissions from coal-fired plants. With the help of McConnell, who is expected to be re-elected in large part on the coal issue despite his continued unpopularity in Kentucky, Republicans could attach a repeal of the rule to the so-called Continuing Resolution.
That’s the bill—up for consideration either in December or sometime next year—required to keep the government open. If Inhofe and the climate-change deniers have their way, they will force Obama to veto that bill, then blame him for forcing a government shutdown. The resulting negotiation, they hope, would gut the EPA regulation.
Inhofe has a record of recklessness that shouldn’t be underestimated. After he landed a private plane at a closed Texas airfield in 2010 and almost killed a group of construction workers, the airport manager was quoted as saying, “I’ve got over 50 years flying, three tours of Vietnam, and I can assure you I have never seen such a reckless disregard for human life in my life. Something needs to be done. This guy is famous for these violations.”
One advantage of Inhofe taking the gavel is that he might have to start playing defense. We got an indication of that last July when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse schooled him in a floor debate after Inhofe and other Republicans blocked a resolution declaring that climate change is real. Whitehouse noted that Inhofe charged that government agencies had been “colluding” to peddle climate-change threats.
Did this include NASA, the U.S. Navy and the National Weather Service? Was Inhofe suggesting we shouldn’t trust those agencies with the lives of astronauts and sailors, or that we should disbelieve weather forecasts? Was he suggesting that Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Mars, Google, Apple and the entire property and casualty insurance business were in on a big lie? Whitehouse concluded by citing surveys showing that even young Republicans believed that only people who were ignorant, out of touch, or crazy rejected climate science.
Historians looking back 100 years from now to the early 21th century are likely to conclude the same thing as they chronicle the biggest story of our time: How the United States and other great nations fiddled while the world burned.
On Sunday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—reflecting a consensus of global scientists—issued another dire report, this one warning that temperatures in many regions could grow so hot that it will become difficult for large percentages of the world’s population to work or play outdoors during the hot months of the year. The report repeated warnings of catastrophic food shortages, refugee crises, major cities and even entire countries left underwater by flooding, and mass extinction of plants and animals.
Even in an era when the public detests Washington, the U.S. Senate remains a powerful platform to advance ideas, including historically bad ones. So voters might want to consider who else—and what else—they are elevating when they go to the polls on Tuesday and vote for ostriches.
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FOCUS | Starbucks for President? Yes - Howard Schultz's Trial Balloon Is Up! |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 04 November 2014 09:30 |
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Boardman writes: "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."
Barista in the White House? (photo: Starbucks)
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.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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