I did not even know who the CEO of Starbucks was until he abruptly decided he would do his best to re-elect Doughface Donny by running as an independent centrist candidate for president. Every buzzword phrase has already been deployed to try and dissuade Howard Schultz from doing this. I've heard 'if you really want to set fire to a bunch of money there are easier ways.' And the President of the Center for American Progress will call for a boycott of Starbucks to make sure that none of her money is going to re-elect Trump. Even perennial mugwump independent centrist extraordinaire Michael Bloomberg said that it was a bad idea. Not because he didn't love Schultz' positions of ultra anti-progressivism one would assume, but because the electoral college makes it an impossibility.
Now, panic might be too strong a word for real world reactions to this hypothetical two years out spoiler, but this quixotic scheme and all others like it need to be squashed as hard as possible by as many voices as possible. We have enough trouble with every Democrat with more than 1% name recognition throwing their hat in the ring already to worry about how the elite business class will sabotage the restoration of the republic. This is serious business, not something for businessmen with no political experience and ideology that only fellow CEOs could love to jump into on an insane vanity project. I am normally pretty grumpy and gloomy about politics, civilization has enough to deal with from the enemy (republicans). This third party bid feels more like sabotage, especially when Schultz makes the same inane quip that Reagan did about the Democratic Party leaving him.
I mean goddamnit! Schultz has the same stupid positions that were all in vogue during the '90s with Bill Jeff and the DLC ragamuffins. We as a country and as individuals are kind of past the flirtations with propaganda like "this is a center-right country" when it has finally become so difficult to get by that no one can intentionally have a family. Seriously, it may have flew under the radar but the CDC report that fertility has dropped below replacement levels for the country at large made my local ABC affiliate. Other things we are done with, "tax cuts spur growth", "we can't afford medicare for all", or "free college or government guaranteed jobs will kill incentives to work hard." I am done with anyone not taking climate change seriously, or espousing any of the business-friendly positions that have skyrocketed inequality and poverty beyond gilded age levels.
The fertility report is also important in another respect, beyond finally putting the lie to any scumbag republican talking about "family values", is that business has finally broken Friedrich Engels' dictum that capitalism will always have a floor for wages at replacement levels. When workers cannot have enough children to replace themselves we have finally hit the ultimate short term gain, eat your seed corn period of late stage capitalism. It is the essence of mugwumpism that Howard Schultz embodies here, his main position seems to be not wanting to pay any more taxes. He apparently likes to label progressive ideas as un-American. Josh Marshall at TPM wrote that this supposed "lifelong Democrat" is basically running as an anti-Democrat and on an anti-Democratic Party platform.
Schultz embodied, not the non-ideological centrism he claims, but the left wing of what Anand Giridharadas called "Marketworld" in his book Winners Take All. Perhaps Marketworld is the home of 21st century mugwumps, refusing to join in the messy world of politics to tinker with market-based solutions to social problems. Schultz very consciously states that he wants to run "outside the two party system" because to acknowledge that real people and their lives are affected by what happens in the dirty world of partisan politics would be to admit that his canopy view of America is completely out of touch. Oblivious to the fact that they have caused most of the problems they purportedly want to solve, modern mugwumps operate inside the fantasy that any attempt to raise taxes on the rich will cause the economy to collapse and life as we know it to end. Much better to massively cut Social Security and Medicare, thus ensuring that life will end for millions of non-millionaires. Claiming that the massive national debt (run up almost entirely by republicans and their legacies) is our greatest threat was the standard threat of republicans only a decade or so ago. You need look no further than this scolding from Investors Business Daily to understand that these are internalized ideals of the Marketworld set, completely detached from life as most of us know it.
Howard, as someone who has drunk a few Starbucks coffees and isn't fundamentally hostile to the company, please take Bloomberg's advice.
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