Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Howard Schultz, the Great Uniter

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Feb. 1, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

18:42

Howard Schultz, the Great Uniter

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	I'm starting to feel bad for Howard Schultz, the executive chairman and ex-CEO of Starbucks, even though really I probably shouldn't, despite the fact that he's responsible for some of the most regressive social activism I have ever seen in my life.
	He's getting a lot of stick in the media right now, and honestly, he doesn't really deserve it.
	So this video is going to be at once a kind of condemnation of Howard Schultz and a defense of him.
	So Howard Schultz announced his bid for the presidency of the United States and I can't believe how badly he's getting panned in the media.
	I actually thought he'd be something of a darling of theirs given the effort that he's put into, well, what I would call regressive social activism.
	And he can do this because he was the CEO of Starbucks.
	He's now an executive chairman for them.
	While I consider him wildly out of touch on many social issues, that doesn't mean he's operating with ill intent.
	But this is being constantly ascribed to him, despite the fact that he has a very consistent history of promoting the same kind of activism through the same kind of motives.
	He very rarely changes the language that he uses when trying to describe why he's doing what he's doing.
	And honestly, I think that's to his strengths.
	Not that I would personally support Howard to become the president of the United States, even though he is a lot more fiscally conservative than Alexandra Orquesio-Cortez and her wing of the Democratic Party, which is practically the entire thing now, isn't it?
	But she was in fact the reason that he left and the reason that he has decided finally to step into the political arena.
	Because Howard's been effectively signaling that he was going to do something like this for years now.
	And I think it's important to remember that when he approaches anything that he's doing, he's not approaching it from someone from the perspective of someone who has been a billionaire their whole lives.
	Howard Schultz is actually a self-made man and he is actually in many ways the embodiment of the American dream.
	A lot more than Donald Trump in some respects.
	So it's kind of annoying to watch the left castigate him in the way that they're doing.
	But, I mean, he is, of course, a billionaire.
	And we know how people on the left feel about billionaires these days.
	Do we live in a moral world that allows for billionaires?
	Is that a moral outcome in and of itself?
	It's not.
	It's not.
	And it's not.
	And I think it's important to say that I don't think that necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral.
	It is not to say that someone like Bill Gates, for example, or Warren Buffett are immoral people.
	I do not believe that.
	He kicks his dog.
	Right, yeah, I don't, I don't, I'm not saying that, but I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong.
	And I think it's wrong.
	Howard Schultz has always run on a theme of togetherness, and this has obviously dominated his thinking on a more sort of national scale when it comes towards politics and society in the United States.
	In 2012, there was a lot of speculation in the press that he would run for the presidency because of a initiative he wanted to push through Starbucks called Come Together, because he would ask baristas to write Come Together on People Starbucks orders.
	And this foreshadowed a lot of his activism going on into the future.
	After watching many interviews with him and reading many articles, man, I really do come away with the impression that he is very concerned about the United States and the social cohesion of the country.
	And that's something that he personally is intent on, well, trying to help stitch back together.
	But of course, the problem is he is an out-of-touch boomer billionaire.
	And so all the good intentions in the world don't really save his attempts at campaigns from being universally hated.
	His 2012 Come Together campaign was fairly innocuous.
	calls for bipartisanship and social unity.
	It's hard to condemn those, but in 2015 he decided to take it up a notch and add an extra dimension into these when he started the hashtag race together Starbucks campaign, where he encouraged his baristas to write hashtag race together on people Starbucks orders so the baristas and the customer could have a nice friendly chit chat in the store about race Which nobody wanted to do.
	What if we were to write race together on every Starbucks cup and that facilitated a conversation between you and our customers?
	And if a customer asks you what this is, Try and engage in the discussion that we have problems in this country with regard to race and racial inequality.
	As Business Insider reported, critics branded it as insensitive and tone deaf, and it was mercilessly lampooned on late night TV.
	Starbucks head of communications was forced to temporarily suspend their own Twitter account following a barrage of attacks, which only further frustrated the critics.
	Many people apparently questioned how the idea could have ever gotten past the boardroom at a Fortune 500 company, and the answer was because the idea came from Howard Schultz himself.
	According to people in the know, Schultz began exploring ways for the company to weigh in on race as late as 2014.
	According to Carr who interviewed several Starbucks executives including Schultz for the story, Schultz said he couldn't get his mind off the racial protests dominating the national headlines in the wake of the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown.
	Schultz said, if we keep going about our business and ringing the Starbucks register every day, then I think in a sense we're part of the problem.
	Schultz had shared his ideas at a board meeting in January 2015 and nobody really liked it.
	So without doing any kind of market research at all, Howard Schultz pulled the trigger, as it were.
	And so Starbucks Race Together campaign began.
	The campaign backfired almost instantly, but Schultz was unrepentant.
	He said, we made a tactical mistake.
	So what?
	We're moving forward.
	In January 2019, Howard Schultz actually released a book in which he discussed the failure of the Race Together campaign.
	He admits that it was ultimately his decision to have baristas write Race Together on Cups and said that Starbucks was called tone deaf and patronizing.
	We were accused of overstepping acceptable bounds for a corporation, seizing upon a moment of national crisis to promote our brand and preaching through the company megaphone.
	I actually think it's really unfair to accuse Schultz of trying to promote Starbucks brand through this controversy.
	It's not that he was trying to make Starbucks a more successful company.
	Starbucks was already a massively successful company.
	It made him a billionaire.
	He wasn't worried about money.
	He was worried about, well, the social fabric of the United States.
	And I think that he thought, in good faith, that he could do something to help it.
	Of course, he didn't think that people may have considered that perhaps it wasn't Starbucks' place to start having conversations about race in their stores and preaching through the mouthpiece of a barista.
	Which is kind of ironic, given that I bet that Starbucks baristas hold per capita the highest number of African studies degrees in all of human history.
	But then I guess they should have learned code.
	But okay, the Race Together campaign didn't work, but that's not going to stop Howard from trying to make a positive impact on the world.
	And when Donald Trump says that he's going to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, Howard Schultz replied by saying, I'm going to hire 10,000 Syrian refugees.
	There was a slight problem with this for Howard though, as in 2017, the United States only accepted 44 Syrian refugees, of a total of around 3,000 from the region in its entirety.
	So Howard was obviously going to have to hire these refugees in Europe.
	But Howard wasn't done there.
	In October 2017, he produced a video series called Upstanders, which was about the lives of ordinary Americans, at least from his perspective, or I guess the perspective of Starbucks.
	But just a short clip from one of the interviews about this goes to show what I mean when I say he really isn't a bad person.
	He doesn't operate with ill intent.
	In fact, he's very committed to the idea of the American dream and wants to make that global.
	Upstanders is produced by Howard Schultz, who is also executive chairman of Starbucks, and we're happy to welcome back to the table.
	Good morning, Howard.
	Thank you, Nora.
	Hi, Charles.
	Morning.
	Good morning.
	So this second series features stories from all across the country.
	What's the goal?
	I mean, the goal is there's a better side to America than what's coming out of Washington.
	Those stories are not being told.
	Upstanders won that season.
	60 million people viewed that series.
	I think it's even more relevant today.
	I think the sense of humanity, compassion, empathy that's going on in every city and every town around the country has to be told.
	And we had so many stories.
	We picked 11, we could have had a thousand.
	And I think people are longing for truth, authenticity.
	You just talked about millennials.
	It's an altruistic generation.
	They want to hear stories like this.
	And I think we have a false narrative in America, which is coming out of Washington, which is not the American story, not the promise of America.
	And Howard Schultz's commitment to the American dream is probably one of the reasons that he's breaking with the Democratic Party and their embrace of radical leftist politics under the leadership of Red Cortez.
	He's not a socialist.
	He's not an anti-capitalist.
	He doesn't hate the United States.
	He doesn't want the United States to be a guilt-ridden, self-loathing society.
	He actually has a really positive vision for it, and he sees it in a really positive way.
	And then in 2018, two black men and a Jewish businessman went into a Philadelphia Starbucks to have a meeting about property.
	They apparently decided not to order any drinks.
	And when asked to either order drinks or leave, the men refused.
	And the cops were called and they were arrested for trespassing, which Starbucks was completely within its right to do.
	However, the men were black.
	And you know what that means?
	Protesters swarmed a Starbucks in Philadelphia Sunday following the controversial arrests of two black men.
	Meg Oliver has more on this.
	Dozens of protesters showed up to this Philadelphia Starbucks Sunday after two black men were arrested inside late last week.
	Camille Himes is Starbucks Vice President of Operations.
	We know that we have work to do.
	We have worked very closely with the community here in Philadelphia.
	It literally breaks my heart.
	Lauren Wimmer, who initially represented the men, would not identify them.
	She says they were waiting for this man, Andrew Yaffe, to arrive for a business meeting.
	Where did they get called for?
	There are two black guys in here.
	Wimmer says the men were in Starbucks for less than 15 minutes.
	These guys were doing what people do every single day.
	They were having a meeting and they were undoubtedly singled out because of their race.
	During that time, police say the men attempted to use the restroom without buying anything, which is against Starbucks policy.
	When an employee asked them to leave, they refused and she called 911.
	When they were arrested, they were taken out essentially without incident.
	There was no harm done to them.
	Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross went on Facebook Live insisting his officers did nothing wrong.
	And three different occasions, the officers asked the males politely to leave the location because they were being asked to leave by employees because they were trespassing.
	Instead, the males continued to refuse.
	Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson released a statement apologizing to the men, saying, Starbucks stands firmly against discrimination or racial profiling.
	So Starbucks had done absolutely nothing wrong.
	The Philadelphia police had done absolutely nothing wrong.
	But that didn't matter because Starbucks apologised anyway.
	And despite not being the CEO anymore, he stepped down in 2017 to become an executive chairman with exactly the same salary.
	Howard Schultz said that he felt deeply ashamed of what had happened.
	Schultz said he was embarrassed by the recent accusations of racial profiling in the company's US cafes and announced that Starbucks was going to close all its US stores on the 29th of May that year for company-wide racial bias training.
	I think what occurred was reprehensible at every single level, he told CBS News.
	The announcement we made yesterday about closing our stores, 8,000 stores closed, to do significant training with our people is just the beginning of what we will do to transform the way we do business and educate our people on unconscious bias.
	There's no doubt in my mind that the reason the police were called was because these men were African American, Schultz said.
	That's not who Starbucks is.
	So naturally, Starbucks and the two black men who were arrested reached an agreement, which involved giving them $200,000.
	Because why not?
	It's very difficult to envisage a situation where I, as a white man, could trespass in a Starbucks, get arrested, and then be given a small fortune, but I'm going to go get my shoe polish.
	I know, I'm going to block you.
	And ever good to their word, Starbucks closed 8,000 North American stores on the 29th of May 2018 to go through this implicit racial bias training.
	175,000 employees were subject to videos like this.
	Discrimination against African Americans in public spaces has a long history.
	In the 1960s, black and white students trying to desegregate buses were firebombed.
	Black patrons were routinely denied service in restaurants and hotels.
	The right to be respected in public spaces was at the heart of the civil rights movement.
	Because there are two black guys sitting here meeting.
	Yes, I didn't have black guys.
	Well, what did they do?
	So the question was, was the racial bias training effective?
	Well, the employees didn't think so.
	According to Jason, the only African-American employee at a Hollywood-based Starbucks, he found that despite the fact that the videos featured the perspectives of people of colour, and particularly African Americans, Jason thought, there were times where I felt that they missed the mark.
	It seems like a lot of talking from the videos and not enough discussion from us.
	Helpful?
	I don't know.
	It kind of reaffirms things I know already.
	And apparently this was a common theme among the employees.
	It's not that they thought it was offensive or anything like that, but it was just regurgitating the same kind of, well, propaganda about the racial history of the United States that we're all familiar with and condemn.
	So instead of actually doing anything to reduce racial bias, all it really did is reconfirm to the black people working for Starbucks that they were indeed different to the other people working there.
	Howard Schultz and his finely crafted propaganda movies were going to show them how.
	But again, I want to stress, it's not because Howard Schultz is a bad guy, it's because he's wildly out of touch.
	But it's not just the regular person that Howard Schultz is out of touch from, he's also out of touch from, well, his political peers.
	So when he announced his candidacy for the president of the United States as a centrist independent, I couldn't help but smirk slightly at the idea of him being a centrist.
	And the fact that he was an independent just opened him up to attacks from all sides.
	In an op-ed for USA Today, he wrote, Imagine if our country were more united, if we were stronger, safer, more respected, fair and compassionate and prosperous.
	Well, we don't have to imagine that, Howard, because you do unite America against you repeatedly for years in everything that you've done.
	The New York Times criticized him for not understanding American history, but the best bit was the byline on this article.
	The most effective third-party presidential candidates were polarizers, not centrists.
	Slow down their New York Times.
	Centrists can be polarizing too.
	And in fact, as New York magazine puts it, and I tell you what, this is so unbelievably mean.
	Howard Schultz may be even more disingenuous than Donald Trump.
	How on earth can Howard Schultz, a democratic, left-leaning, centrist, liberal, Jewish billionaire, be considered to be worse than the God Emperor?
	I love calling Trump the fucking God Emperor.
	I do it all the time.
	Incredibly unfair characterization of him, I would call that.
	But New York magazine do actually recognize that Schultz does deserve credit for bringing the country together, if only in its bipartisan detestation of him.
	But to characterize Howard Schultz as being disingenuous is just really not on.
	He is completely sincere in what he says when he says that he believes in the American dream and compassion and he is concerned about the lives of regular Americans.
	Because I really think that he is.
	He's not disingenuous, he's just out of touch.
	But just because he's out of touch doesn't mean that he isn't open to criticism.
	As The Guardian reported, he even admits that he's managed to cause hate and anger with just the talk of his 2020 run.
	Democrats naturally believe that he's going to split the vote because he's going to be an independent.
	And Trump was on Twitter challenging him to run because he doesn't have the guts.
	Howard Schultz doesn't have the guts to run for president.
	Watched him on 60 Minutes last night and I agree with him that he's not the smartest person.
	Besides, America already has that.
	I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower.
	Fucking bird.
	Oh, what a dick.
	The point of all this is to show that Howard Schultz is very far to the left when it comes to social issues, but he is quite centrist when it comes to his political and economic policies.
	The problem is, he's just not popular.
	He doesn't have his finger on the pulse.
	He's seeing things from the outside.
	He is seeing things through the lens of Starbucks, just numbers coming in and numbers going out.
	And from that, he is extrapolating people's intentions, their motives, their beliefs, their desires, and their dreams.
	And the thing is, it's not that he's not listening.
	He's listening in places like New York and Los Angeles.
	He's not going out into the heartlands of the country and actually talking to the real people who are actually voting for people like Donald Trump.
	He doesn't understand their motivations.
	He doesn't understand what drives them.
	But he does have far-left activists constantly speaking into his ear and he is well-intentioned.

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