Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, says 150 CEOs have heeded his call to withhold campaign contributions from politicians of both parties, He stressed that this isn’t aimed at President Barack Obama, said the country sorely needs bipartisan cooperation and gave his ideas — which don’t have a talk show political culture tone to them as do most politician’s polarizing comments these days — on the economy.
Here are a few tidbits from the show transcript:
His prescription for economic recovery:
FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST “FAREED ZAKARIA GPS”: The president is out there with a jobs plan…on the Republican side, you have people saying what you need more than anything else is to cut government spending…Which of them would you prefer to see?
HOWARD SCHULTZ, CEO, STARBUCKS: …It’s not one versus the other. It is we need cooperation and we need co-authorship. We need a combination of both. Let me take a different tack if I can. In the mid-1940s, something was created. It was significant, it was innovative, it was bold and it was courageous. It was the Marshall Plan. Now let’s take a step back.
Can you imagine the situation today where the Marshall Plan would have any opportunity whatsoever in this existing political climate to succeed? And the answer, unequivocally, is no. I would suggest that our problems, domestically, are as great as the problems were when the Marshall Plan and President Truman convinced America and a Republican Congress this was the right thing to do.
We need a domestic agenda. And we need a forcing function that addresses the significant problems and, as Tom Friedman said in his book, we need truth-telling, once and for all. Tell us the truth. We don’t have a $14 trillion deficit. It’s $47 trillion, and it’s things like that. Unemployment in American is not 9.1 percent when you’re an African-American or you’re Hispanic. There’s no access to credit for small businesses.
On why he feels people should withhold 2012 campaign contributions:
ZAKARIA: You have made this appeal that you want people to withhold campaign contributions.
SCHULTZ: I want to suspend contributions because I don’t believe that writing a check, based on a $4 billion election cycle in 2008 and an estimated $5.5 billion in 2012 is what we should be doing. Instead, I want to send this powerful signal to Washington that I and other like-minded CEOs, now 150 of us, are dissatisfied with the status quo. And we are begging you to understand that we need solutions to significant problems.
And I also think businesses and corporations — and this is where I feel differently than some of my brethren — we have a deep responsibility as well. And we have to do our part. We have to invest in the economy and we have to create a sense of optimism that we still believe in America. America’s best days are ahead of us, and we believe that investing in America, despite the landscape and all the information is still the right thing to do.
GO HERE to read the entire transcript.
Schultz gives his opinion of Obama (we need “big, bold ideas” and “transformation” that “comes from leadership. We’re in a crisis.”:
His views on corporate and consumer confidence:
Schultz’s comments will be of particular interest to moderate and independent voters. Many will share his views on the problems and what’s needed to fix them — fixes seemingly beyond the ability of broken governnment, mega partisanship and ideological polarization.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.