The establishment needs a business as usual candidate instead of the thinly disguised wannabe socialists they're getting. The billionaires, Schultz, Bloomberg, and whatever collection of Silicon Valley clowns, with egos that are contemplating getting in the race need to figure out if they can win the dem primaries running to the right of Warren and Harris and Sanders or if an independent run is a better play.

I don't think a third party run wins. The real question is who loses the most votes in the states that will decide the election. Bloomberg and general could be scary.

I'm not sure I agree. Third party candidates tend to lose either because they come off as being kinda nuts (Perot, for example) or because they come off as being the "lite" option. We hire an Executive to act decisively.

As for who gets the votes siphoned off - Schultz would be a liberal democrat "lite", and the alternatives are a bunch of little donkeys that don't particularly impress. I think Schultz would cost the Dems a lot more votes than the Republicans. If that weren't the case, the RINOs and never-Trumpers would have done a lot better than they have in recent years.

I saw his interview on 60 Minutes. I’m still not sure what his beef is with the Democrats. I don’t see him as Liberal Dem “Lite” at all, he seems to check all the boxes of the far left. As an Independent, he doesn’t scare me, as a Party nominee backed by his billions, he does.

Staying positive though, assuming he follows through and runs Independent, he helps President Trump be re-elected, which certainly appeared to be a big worry for the CBS News guy (Scott Pelley) who interviewed him.

^^^ Good assessment, TMats.

Where Howard Schultz disagrees with the other Democrats is that he alone (on that side) seems to realize that our debt, and adding to it, has become unsustainable.

Bloomberg could buy and sell both Trump and Schultz at the same time. He could drive the national conversation by virtue of the fact that he can spend any amount of money he needs to do so.

He can also show both experience and success in running NYC. And yes, I know NYC is not popular here, but between him and Giuliani, NYC is a vastly better place than it was before them. While Giuliani did a lot of the heavy lifting as far a crime control. Bloomberg successfully drove the economy up. Specifically, he moved the NYC economy to be less dependent on Wall Street, and was key in starting the tech boom the city is having now. This is as opposed to Schultz, who has no government experience at all.

Would he play well in middle America? I think that depends if middle America has gotten sick of Trump yet. He'd certainly play better then Kamala Harris or Fauxahontas. I don't think he'd play any worse than Schultz, and probably better.

I see an opening for an independent in 2020, because Trump is pulling the hard right, but I don't see him pulling much beyond that. The Dems are looking to go hard left. I think they'll be a lot of votes who want neither. If there was no viable third party a lot of those would just stay home. But if either Schultz or Bloomberg can get them out and voting, they could turn the election. But that's going to take a lot of money, and Bloomberg has much more of it than Schultz (or Trump for that matter.)

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I figured Bloomberg would do this.

Bloomberg knows he hasn't got a prayer, his lifestyle would take a radical dive, and that he has absolutely no chance of driving "the national conversation" in any particular direction. Schultz is still dumb enough to listen to his own ego and hasn't figured all that out yet.
.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
Bloomberg could buy and sell both Trump and Schultz at the same time. He could drive the national conversation by virtue of the fact that he can spend any amount of money he needs to do so.

He can also show both experience and success in running NYC. And yes, I know NYC is not popular here, but between him and Giuliani, NYC is a vastly better place than it was before them. While Giuliani did a lot of the heavy lifting as far a crime control. Bloomberg successfully drove the economy up. Specifically, he moved the NYC economy to be less dependent on Wall Street, and was key in starting the tech boom the city is having now. This is as opposed to Schultz, who has no government experience at all.

Would he play well in middle America? I think that depends if middle America has gotten sick of Trump yet. He'd certainly play better then Kamala Harris or Fauxahontas. I don't think he'd play any worse than Schultz, and probably better.

I see an opening for an independent in 2020, because Trump is pulling the hard right, but I don't see him pulling much beyond that. The Dems are looking to go hard left. I think they'll be a lot of votes who want neither. If there was no viable third party a lot of those would just stay home. But if either Schultz or Bloomberg can get them out and voting, they could turn the election. But that's going to take a lot of money, and Bloomberg has much more of it than Schultz (or Trump for that matter.)

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I figured Bloomberg would do this.

Bloomberg knows he hasn't got a prayer, his lifestyle would take a radical dive, and that he has absolutely no chance of driving "the national conversation" in any particular direction. Schultz is still dumb enough to listen to his own ego and hasn't figured all that out yet.
.

Bloomberg announced today that he is not running.


https://twitter.com/MikeBloomb.../1089941001161113602

A person with his resume and money can demand any ransom from the Dems not to run as an Independent and they'd fall all over themselves to pay it. He may not actually have his sights set on the highest office right now.

Perhaps we'll see him run for a more modest post in the future with full backing by the Dems.

OK, let's review:
1. Successful Capitalist
2. Caucasian
3. Male
Somehow, that just isn't in vogue with todays dems. From my viewpoint, he appears to me to have made a cubic buttload of money peddling an image rather than a product (it's about spoiling yourself with an indulgence: overpriced, lousy tasting coffee).
He sounds just perfect. Bring it.

Likely because Schultz beat him to the punch (and likely why Schultz announced this early.)

quote:

Originally posted by BamaJeepster:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
Bloomberg could buy and sell both Trump and Schultz at the same time. He could drive the national conversation by virtue of the fact that he can spend any amount of money he needs to do so.

He can also show both experience and success in running NYC. And yes, I know NYC is not popular here, but between him and Giuliani, NYC is a vastly better place than it was before them. While Giuliani did a lot of the heavy lifting as far a crime control. Bloomberg successfully drove the economy up. Specifically, he moved the NYC economy to be less dependent on Wall Street, and was key in starting the tech boom the city is having now. This is as opposed to Schultz, who has no government experience at all.

Would he play well in middle America? I think that depends if middle America has gotten sick of Trump yet. He'd certainly play better then Kamala Harris or Fauxahontas. I don't think he'd play any worse than Schultz, and probably better.

I see an opening for an independent in 2020, because Trump is pulling the hard right, but I don't see him pulling much beyond that. The Dems are looking to go hard left. I think they'll be a lot of votes who want neither. If there was no viable third party a lot of those would just stay home. But if either Schultz or Bloomberg can get them out and voting, they could turn the election. But that's going to take a lot of money, and Bloomberg has much more of it than Schultz (or Trump for that matter.)

quote:

Originally posted by Il Cattivo:

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I figured Bloomberg would do this.

Bloomberg knows he hasn't got a prayer, his lifestyle would take a radical dive, and that he has absolutely no chance of driving "the national conversation" in any particular direction. Schultz is still dumb enough to listen to his own ego and hasn't figured all that out yet.
.

Bloomberg announced today that he is not running.


https://twitter.com/MikeBloomb.../1089941001161113602

I hate the way they make him look all high and mighty. If my company had a 5,000% profit margin, I could do a lot more too. Let's see him do all that when his margin is a couple of points.

And LOL, Trump is trolling him hoping he can bait him to run as an independent.

TMats, he doesn't really have a beef with the Democrats. He's running as an independent so that he doesn't get lost in the crowd and he's trying to position himself as being if not pro-buisness then at least not entirely anti-buisness.

AITG raises another point - could a straight white guy from an at least notionally buisness background really win a Dem primary? Hell, that's also why I think he'll drain off votes from the Dems from the buisness community and from at least some portion of the Hillary supporters.

As for making him look high and mighty, well, that's as close as the media's ever gonna get to hedging its bets and pretending to be nonpartisan while still burnishing its PC credentials.

This guy's a real fucking winner.
---------------------------------

Starbucks’ Howard Schultz: America Exists for Immigrants, Not Americans

Starbucks investor Howard Schultz wants to get elected president and to amnesty at least 11 million illegal migrants in the United States.
But his justification for the amnesty includes no rules or principles that would prevent his huge amnesty from expanding into an open-borders policy which would benefit investors at the expense of white-collar and blue-collar Americans, said Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Schultz told 60 Minutes:

The country, first and foremost, is based on humanity, fairness, goodness. We have been for 200 plus years a country of immigrants, and for the 11 million people here, unauthorized, there should be a fair and equitable way for them to get in line, pay the taxes, pay a fee and become citizens of the United States.

“What I hear is not only platitudes about immigration and cliches about an amnesty being earned … but a complete ignorance and disregard for the effects on Americans of unlimited immigration,” said Vaughan.

Shultz’s statement suggests that “there is no such thing as an American, and that America is just a collection of anyone who wants to come, rather than a nation with laws and unique culture … He is speaking as if the concept of an American nation is obsolete or never was there to begin with.”

Shultz also seems to think that Americans have nothing to say about immigration, she said. His statement “is all about the immigrants, and not about what is the best policy for our country.” For Schultz, “there is just no downside to unlimited immigration.”

The perspective is common among bankers and investors, such as Schultz, because they gain economically when the federal government imports welfare-aided consumers and cheap workers. Overall, investors tend to prioritize economic growth above Americans’ concerns about wages and salaries, crime and real estate costs, civic harmony, and government priorities.

For example, Politico posted a January 28 article about the political priorities of the nation’s leading bankers who describe themselves as “centrists” even as they push for more cheap labor migration:

“I’m a socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House,” said the CEO of one of the nation’s largest banks, who, like a dozen other executives interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name for fear of angering a volatile president. “Personally, I’d love to see [billionaire investor Mike] Bloomberg run and get the nomination. I’ve just never thought he could get the nomination the way the primary process works.”

Across Wall Street and more in executive suites across the nation, corporate titans are trying to figure out how to navigate the 2020 presidential election. While some executives remain supportive of Trump — especially in industries like energy given the president’s approach to climate change — many recoil at his chaotic approach to governance and harsh approach to trade and immigration …

After mentioning Bloomberg, Wall Street executives who want Trump out list a consistent roster of appealing nominees that includes former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California. Others meriting mention: former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, though few rally know his positions.

Schultz also co-founded a San Francisco investment fund called Maveron which specializes in consumer-related companies:

Our companies marry disruptive tech with soulful, beloved brands into an unstoppable and unforgettable consumer experience. Because middlemen are so 20th century.

Schultz’s investments would gain if the government amnesties illegals and imports additional consumers and workers.

But the nation needs to reduce the current level of immigration so that Americans can rebuild their shared culture, said Vaughan. The current demographic situation is “unprecedented.”

We’ve had so many years and decades of constantly increasing immigration without a period of low immigration that enables the country to absorb immigrants and have them become Americans.

The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland.

https://www.breitbart.com/immi...rants-not-americans/

The guy gave a talk somewhere yesterday after the 60 Minutes interview and was nearly heckled into silence. Looks like Shumer-Pelosi-Feinstein have already mobilized the anti-Kavanaugh mob against him .

quote:

Originally posted by esdunbar:
I hate the way they make him look all high and mighty. If my company had a 5,000% profit margin, I could do a lot more too. Let's see him do all that when his margin is a couple of points.

And LOL, Trump is trolling him hoping he can bait him to run as an independent.

He is running on a balanced budget, reducing entitlements platform. Those concepts will appeal to the reluctant Trump voter. Be careful what you wish for!

You gotta love a billionaire businessman saying another billionaire businessman is "unqualified" to be president.

Kettle, meet pot.

Why Starbucks' Howard Schultz Couldn't Run As A Democrat

Democrats are worrying about former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz running as an independent for president in 2020. They say it will only help President Trump. But the only reason this lifelong Democrat is thinking about an independent bid is because the Democratic party has moved so far to the left.

As soon as Schultz stepped down from his perch at Starbucks last June, speculation arose about his running as a Democrat in 2020. But then, during an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Box" around that time, Schultz had this to say:

"It concerns me that so many voices within the Democratic Party are going so far to the left. I say to myself, 'How are we going to pay for these things,' in terms of things like single payer (and) people espousing the fact that the government is going to give everyone a job."
Dems Are Unrealistic

"I don't think that's realistic," he said. Then he added: "I think we got to get away from these falsehoods and start talking about the truth and not false promises."

Schultz went on to say that the greatest threat domestically to the country is "this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations. The only way we're going to get out of that is we've got to grow the economy, in my view, 4% or greater. And then we have to go after entitlements."

To today's Democrats, Schultz must sound like an alien invader.

He's asking how to pay for universal health care and guaranteed jobs? Everyone knows it's by taxing rich people like Schultz. He wants to "go after" entitlements? The party line is to expand all of them. He calls national debt the "greatest threat"? The official position of the Democratic Party is that the greatest threat we face is global warming.

And 4% economic growth? When President Trump promised to deliver growth rates that high, Democrats called him crazy.

But Schultz is absolutely right about his fellow Democrats. As we have pointed out many times in this space, the Democratic Party has veered to the extreme left in recent years. So far, in fact, that it is now embracing an economic agenda that is to the left of any other industrialized nation — including China.

Top Democrats have, for example, bear-hugged Bernie Sanders' radical "Medicare for all" plan, which promises "free" government-provided health care benefits more generous than any other nation, and that would cost trillions of dollars a year.

The party's most recent fascination is with "guaranteed jobs," an idea straight out of the Soviet Union's constitution that would cost upward of $750 billion a year.

And that's to say nothing of the party's promise of free college, student loan forgiveness and various other big ticket items.

As we noted in this space recently, Sanders, a self-described socialist who nearly stole the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton, "seems to have opened the way for the mainstreaming of socialism in the Democratic Party."

In fact, Hillary Clinton recently tried to pin her troubles in the 2016 Democratic primaries on the fact that she was perceived as — gasp — "a capitalist."

It's not just party leaders who've veered far to the left, but the Democratic base itself. A survey of 1,000 likely Democratic voters taken before the 2016 elections found that nearly 60% said socialism would be great for America. A Pew Research Center report out last year found that while the center of the Republican Party shifted slightly to the right between 1994 and 2017, the center for Democrats moved sharply to the left.
Pre-emptive Strikes

So, it should not come as a surprise that, instead of listening to the more practical-minded Schultz, Democrats immediately tried to force him off the stage.

Helaine Olen, writing in the Washington Post, acknowledges that Schultz was a good liberal when he headed Starbucks. He won kudos for things like providing health benefits to part-time workers, defending gay marriage, offering financial aid for college, and for standing up to Trump on immigration.

But she goes on to complain that Schultz's "politics are not exactly in sync with the Democratic Party today" and says he "shouldn't run for president."

The Daily Beast says Schultz's resume "seems inherently out of step with a party in which Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Corey Booker, Kamala Harris are luminaries" and that "no one is excited" about him running for president.

Eric Levitz, writing in New York magazine, goes so far as to say that Schulz's combination of socially liberal and what Levitz calls "fiscally conservative" views "put him on the radical fringe in the United States." He says Democrats "must reject" Schultz's "ideology."
Abandoning Democrats

So Schultz, realizing he has no future as a Democrat, announced on "60 Minutes" over the weekend that he's "seriously thinking of running for president....as a centrist independent, outside of the two-party system."

"Both parties," he said, "are consistently not doing what's necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged, every single day, in revenge politics."

That has Democrats starting to worry that a Schultz run could hurt Democratic chances in 2020. Julian Castro, one of several left-liberal Democrats who've already announced plans to run in 2020, complained on CNN that "it would provide Donald Trump with his best hope of getting re-elected."

Maybe Castro and Co. should be focused more on their party's lurch into the left-wing fringes, which has made it impossible for moderate Democrats like Schultz to find any home there.

Editor's note: This is an updated version of an editorial than originally ran in June 2018.

https://www.investors.com/poli...atic-2020-elections/

When it comes time to really commit, I think Schultz will run as a democratic or not run at all. He won’t take a chance on being the guy that splits the vote and puts Trump back in the White House. He’s also a white businessman. That kind of candidate is repulsive to today’s millennial communist.

quote:

When it comes time to really commit, I think Schultz will run as a democratic or not run at all.

You may be right. He may decide not to run at all.... but he can't win the Dem. nomination. The Dem. base is way too far to the left to vote for Schultz. He knows that, as he has basically admitted in the IBD article above.

I don't like the man, but he is dead right about the national debt. That will eventually take us down unless we do something about it.

^^^ Every effective lie has a grain of truth. Every demagogue wins by speaking to actual suffering. This is yet another reason why the GOP has screwed the pooch by not going after the national debt - the Repubs should never have left that issue up for grabs.

quote:

Originally posted by NK402:
The guy gave a talk somewhere yesterday after the 60 Minutes interview and was nearly heckled into silence. Looks like Shumer-Pelosi-Feinstein have already mobilized the anti-Kavanaugh mob against him .

A little while ago there was a pissing war in the press and the social media between the Bernie Bros and the 'Bater Hos. Make no mistake; all the little donkeys have their knives out and they're eager to use them on each other. Not only does that make for good entertainment value on the other side, it may make for fissures that last for years and years and years. Will they all pull together eventually? Sure, but it'll be an exercise in "me too" rather than the type of concerted team effort that can move mountains that aren't already disposed to move.

quote:

'How are we going to pay for these things'

Can you smell...triangulation? It's not just a political strategy anymore, it's been proven to be great marketing.