Howard Schultz: Is he a ringer for the Republic Fascists Billionaires??

Seattle Sonics fans know the real Howard Schultz: a feckless and inept defender of billionaires!

By David Neiwert

"Howard Schultz wants to be president. But the people who experienced his brand of civic leadership previously—the residents of Seattle, and particularly the people who supported the NBA team he once owned, the SuperSonics—can tell you exactly why he never should earn a single vote, let alone win any election.

That’s because we learned, over the five years or so that Schultz owned the Sonics, that he is a feckless egotist who has no sense of civic responsibility in any real regard, his honeyed lip service notwithstanding. What we really learned is that Schultz’s only sense of real obligation is to his fellow billionaires.

Schultz would make a fine Republican candidate, since the GOP has clearly abandoned any pretense of civic responsibility. But no Democrat should ever consider voting for the man, not even for dog catcher.

It’s not a secret that those Sonics are now the Oklahoma City Thunder. A broad swath of the public has the perception that this occurred because of a lack of fan support. That is not what happened. The Sonics had amazingly loyal fans before Schultz bought them and during his tenure; even in the worst years, when the team sucked badly, they still averaged 15,000-plus fans per game in a facility that seated only 17,000. (A longtime season-ticket-holder, I was one of them.)

No, what happened is that Howard Schultz got his nose out of joint when the city failed to bow and scrape to the wealthy. Seattle lost the Sonics over luxury boxes.

Schultz, the Starbucks CEO at the time, bought the Sonics from billboard magnate Barry Ackerley in 2001. At first, everything was hunky-dory, even if the team’s earlier trade of Shawn Kemp for Vin Baker was turning into a disaster. Schultz spoke warmly of owning the team as a public trust and seemed like he would be a superb local owner.

But it also soon became obvious that, even though he really didn’t know anything about basketball, Schultz believed he did, and began making player moves accordingly. He had decided that Gary Payton, the team’s remaining superstar from its mid-‘90s heyday, was a selfish team player. So he traded him away to Milwaukee.

That was nothing, however, compared to the problems he encountered regarding the team’s profitability. Because the team’s winning record had gone south, and it was pulling in both fewer fans and lower revenues from playoff and television shares, the Sonics were losing money on an annual basis, even as other teams with new stadiums were raking it in. Seattle’s Coliseum had undergone a wholesale $75 million renovation from 1993 to 1995 (the team played the ’94-95 season in the Tacoma Dome), paid for with city bonds and future revenues, at the conclusion of which NBA Commissioner David Stern had proudly told the city that, even though it was the league’s smallest facility, it could be satisfied with its “model arena,” and that it would be good for the team for the foreseeable future.

The city was still paying for that renovation—along with a new football stadium for the Seahawks and a new baseball stadium for the Mariners—when Schultz decided in early 2006 that he wanted a brand-new arena too. The problem, he claimed, was that the NBA’s economics had changed dramatically in the years after the renovation, and that it was now impossible for teams to compete without having large luxury-box sections paid for by billionaires and large corporations.

He went public with this complaint four days before the Seahawks played in their first-ever Super Bowl. He threatened to sell the Sonics or move them out of town if the city didn’t heed his demands. It went over like a turd in a punchbowl.

City fathers basically told him to get in line, and that it would be a long time before they could get around to financing a new arena. So in July, he announced that he had sold the team to a group of investors from Oklahoma City, headed up by oil barons Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon.

It was well-known that these men had been working assiduously to bring an NBA team to Oklahoma City. So everyone in Seattle assumed that they had bought the Sonics with the intention of moving them, their protestations that they intended to make a “good-faith” effort to keep the team in Seattle notwithstanding. Everyone except Schultz—who insisted he believed them, and continued to persist in that belief right up to the point, two years later, that they in fact moved the Sonics out of town. Schultz still claims he had no idea that Bennett and co. would spirit the team away. That would make him the most naive man in America, since no one else (especially not in Seattle) believed the Oklahomans.

With good reason: In an interview with an Oklahoma newspaper, McClendon said, “We didn’t buy the team to keep it in Seattle, we hoped to come here. We know it’s a little more difficult financially here in Oklahoma City, but we think it’s great for the community and if we could break even we’d be thrilled.” Bennett tried to walk the comments back, claiming that he had never, ever talked with his co-investors about plans to move the Sonics, but McClendon wound up saddled with a $250,000 fine imposed by David Stern. Apparently the fine was not for lying to everyone, but for letting the cat out of the bag: A few months earlier, Bennett had been emailing his co-investors about his intent to try to force the team to move to Oklahoma for the 2007 season: "I am a man possessed! Will do everything we can. Thanks for hanging with me boys, the game is getting started!"

When those emails were disclosed, and it became apparent to everyone that Bennett and co. had been lying not just to the public, but also to David Stern, the NBA commissioner was utterly unbothered: “I haven’t studied them but my sense of it was that Clay, as the managing partner and the driving force of the group, was operating in good faith under the agreement that had been made with [previous owner] Howard Schultz,” he told reporters.

Bennett finally presented his grand arena plan to the Seattle public later that year: a $500 million palace to be built in the less-than-ideal suburb of Renton, right next to the worst freeway intersection traffic-wise in the entire state. And his group would only contribute $100 million of that, at the very most. He presented this plan to the state legislature as an ultimatum: Approve it, or the team will move.

Lawmakers laughed the proposal out of Olympia. Bennett announced the team would be moving to Oklahoma two days later. In April 2008, the NBA approved the move. And the Sonics were gone.

Schultz attempted to make a few lame, last-minute legal maneuvers to reel the whole disaster back in, but folded his tent in short order. In the ensuing years, he would refuse to address the matter. He told one interviewer that he wasn’t “there to talk basketball.” He told another interviewer that his ownership experience had been “a nightmare,” saying that the ethos of the league “was inconsistent with my value system.” At a book-signing event where he was questioned publicly about it, he refused to answer and had security remove the interlocutor.

Ah, but now he has decided to come clean, amid his newly announced consideration of a run for the American presidency. In his new book, From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America, Schultz admits that he betrayed the public trust and apologizes for it. But he does it in a way that makes clear that he really hasn’t learned the core underlying lesson: namely, that his betrayal of Seattle was done on behalf of protecting his fellow billionaires, and that the effect of his behavior had been to advance the cause of the wealthy.

Indeed, that was the whole upshot of the Sonics move. It was not just about Seattle. It was about every other city that hosted an NBA team. David Stern and the NBA were determined, once and for all, to shatter the public’s illusion that the teams belonged to the communities that hosted and fostered them. To establish, irrevocably, that the teams belong to their billionaire owners, and no one else. And if those cities don’t bow to the demands and whims of those owners, they will lose their teams.

Schultz blames it all on his misguided hope that selling the team to outsiders would bring the Seattle city fathers to heel. No one in Seattle has been even remotely impressed.

Nor should any voter in America be. It’s been clear, ever since his announcement that he’s considering an independent run for the presidency, that he actually learned nothing from the whole affair, at least nothing of any value for American voters looking to revive American democracy in the wake of the ongoing disaster that is Donald Trump.

He told reporters he was driven to consider a candidacy by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion of imposing a 70 percent marginal-gains tax. When asked who his favorite Democratic president of the past 50 years was, he replied: “FDR.” (Roosevelt, of course, was president 74 years ago, and his marginal-tax rates were north of 80 percent.) He couldn’t answer a question about how much a box of Cheerios costs, and got angry that he was asked. He described efforts by Democrats like Elizabeth Warren to reduce the nation’s massive income inequality as “un-American.”

Oh, and speaking of un-American: Schultz, it has emerged, only votes when he feels like it. Out of 38 elections in Washington state, he has only voted 11 times.

As Ocasio-Cortez tartly noted: “Why don’t people ever tell billionaires who want to run for President that they need to ‘work their way up’ or that ‘maybe they should start with city council first’?”

We currently have a president who has manifested clearly that he is a rich man whose idea of civic responsibility is to have everyone in the nation line up to kiss his feet. We really don’t need another one.

URL: [dailykos.com]