Food Moguls Lobby For Campus Crackdown

Several leading figures in the food business were among a group of moguls and investors who participated in online meetings with New York City Mayor Eric Adams in which they encouraged him to send the cops onto the Columbia University campus to crack down on students protesting Israel's continued assaults on Gaza. They also discussed making political contributions to the mayor.

The Washington Post first reported the group's activities on Thursday. About 100 "business titans," including some of the richest people in America, started meeting regularly after Hamas attacked Israeli territory on Oct. 7, according to the Post. Participants have regularly discussed ways to support Israel even as that country escalated its attacks on Gaza, killing an estimated 35,000 people, most of them civilians.

The participants included Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks who has been heavily criticized for his anti-union stances, and Daniel Lubetsky, the founder of Kind LLC, which markets "healthy" snacks the true healthfulness of which might be best described as "Eh, it's better than a Butterfinger."

The Post named only about a dozen of the group's members, and hasn't published the actual chat logs it obtained, nor even a full list of the participants. Also among them was Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager perhaps best known for his campaign a dozen years ago against Herbalife, the marketer of weight-loss supplements that he called (more-or-less accurately) a "pyramid scheme." As an "activist investor," Ackman has also taken on Wendy's and McDonald's. He's also a major investor in Chipotle Mexican Grill.

Among the other participants identified by the Post were Daniel Loeb, whose Third Point Ventures has made activist moves on food giants Nestle and Unilever; Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computer; real-estate investor Joseph Sitt; and Josh Kushner, brother of Jared and founder of Thrive Capital.

Schultz and some others in the chats are cited by the Post as discussing their meetings with members of the Israeli war cabinet, which was formed after the initial Hamas attacks that killed a reported 1,139 people, a majority of them civilian.

Lubetsky is quoted from the chats stressing the importance of "getting black leaders to condemn antisemitism." He told the Post that he said this because he believes that "building bridges between the black and Jewish communities is more important than ever."

Both Schultz and Lubetsky are major donors to Democratic candidates (Schultz; Lubetsky). Both are also major philanthropists.

Schultz is one of those "socially liberal and fiscally conservative" guys, as are most of these guys (all the group participants named by the Post are men). He's been anti-union all along, at least for Starbucks, writing in his 2012 memoir that "if [Starbucks workers] had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn't need a union."

Many of them had no such faith, and Schultz returned for his third round as CEO in 2022 after a six-year absence determined to stamp out organizing in the chain. Immediately upon his return for a one year-interim, stint, he told employees during a companywide meeting that Starbucks was "under assault from unionization" at the direction of "outside forces." During his final(?) stretch as CEO, the company fired some union organizers, an action that was later ruled to be illegal. Union organizing at Starbucks continues apace as Schultz has moved on to helping Jared Kushner's brother solve the Middle East.