Southwest Pilots Union Schedules Strike Authorization Vote

When I was racking up free flights on Southwest traveling for work in the 1990s, it was still the old Southwest with "party seating", peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. I was drawn to that sort of culture, and I followed stories about it in the Wall Street Journal, which I got for free at my door every morning at my hotel. I learned at the time that its relations with its unions were unique. The airline was succeeding as a discount carrier, and its workers were willing to work for a little less to have secure jobs. Its unions were less adversarial and more inclined to look at win-win opportunities. If Southest prospered, so did its workers.

The last time I flew Southwest, maybe 15 years ago, things had changed greatly; they'd gone corporate, the peanut snacks, party seating, and singing flight attendants were long gone, while the company style had turned to talking down to the public like children. As far as I could tell, though, the unions had stuck with the program. Apparently the holiday-season meltdown has changed even this. Via Epoch Times,

Southwest Airlines pilots have set a “historic” strike-authorization vote, following a lack of progress in contract negotiations and a massive operational meltdown.

In a Jan. 18 announcement, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said a vote has been set “beginning on May 1, and will ultimately give pilots the ability to strike.” The union, which represents about 10,000 pilots, said this is the first time in the airline’s 51-year history for such a vote.

The union’s vice president, Capt. Michael Santoro, in a SWAPA Facebook post, said the union is exasperated. He called the vote is “a tool we must employ to wake up management.”

All of a sudden, the pilots are playing hardball:

The union said it picked the May 1 date because it “allows our union time to prepare and gives our customers time to book elsewhere, so that they can have confidence that their summer vacations, honeymoons, and family outings are assured.”

The votes will be counted at the end of May, SWAPA said.

In the past, Southwest's unions would never have implied that Southwest's customers -- who were also their customers -- should maybe think about scheduling flights with more reliable carriers. You plan to fly this summer? Maybe think now about booking cheap tickets in advance with Delta, because we may be on strike here at Southwest.

But things changed over the holidays.

During negotiations, the union has been pushing the company for contract language to address “scheduling work rules and information technology,” SWAPA said.

Those were two of the major factors the union blamed after a winter storm touched off problems that led to 16,700 canceled flights during the holiday rush of the last 10 days of 2022.

As I noted the other day, Southwest management has backed off even the minimal acknowledgement it made during the meltdown that its outdated scheduling software was even partly responsible, although the specific triggering event, the memo from the vice president for ground operations to the Denver ramp workers requiring a doctor's note for any claimed illness, suggests Southwest's labor relations had been deteriorating prior to the meltdown as well,

I'd also noted that another vice president of the Southwest pilots' union wrote an open letter to Southwest's CEO on December 31 strongly suggesting the implicit deal with Southwest's unions was over. After all, the pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and ramp workers were suffering just as much as the passengers. Some had to sleep at the airport, while they were also the ones who bore the brunt of customer dissatisfaction.

I was actually astonished at the time of the meltdown that Southwest employees appeared to be as supportive of the company as they were. I wrote it up to the fact that, especially among those who'd been with the company since the days of peanut snacks and singing flight attendants, they'd built up seniority and benefits that they'd forfeit if they went to another carrier, although there's a shortage of pilots generally.

But it looks like factors are changing. I knew the old Southwest was gone quite some time ago, and the old-time workers are going to retire very soon.

Right Wing Media Is Still Coasting On the Biden Documents

What puzzles me about right-wing media is that the Biden classified document puzzle is a story that's a potential career maker. Just look at what Watergate did for Woodward and Bernstein, who were at least portrayed before the scandal broke as underperformers in the Washington Post newsroom, but soon enough they had Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing them on the silver screen. I bet they both scored big time after that. But if all they did was find themselves in the right place at the right time for Deep Throat, even that took some minimal level of enterprise -- they had to get up in the morning and show up, after all.

The current right-wing writers, as far as I can see, aren;t even doing that. All they're doing is cribbing from each other and mostly not even going to Wikipedia. Let's take one data point that as far as I can see was covered by just one obscure YouTuber, a South Florida radio host named Brian Craig. He actually went to Wikipedia to look somebody up and discovered Dana Remus:

Dana Ann Remus is an American lawyer who served as White House counsel for U.S. President Joe Biden from January 2021 to July 2022. Prior to her appointment as White House counsel, Remus was general counsel for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. Earlier in her career, she was deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel for ethics during the presidency of Barack Obama, was general counsel for the Obama Foundation from 2017 to 2019, and was counsel to Michelle Obama.

Wikipedia, though, doesn't cover Ms Remus's career after July 2022. The Hill noted of her departure:

White House counsel Dana Remus will leave the administration next month, the latest in a string of key officials to depart their posts ahead of the midterm elections.

Remus has served as President Biden’s top lawyer since he took office in early 2021. Remus previously worked as general counsel on the Biden campaign and in Obama White House. She also worked as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

In October, she joined white-shoe Washington law firm Covington & Burling:

Dana Remus, most recently Assistant to the President and White House Counsel to President Biden, has joined Covington as a partner. She will practice in the firm’s Congressional Investigations, White Collar Defense and Investigations, Public Policy, and Election and Political Law practices.

Brian Craig says in his commentary that Ms Remus left the White House in July to become a personal attorney to President Biden. This is not completely clear in the public record, but CBS News had this to say about Bob Bauer's appointment as Biden's personal attorney last week:

Longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer is serving as the personal attorney for President Biden in the classified documents matter now before a Justice Department special counsel, the White House confirmed Friday.

Bauer has been the primary point of contact between the Biden camp and the Justice Department during the initial investigation, which began in November, CBS News has learned.

CBS news notes, though, that Dana Remus and two other Covington partners have also been involved in the document inquiry:

Recent filings with the National Archives name three partners at D.C. law firm Covington and Burling as Biden's representatives to the Archives for his vice presidential records: Dana Remus, former Biden White House counsel, Biden campaign attorney Robert Lenhard and James Garland, a former Obama-era Justice Department official.

Their roles in the documents matter is unclear. Multiple calls and emails to Remus, Lenhard and Garland since Monday have gone unanswered.

Both Mr Bauer and Ms Remus have had connections with the Democrat Party and the Biden White House at a very high level and have a history of working closely together for both Presidents Biden and Obama. According to CBS, Mr Bauer

served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama and as a top attorney in the 2020 Biden campaign. His wife, Anita Dunn, is a senior adviser to Mr. Biden and widely considered inside and outside the West Wing as poised to become the first woman to be White House chief of staff.

Brian Craig cites Steve Bannon's show to claim that Ms Remus was the attorney who actually found the November 2022 tranche of classified documents, not White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber. and he also claims that Ms Remus left her job as White House Counsel in July to become Biden's personal attorney. Whatever the actual circumstance, what seems to be very close but unacknowleged cooperation among Mr Bauer, Ms Remus, other Covington partners, and Mr Sauber suggests that very highly placed and expensive attorneys are now working behind the scenes on the Biden documents and the circumstances that led to their discovery.

In fact, as Brian Craig implies and the record suggests, the White House appears to have recognized as early as last May, when Mr Sauber was brought in to perform unspecified cleanup work on the Penn Biden Center, and last July, when Ms Remus left her position as White House Counsel to perform unspecified duties apparently related in some way to the Penn Biden Center, which she is now undertaking with other Covington partners, there are potentially very serious issues that could potentially emerge at the Penn Biden Center.

I continue to note that Hunter Biden appears to have been closely involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center, which e-mails on his laptop suggest was developed as a "wealth creation" opportunity for the Biden family but also functioned effectively as an administration-in-exile for the future Biden White House, employing key people including Secretary of State Blinken. Hunter's involvement was also during the peak of his binge years from 2017 to 2019, which suggests some part of the classified document problem might be traced to his access to such materials while he was engaged in Biden business-related activities.

But even this doesn't really explain why such highly connected lawyers are now on the cleanup detail, except to suggest this is a potentially very important issue.

It's hard to avoid thinking important business was done at the Penn Biden Center which it's now in the White House's interest to minimize, to the extent that very high level people with very high level connections have been pulled off other work and are now on the case. You'd think the writers at Breitbart, Red State, Hot Air, The Daily Wire, and elsewhere might find it in their interest to work a little harder.

Southwest Circles The Wagons

Yesterday I noted that in the wake of Southwest Airlines's Christmas meltdown, Mahogany Row gave themselves promotions and almost certainly bonuses. And over the recent long weekend, CEO Bob Jordan backed off the airline's own mea culpas at the time of the crisis:

Southwest Airlines' CEO said aircraft engines froze and jetways wouldn't move after a storm caused an operational meltdown that led to thousands of flights being canceled, The New York Times reported.

. . . The CEO's comments come a day after a group of shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against Jordan, its CFO, executive chairman and the airline, claiming that it hid problems that caused its meltdown.

. . . Jordan denied that its technology failed and told the Times it had just experienced an "overwhelming volume." He added that it hired Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, to independently investigate the event, per the report, and reiterated that he was responsible for what happened.

We may assume that Oliver Wyman will echo those views in its final report. But this is a turnaround from Southwest's own version of events as the meltdown happened last month. As of December 27, this was the story:

Southwest Airlines has blamed its operational meltdown on the busy holiday weekend and the powerful winter storm but said on Tuesday its antiquated scheduling system also played a role.

. . . Since its original statement last updated on Tuesday, Southwest has added to its reasoning for the chaos, telling Insider, "we have had issues with our scheduling tools, causing a scheduling issue."

"We were fully staffed and prepared for the approaching holiday weekend when the severe weather swept across the continent, where Southwest is the largest carrier in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the US," the carrier said in a statement. "These operational conditions forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity."

Reports at the time noted that the delays and cancellations at Southwest were far worse than those at other airlines. The December 27 story at the link continues,

Other airlines, like United Airlines and American Airlines, largely avoided this. This is because their systems are more modern and can handle the workload quicker than Southwest's can. The latter's systems failed to keep up because flight attendants use a system largely reliant on phone lines, [Southwest flight attendant union president Lyn] Montgomery told KHOU. That system can get clogged up, forcing crews to wait on hold for hours waiting for a new assignment.

Since the meltdown, Southwest has worked on restoring customer and employee loyalty by offering credits for future travel. The story linked in yesterday's post pointed out,

The airline has also given customers some free frequent flyer points to make them feel better about daring to fly Southwest again. I even received an email from Southwest this week that announced: "Big Sale, itty bitty fares."

I wonder whether any customers were ittily bittily annoyed by the enticement of $49 flights from an airline that has so let them down.

Please, though, let's not forget Southwest's employees. The airline gave them $400 worth of bonus points to compensate for the "physical and emotional toll" of a mess caused by management's refusal to invest in crew scheduling software from this century.

From the start of this whole episode, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "courtship" or "honeymoon phase" in the cycle of abusive relationships.

In many cases, the person who committed the abuse will try to make things right by offering gifts and being overly kind and loving. The reconciliation period is often referred to as a "honeymoon stage" because it mimics the beginning of a relationship when people are on their best behavior.

When the person who experienced the abuse is in this phase, the extra love and kindness from their partner triggers a reaction in their brain that releases feel-good and love hormones known as dopamine and oxytocin. This release of hormones makes them feel closer to their partner and as if things are back to normal.

What's intriguing here is that Southwest grew by relying on employee cooperation and goodwill to build a unique corporate culture that customers found appealing, especially in the days of peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. Those days ended a decade ago and more, but customers stayed due to low fares and a generous rewards program, while employees had built up seniority and benefits and were reluctant to leave.

Business Insider as of last Friday, before CEO Jordan''s New York Times interview over the weekend, quoted him as follows:

Last week the airline's CEO, Bob Jordan, took responsibility in an interview with Reuters, saying that there were a lot of reasons that this happened "but it's on me at the end of the day."

He added that "it just can't happen again."

But that was apparently still back in the honeymoon phase. Of course it's going to happen again. The question is whether it will happen again and again and again.

Southwest Update

In covering Southwest's holiday-seasom meltdown, I've got to say I expected at least some management heads to roll. So far, not a bit of it.

[I]n an announcement that flirts with humor and attempts to defy it, the airline this week promoted five of its senior executives to even more senior roles.

Why, the vice president of Network Planning, Adam Decaire, was promoted to senior vice president of Network Planning and Network Operations Control. He's going to need a wider business card, isn't he? And please don't worry, he went to Ohio State and didn't study accountancy.

Then there was Tony Roach. He was promoted from vice president of Customer Experience & Engagement to senior vice president of Marketing & Customer Experience. He's going to have some fun over the next few months. And no, he didn't go to the University of Texas. His alma mater is Abilene Christian University.

All hail, too, Whitney Eichinger, ascending from vice president of Culture & Engagement to senior vice president of Culture & Communications. She was at TCU and, oh, the University of Texas. But wait, it's OK. She studied "communications, journalism, and related programs."

The references to educational background refer to a letter from the Southwest pilots' union that traced the airline's problems to an in-group of executives who had accounting degrees from the University of Texas. The article suggests, though,

I feel entirely sure these are extremely competent people. By my rough calculations they have, between them, a total of 100 years working for Southwest. But is that actually a good thing? Or does it reflect the pilots' view that Southwest management is a rather closed cabal?

So now, dear Southwest customer, you must decide how you feel. Is it really a good look to react to an act of utter incompetence by promoting five longtime executives in the aftermath?

. . . Might you be slightly skeptical when Southwest insists these promotions "will strengthen our operational execution and better serve our People and Customers"?

What intrigues me is what the new executive titles reveal about current corporate culture. They all contain gaseous, jargony, interchangeable words like "Experience", "Culture", "Communications", and "Engagement", which suggests none of them is actulally in charge of anything at all. I assume that their position descriptions all read something to the effect of "maximize effective corporate cultural engagement with key stakeholder experience" or some such, and they're all paid upwards of half a million plus bonus to do it, whatever it might be.

Meanwhile, there doesn't appear to have been any change in the status of Chris Johnson, the Vice President of Ground Operations, whose memo to the Denver ramp workers telling them that if they claimed frostbite in the job, they'd need a doctor's note or be fired, started the whole meltdown. There may be some justice here, since he's clearly well below the various senior VPs of Communications Engagement and Cultural Experience in the food chain and no doubt did nothing other than he was told.

But the whole set of circumstances does provide, like what we saw at Starbuck's last week, a vignette of the new corporate gentry, farther and farther isolated from people who actually do the work or buy the product, and indeed, the current state of standardized corporate language that conceals resposibility while trivializing and even infantilizing both customers and employees.

Whew!

I'm astonished at how quickly, during a holiday weekend, the Biden classified documents story has metastasized -- and that following the Christmas holiday break, from which reporters had already been reluctant to resume even the token appearance of doing work. Several commentators, even on the normally obtuse and lackadaisical right, have made worthwhile points. Bonchie at Red State notes,

After initially framing the incident as a one-off resulting from hurried packing after Biden’s vice presidency, more documents were “found” in the president’s garage at his Delaware residence. Then, weeks later, yet another document was found in an adjacent room.

In reality, almost all of this had already taken place by the time the public was informed, with the second batch of documents being secretly reported to the DOJ on December 20th, 2022.

. . . Perhaps it was all over? Surely, Biden could blame the illegal possession of all those classified documents on careless staffers who “accidentally” swept up SCI material into packing boxes. Of course, SCI material isn’t supposed to ever legally leave a SCIF, so how it even got to Biden’s vice presidential office is an issue, but hey, details, right? And yeah, the documents ended up separated out into three different unsecured locations, clearly having been moved multiple times.

. . . Of course, on Saturday, that narrative took another beating with the discovery of a fourth trove of classified documents. This time, they were found in Biden’s filing cabinet at his home office. To say that it belabors belief that they ended up there without the president’s knowledge is to severely understate the situation.

He then moves to a related queation, although I'm not sure he recognizes all the implications:

Yet, somehow, as big of a scandal as the possession of those classified documents is, they’ve actually served as a useful tool in revealing a possibly bigger scandal. Namely, how the Biden family garners and handles money. For example, isn’t it a little concerning that Joe Biden was paid nearly $1,000,000 as part of the Penn Biden Center, a university arm that allegedly received $61 million from the Chinese? Given he never actually taught a class, what exactly was he getting paid to do?

I noted on Friday that the Penn Biden Center looks to have been a major operation, a very well-funded administration-in-exile that not only paid Biden himself handsomely, but hired at least 10 people who became high-level administration figures after the 2020 election, inclulding Secretary of State Blinken and and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Where did all this money come from? Bonchie goes on,

Things get a lot worse when Hunter Biden enters the picture, and with this classified documents scandal, he has now entered the picture like the Kool-Aid man.

He links to a tweet from Miranda Devine citing a form on which Hunter claimed to live at the Biden Wilmington residence where some of the classified documents were found.

But when you look at the form, things go from bad to worse.

For some reason, Hunter Biden claimed that he was paying $49,910 in rent for Joe Biden’s Delaware residence. The house itself is only worth $2,000,000 in today’s market (and was built for a fraction of that). Why was Hunter Biden paying $49,910 in rent to his father? Where did all that money go?

But I think it's important to go back to one of my Friday points, that much of this had been anticipated by Biden operatives last spring, when the White House brought Richard Sauber over as special counsel for the specific purpose of scrubbing Biden's Penn Biden and home offices. The best we can say is that although Sauber had uncovered a few things by last November, he didn't get nearly as much as he should have. And indeed, what must clearly have been a Biden decision to approve a raid on Mar-a-Lago for Trump's classified documents looks especially incongruous in light of the fact that Biden had tasked Sauber to scrub just such material from his own home and previous workplaces.

Of course, had Sauber been able to do that before the August raid on Mar-a-Lago, noody would have been the wiser, but all those pesky documents have been turning up over the months since the Mar-a-Lago raid. And now that Attorney General Garland has announced a special prosecutor for the Biden documents, Biden has had to engage a personal attorney to handle the case.

President Joe Biden has hired Democrat lawyer Bob Bauer to represent him in the ongoing special counsel investigation over classified documents found in his possession at his home and at a private office in Washington, DC.

Ed Morrissey makes the worthwhile point at Hot Air:

Either [Special Counsel Sauber's team] incompetently conducted their initial searches of Biden properties and offices, or they didn’t actually complete them at all.

I like to study incompetence, wherever we find it. I think this will be an especially delicious example. This may well end Sauber's career. Morrissey goes on,

This raises another question, too. The spread of these materials in the Wilmington home makes it clear that someone was making use of them at some point. Otherwise, the classified material would have remained in the boxes in which they were initially packaged from Biden’s vice-presidential term. That’s not “inadvertently misplacing” material, but intentional retention and unauthorized uses of classified material.

And that makes the obvious questions even more acute. What did the classified information contain, and what was Biden’s interest in it? Who else accessed this material, and for what purpose? How much more is there to find?

That reporters are working on this over a holiday weekend suggests they think careers are to be made from it. So far, what we've been learning has been the result of overall incompetence, starting with how Biden's post-vice presidential operation was run, extending to the incompetent effort to clean up that mess once he was in the White House. As they say, handsome is as handsome does.

Starbucks Doesn't Just Sell Coffee, It Sells Kool-Aid

A piece in Fortune two days ago caught my eye: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is annoyed employees didn’t listen to his back-to-office request—and now he’s ordering a return. This echoes policy changes by figures like Elon Musk at his companies: the COVID panic is over, and it's time to drop all the charades. Although this is behind a paywall, this site carries a version from Starbucks's CEO, Howard Schultz, himself "Message to Starbucks support partners: Returning to each other and to the office" ["support partners" are headquarters management employees in Starbucks-speak]:

I want to share a change in our policy about hybrid work consistent with our past, but boldly about our future. Before I do, let me share context.

The pandemic was a full-out attack on the ideas that make Starbucks, Starbucks. It disrupted human connection. It made the world harder for so many. And it threatened our ability to be a safe haven and a Third Place.

At the SSC ["SSC" is Starbucks-speak for "headquarters"] and across our regional offices, we had the privilege and the ability to pivot to virtual work. Most of us stopped coming into the office—at first, because of safety, and to protect ourselves and our loved ones. As days stretched into weeks, many of us claimed new freedoms, pioneered new ways of working, achieved new productivity.

Notice how the corporate culture is described in saccharine terms -- the work environment is "a safe haven and a Third Place". And note how the headquarters employees are flattered -- even forced to work from home away from the headquarters safe environment and Third Place (whatever that means), they've "claimed new freedoms, pioneered new ways of working, achieved new productivity". How gloriously wonderful! But there are snakes even in the Garden of Eden!

But many partners [in Starbucks-speak, non-headquarters employees] didn’t have that privilege. They had to keep coming into their workplace—our stores, our plants, our distribution centers—day after day. They faced the hardship. They faced the challenges in their communities—deeply, passionately and often with great heroics.

Today, when we talk with our store partners, we hear how much they need us. As the nation comes out of the pandemic, they want to thrive, not just survive. We need to support them better. We need to simplify their jobs. We need to dive even deeper into each store and every store to support partners the way they need us to, now.

Note the overall weepiness of the tone. The actual line workers faced hardship. They faced challenges. And now they need us! We need to support them better! And thus we must change!

Effective Jan. 30, all SSC partners within commuting distance are expected to work in the SSC a minimum of three days per week. To rebuild our connection to each other and synchronize teams and efforts, two of your days will be Tuesday and Wednesday—and the third day will be aligned on in partnership with your leader and team. The other two days of the week are work from anywhere—home, office, a Starbucks store, or beyond.

But this isn't done for the reason someone like Elon Musk might do it. Not at all!

We are a company rooted in human connection. We must have authentic and deep human connection everywhere we work—in stores, the SSC, roasting plants, coffee farms—everywhere. While we have built transactive connection and on-screen skills through COVID, we have lost a true human connection at the SSC. We need to rebuild that. Failing to do so as we emerge from the pandemic puts us at a great loss, depriving us of vital relationships and the impromptu connections and idea generation that comes from convening in person. In a real sense, the more we lose human connection with each other and within our stores and the vital relationships that define who we are, we put our brand into peril.

It's not that nobody's showing up and work isn't gettsing done, nothing like that. It's juist that we're losing deep, authentic, human connection and vital relationships! Who can object to that? Beyond that,

Our culture depends on rituals—from coffee tastings to storytelling to seeing how our design experiences look end-to-end by putting the work up on a wall, and on and on. We will revive and reinvent these rituals to build our culture. And we will use in-person time to spend on our Reinvention efforts, forging the deeper hard choices, trade-offs, and integration, so we succeed.

This is the gaseous, jardon-laden patter the liberal arts-educated, feminized "support partners" learned at their colleges and universities. In fact, this is the preferred day-to-day style of the new gentry, and Mr Schultz even refers indirectly to the class bias inherent in the Starbucks environment. As he said, the line workers, the store managers, the baristas, the people who actually produced the coffee, never got to work from home. But oddly, when he brings up "fairness", he doesn't even mention those:

I applaud the hard work from all of us. But it’s time to right something that has been inherently not fair. Partners in our offices have had the privilege of not coming into the workplace and when we embarked on hybrid work last year, each of us made a promise to each other to be in the office between one to two days a week. From our badging data, it’s clear that a good number of SSC partners are not meeting their minimum promise of one day a week. This is why I am also announcing that this policy—three days in the SSC and regional offices—is a requirement, and we expect every partner to respect it like we do every other workplace policy. It’s that critical to our business success.

This is an internal issue specific only to the headquarters gentry. The only unfairness is that some of those aren't even spending one day a week at the office. So instead, to make this fair, everyone has to spend three days a week at the office, no exceptions, unless you can find one, of course. (If I were an employee, er, partner, I'd raise my hand and ask why they can't just make the one day a week compulsory instead of changing it to three, but I guess that's why I don't work at Starbucks, or at least not as a "support partner".)

I have a couple of takeaways. One is that the former Twitter culture portrayed in the "My Day at Work" TikTok video isn't limited to Twitter, even though Musk seems to have eliminated it there within days of its appearance on TikTok. There's an extraordinarily pampered new gentry class everywhere, it seems. And Schultz says this will continue:

Additionally, our Modern Workplace team has spent the past two years tirelessly redesigning a workplace of the future with countless amenities to support an inspiring and uplifting environment. We are providing those resources in support of enabling your very best contributions.

The smoothie bars, the free breakfast and lunch, the yoga rooms, and more will continue, to enable the best contributions of the "support partners". But as this site says,

Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse restaurant in the world with over 20,000 locations in more than 60 countries worldwide. The restaurant is very trendy today and has a perception of providing quality coffee products. Because of that, Starbucks menu prices are higher than what you would expect to pay for a coffee at other fast-food restaurants.

Starbucks, much like pre-Musk Twitter, is selling a gentrified, in some measure class-based, world view, not just a cup of coffee. And there's clearly, as with pre-Musk Twitter, an expectation that a certain class of headquarters employees is entitled to live out the full benefits of this world view, irrespective of any actual contribution.

My other takeaway is that corporate Kool-Aid is nothing new.

Dum-Da-Dum-Dum

Cue the Dragnet theme:

I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate, start to finish. I was young enough at the time to have supported McGovern in 1972, and I thirstily drank up every detail of Nixon's subsequent downfall. The appointment of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor in the matter in May, 1973 was a big event, since it was forced on the Nixon administration as a condition of Eliot Richardson's Senate confirmation as attorney general. In fact, for those of us who followed the story closely, this was the key sign that Nixon was on his way out.

The odd thing is that Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former President Trump just this past November. It's hard to avoid thinking this was a deeply unserious act intended to drive a stake through the potential for a 2024 Trump run, while Trump steadily fades as a prospect even without it. Garland's problem now, though, with the opposing party in control of the House, is that he's much more in Eliot Richardson's position, with the appointment of another special prosectuor forced on him to appoint an investigator to undermine his own administration.

A problem that won't go away is that lawyers appear to have been involved in the discovery of classified documents at Biden home and office locations from the start. According to NPR,

President Biden's lawyer have [sic] found additional classified documents at his Wilmington, Del., residence, according to his counsel Richard Sauber, who said "all but one" of the new documents were found in storage in Biden's garage, and one document was in stored materials in "an adjacent room."

Richard Sauber turns up on a web search as of last May 22:

The White House has hired Richard Sauber to assist in the Biden administration’s response to potential future investigations should Republicans win back majorities in Congress in the midterm elections, officials confirm to CNN.

Sauber, currently the top lawyer at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and [sic]is expected to begin at the White House in the next few weeks with the title “special counsel to the president.”

He was previously a partner at Washington law firm Robbins, Russell, Englert, Orseck, Untereiner & Sauber LLP. The NPR story continues,

"Following the discovery of government documents at the Penn Biden Center in November 2022, and coordinating closely with the Department of Justice, the President's lawyers have searched the President's Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, residences — the other locations where files from his Vice-Presidential office might have been shipped in the course of the 2017 transition. The lawyers completed that review last night," Sauber's statement said.

A complication in the timeline is that Biden, while he is thought to have had an office at the Penn Biden center following its opening in 2018, was involved in setting an operation up there even before he left the vice presidency in January 2017.

On April 25, 2016, Creative Artists Agency (CAA) agent Craig Gering emailed Hunter with "confidential notes from our meeting," in which Gering listed apparent plans that were discussed for the vice president upon leaving office.

One of those plans included "wealth creation," with no further explanation, and another included an apparent reference to the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., with a possible job opportunity for Hunter.

"The Biden Institute of Foreign Relations at the University of Pennsylvania," Gering's email read. "Focus on foreign policy. In addition to the institute at U of Penn, the school has an existing office in DC that will be expanded to house a DC office for VP Biden (and Mike, Hunter and Steve?). Operates like The Clinton Global Initiative without the money raise."

Hunter then confirmed Gering's notes but emphasized that they needed to be "very confidential" because they were not set in stone.

It appears that what became the Penn Biden Center was a shadow Biden administration while Biden himself was temporarily out of office:

At least 10 senior Biden administration officials were hired to their current or former positions after stints at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, the president's think tank where a trove of classified documents was recently found.

The Washington, D.C.-based Penn Biden Center — a foreign policy think tank President Biden opened in 2018 — previously employed current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl and White House counselor Steven Richetti. Blinken and Richetti both served as managing directors while Kahl was a strategic consultant at the center.

At minimum, it looks like the Biden administration was resigned to the likelihood that Republicans would return to some type of congressional control in November 2022, which in fact they narrowly did. Based on that expectation, the White Houae hired Richard Sauber to scrub the Biden Center records (coincidentally, sauber in German means "clean"). Mr Sauber has presumably been working on this since last spring, but by November, he was in a position where he was forced to disclose the classified records. Further searches turned up more documents at Biden's residences. (I imagine that Mr Sauber found these papers well before they were officially reported, and it wouldn't surprise me if more revelations are to come.)

It seems to me that there are differences between Trump's documents at Mar-a-Lago and Biden's at the Biden Center. In Trump's case, these apparently were random paper detritus scooped up from the White House residence at the last minute, boxed willy-nilly by domestic staff, and shipped directly to storage rooms at Mar-a-Lago; Trump was unaware of their specific contents and presumably hadn't looked at any of them. In Biden's case, it appears that they had somehow left government locations, possibly in the vice presidential residence or elsewhere, been shipped to another intermediate location where Biden was aware of them, and then identified as such and shipped again from that location, his Wilmington home or elsewhere, to his offices at the Penn Biden Center, where they were in active use without any declassification, as part of a "wealth creation" exercise involving Hunter. Biden has far less of a defense that it was inadvertent, and beyond that, as only the former vice president at the time, he never had Trump's declassification authority.

At least, that's one way to see it. Speculation is that maybe this is an effort by Democrat insiders to derail a Biden run in 2024. But no Democrat wants the sort of scandal this could well become, especially if Hunter is involved. I doubt if we've seen anything like the full story up to now.