Don't say anything but...

For this blog entry you will need to know how Starbucks works. Not in the three-day-orientation-training kind of way, but in the kind of need-to-know way I'm about to impart...

First you want to know that Starbucks stores in the US are almost all corporately owned.

There are Starbuckses in book stores and in airports and though these look like any other Starbucks they're actually licensed. In short Starbucks leases the logo and the brand and the supply chain and the recipes to the individual store and the store operates independently of Starbucks. This means that Starbucks giftcards are not accepted there and that I don't get a discount, either.

So that's store ownership.

When you start you begin as a barista. This means that you take orders and make drinks. Bottom of the totem. If you excel there you might get to be Shift Supervisor which is what I am. You're responsible for the safe, the tills, employee safety - pretty much everything up to making strategy rather than operations decisions.
After that you go to Assistant Manager, Manager and, if you do well enough, you get to oversee the management of a group of stores as a District Manager, a group of districts as Regional Director and so on and so forth right up to the good management jobs in Seattle.

Well, my District Manager told me today that he wants me to apply for an Assistant Manager job at a busy mall store. It'll mean long hours, yes, and hard work too, no doubt - but the money is a hefty step up. Basically it'd be around a 50% pay increase for me which is good.

So I've been pretty jovial all day since, in my experience, you don't generally get told you ought to apply unless they think you're going to be given the job and applying for it just satisfies the requirement that you applied for it in the first place.

That's all. I'm excited to be going away for a few days and excited that I might have a new job when I get back.

It's nice that, for once, things seem to be going really well...

So Bush is swelling the defense budget again and using it to develop a Hypersonic Stealth Bomber, capable of reaching any target, worldwide within two hours. That's pretty speedy. But I have to ask: when was the last time it was necessary to have that kind of time-critical response?

I'll tell you when I think it was, it was when Ronnie was at the helm and scaring up the threat of nuclear war with the USSR.

"The Soviet Union is acquiring what can only be considered an offensive military force. They have continued to build far more intercontinental ballistic missiles than they could possible need simply to deter an attack."

And doesn't this:

"The calls for cutting back the defense budget come in nice, simple arithmetic. They're the same kind of talk that led the democracies to neglect their defenses in the 1930's and invited the tragedy of World War II. We must not let that grim chapter of history repeat itself through apathy or neglect."

...look a lot like this:

"In the 20th Century, some chose to appease murderous dictators whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war. In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth. Terrorists and terrorist states do not reveal these threats with fair notice in formal declarations. And responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self defence. It is suicide."

The first is from Reagan's Star Wars speech, March 23, 1983. The second you will probably recognise as GWB in his "Ultimatum to Saddam" speech of March 18, 2003.

Both used the threat of terror and war to justify spending billions on defense, both had a "special relationship" with the British Prime Minister.

Both of them significantly dumbed down the news media and appealed to the far right in the wake of successful and more liberal Democrat presidents.

With Bush on the fundraising trail again for his election next year, I can only hope that his presidency does not follow Reagan's example by serving two terms and then handing over to another Republican. Another nine years of ignorance, fear and underinvestment in the welfare of those who cannot help themselves not what the US or the world needs.