I Love How Our Country Has Made Me Obscenely Wealthy, and That’s Why I Am Seriously Considering Running for President as a Centrist Independent

“I love our country, and I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.” — Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

- - -

This is our country. I own a lot of it — much, much more of it than you. However, I call it “our” country because my net worth is equal to 60,000 Americans’ yearly salaries, so I understand its turbulent state 60,000 times better than the median American. We are in this fight together.

Oops — did I say “fight”? I believe that fighting in Washington is the problem, and fighting is the thing I am fighting against. Washington needs to stop bickering and disagreeing with each other, and I’m confident I can make that happen because I am so rich that no one has disagreed with me in several decades.

It’s true that our country — the one that I own a very large chunk of — has problems. But I promise you that as one of America’s most successful business owners, I see those problems so abstractly that they may as well be Rothko paintings, of which I own seven.

While I agree that we have problems, the radical dividers of America would have you believe that they are much much worse than they really are. But I see the big picture, rather than getting bogged down in the small and miserable details of people’s actual lives. Let me put it this way: from space, our problems seem very small indeed, which is why my recent zero-grav orbital spacecation was such a sobering and spiritual experience.

Michigan looks so small and winnable from up there.

As detailed in my book From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America, I built my business from the ground up, using only thousands’ of Americans’ minimum wage labor and repackaging only several other cultures’ culinary traditions. I would like to take this moment, right before running for president, to show my deepest gratitude to the ground, who I never could have built it all up from without.

These days, people are quick to point blame. They blame corporations, without stopping to consider that my billions in assets are mostly held in corporate stock. They blame foreigners, without stopping to consider how cheaply we can buy coffee beans from those foreigners, or just how helpful Swiss bankers can be. They blame straws — actually, they are right about straws; straws are perhaps the biggest problem of them all.

As someone who makes hundreds of thousands of Americans wear humiliating aprons and feign enthusiasm about scones for their paycheck, I’ve gained the respect of the Silent Majority. They know that if both parties just worked together, we’d have no more problems at all. In fact, this centrist majority has been so silent that it almost seems like they don’t exist at all. I look forward to speaking for that silent majority, meeting them, and shaking their silent hands.

Let me tell you about the silent majority. They are the kind of people who love pointing at a bagel through the glass and watching a surly teenager reheat it to just above room temperature, then throw it in a bag with an insufficiently large packet of cream cheese. They are the kind of people who have made me very very rich, and I am excited for them to make me very very The President.

You see, I started my life in the Bronx projects and worked my way to the top of the American economy. The fact that my life is a statistical miracle interlaced with crucial moments of incredible blind luck is living proof that the “American Promise” needs to be reimagined into a future we can all believe is more than impossible than a dream together families veterans improve solution America.