Home Depot Founder Virulently Anti-Obama – Could Race Be To Blame?
March 15, 2012
By Wendy Gittleson

If billionaire Home Depot mogul, Ken Langone has his way, there will be a new face in the White House come January. That face, he hopes, will belong to fellow mogul, Mitt Romney.

Long before Romney declared his intention to run for the Presidency, Langone regularly expressed his discontent with the Obama administration. His complaints ranged from unsubstantiated policy disagreements to what many would call racist code.

Langone is not your typical partisan hack. He believes that the wealthy should pay more in taxes.

“People like me have to understand that it isn’t business as usual,” he said. “I think it’s a travesty for a man of my success and my means to get anything from the federal government. I think I should pay more taxes.”

He has supported Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), NY Rep. Carolyn Maloney and NY Governor Andrew Cuomo.


So what is so different about President Obama? Naturally, many of Langone’s criticisms have to do with the economy. He has called Obama anti-business and has accused him of promoting class warfare.

The irony of those criticisms, at least from the perspective of Langone, is that Home Depot has now had nine straight quarters of double digit earnings-per-share growth. In other words, they are doing just fine under the Obama administration. Hourly wages for Home Depot employees range from $8.00 to $18.00 an hour. On the other end of the spectrum, the CEO of Home Depot, Frank Blake, received a compensation package of almost $10.5 million in 2010. The $8.00 hourly employee – assuming 40 hours a week – made just $16,640. Blake made 631 times the amount of his lowest paid employee. Those who defend the working class may be engaging in class warfare, but it’s companies like Langone’s who are foreign-made carpet bombing the villages.

Even his assertion that the Obama administration is killing jobs with regulations holds no water. Conservative David Brooks argued in the New York Times that Obama’s regulations have neither killed jobs nor businesses, and that they aren’t substantially more significant than his predecessor’s.

As a businessman, Langone has every right to disagree with the Obama administration on policy, however misguided and disjointed he may be.

Video here:

However, much of Langone’s criticism comes not from policy, but from perception.

“Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on—that’s how much he revered the presidency,” he said. “This guy worked like hell to be president…Behave like a president. Let me look at you as a model to how we should behave. What does he say? Fat cats, jet airplanes. What is the purpose? Us versus them.

“He is not acting presidential. He is behaving in a way designed in my opinion to divide us, to make us look at each other with skepticism, with suspicion. That is the end of America as we know it,” he said. “The destruction he is inflicting by his behavior will carry on long after we settle the debt limit.”

He’s called the President “petulant,” a word typically reserved for children who act out. Are you seeing a pattern here? President Barack Obama has arguably been one of the most dignified statesman to occupy the Oval Office, yet Langone’s complaints have not been policy specific, but rather on how the President looks or with a three syllable synonym for the racist use of the word, “boy.” Even his suit jacket accusation was without merit.

Accusations of racism are nothing new to Langone’s company, Home Depot. In 2009, a Haitian immigrant sued Home Depot over allegations that the home improvement company gave preferential treatment to staffing agencies that were Caucasian owned. Ludin Pierre, the plaintiff in the suit, claimed,

He was dropped by Home Depot because “our only fault is we are a black, Haitian-owned company.” He notes that Home Depot gave contracts to several white-owned staffing agencies, but passed over the only black minority -owned company—despite the fact that Cosmo was supplying about 75% of the company’s temporary assignment needs at the time.

Pierre recalls at one Home Depot meeting, a Regional Human Resources employee at the company said, “We don’t like Haitians, and we don’t want them working here.” Pierre says Home Depot officials suggested that someone else should be representing his staffing agency. “One manager told me, ‘Change your front color.’” Pierre has a letter from a former Home Depot manager who apologizes for the anti-Haitian remarks that were reported to him, and adds: “I also feel bad that you lost many of your good workers due to the other agency’s recruiting them within Home Depot’s facilities. I don’t think that was right, and we should not have let that happen.”

The suit was dropped only after Home Depot ‘out lawyered’ Pierre. Pierre couldn’t afford to keep fighting the legal battles.

However, Pierre wasn’t alone in his complaints. The Huffington Post goes on to say,

Over the years, Home Depot has been hammered repeatedly with racial discrimination lawsuits. In Washington, D.C., in suburban Detroit, in Indianapolis, on Long Island — Home Depot workers sued their employer for racial discrimination. In 2004, two African-American workers in Los Angeles filed racial discrimination lawsuits claiming a Home Depot supervisor laughed as white employees dressed in Ku Klux Klan hoods harassed the black workers. In the same year, Home Depot agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by employees in the company’s Colorado stores.

In New Jersey, where Ludin Pierre did business, the situation was not much better. In October of 2003, ten foreign-born Hispanic and black workers at Home Depot distribution centers in South Brunswick and Cranbury filed a lawsuit charging the company with discriminatory treatment. These workers — at the same distribution center with Ludin Pierre’s employees — sought class action status on behalf of 500 minority workers at Home Depot’s distribution centers throughout the state. They claimed they were paid less than white workers, not promoted or trained, and were subjected to harsher work conditions. In October of 2007, three nooses, carefully tied and hanging from a shelf in Aisle 14 of a Home Depot store in Passaic, New Jersey once again put the home improvement retailer in the headlines.

Throughout the years, they’ve also been known for gender discrimination and age discrimination.

As an American citizen, you say, Langone is entitled to his opinion, no matter how offensive. Of course you are correct. However, the difference between Langone’s First Amendment rights and the rights of the majority of Americans is that he is speaking from atop $1.5 billion.

Money, not the written or spoken word, will peddle the most influence in the 2012 elections. Langone is all-in for Romney. From Mother Jones:

Langone says that since he threw his lot in with Romney, he’s helped bring 90 percent of the megadonors on the Christie conference call into the Romney camp. “I would say virtually everybody who tried to persuade Christie is partial to Romney,” he told me when I reached him at his winter home in North Palm Beach, Florida. “Don’t forget: It’s the art of the possible, not the impossible,” he said. “Romney appears to be the likely candidate for the Republican Party.”

Even if we assume the best about Langone, that his intentions are not racist, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Romney is playing the strategy of courting millionaires and billionaires instead of votes, knowing that with enough money, votes can be won. Judging by the business climate of Home Depot and by the employee unfriendly approach of Bain Capital, it’s also pretty safe to assume that as business-friendly as the Obama administration has been, a Romney administration would be even more supportive of an increasingly anti-worker culture.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/03/15/home-depot-founder-virulently-anti-obama-could-race-be-to-blame/

I will shop elsewhere and encourage my friends and family to do the same.

Home depot just went up a notch in my book and I will encourage family and friends to shop there instead of Lowes.

stupid libs... no one can dislike the MIC without being labeled a racist. just another reason to hate obama.

Libs don't have anything else to say other than racist or everything we don't like is racist...

their favorite word. if you don't like his policies, then your a racist. if your against the obamacare bill, then your a stinking racist. if you wanna vote for someone else, then your a ****ing racist. just never ends

Funny thing is most who voted for him voted for him because of his skin color which in and of itself is racist LOL

good point! never thought of that...

Too bad the racism exists and makes the funny not funny anymore.

I have seen non libs, lots of them, call racism when they see it too.

And this sounds like a racist man struggling to find another less ugly reason to express his racism as is seen so much these days.

i'm pretty sure that no one is saying that racism does not exist, we are saying that anything that we do not like about the MIC may not be racism. i didn't GWB either, am i a racist for that?

What this is really about is the libs don't like this dude because he is worth 1.5 billion and supports the "wrong" side!

The leftist position on opposition to Obama is SHUT UP. Their method of making Obama's detractors SHUT UP is to call them racists. It's nothing more than name calling.

I don't care Home Depot has tools that's all i care about.

Pretty much sums up how I feel about it!

so there is a "racist code"

Many don't like which ever president is in office....doesn't mean it has to do with race....could be their policies, their stance on issues, etc.

So if someone doesn't like the next white president, then that is racist?

So was the OP about you?

So why take it personally?

The man appears to have racists reasons for his dislike of the president considering that he supports his policies.

I know.

I am so disappointed.

I like Home Depot but can't spend my money where it may go to white racists.

i feel your a racist for spreading this filth all the time. did you ever think that about 65% of home depot employees are black? have you ever even been in a home depot? your just spreading your liberal rhtoric, without even checking up on anything. spread your filth, you won't have much longer to worry about how everyone is a racist, cause the head muslim will be out of office soon.

i don't think he is racist i think the article is trying to make the readers believe he is.I just think he doesn't like Obama.Come on Home Depot has Dewalt,Milwaulkee and Hilti....omg i just had an orgasm

wtf is artical i had to edit that,man i need to reread what i type....lol

You have the right to "feel" whatever you want.

Doesn't make it right.

4 MORE YEARS BABY!!!! YEA, THAT WILL BE.

I believe you are incorrect here but you have the right to your opinion as do all.

I believe this man is a white racist possibly unbeknownst to himself and he is looking for excuses to express this.

There are lots of white racist who have no clue they are white racists. In a white controlled society as we have had, it is easy for that to happen.