Just A Common Soldier by A. Lawrence Vaincourt with Tony Lo Bianco

Just A Common Soldier 

by A. Lawrence Vaincourt with Tony Lo Bianco

Click on picture to watch inspiring video

All The People Who Dislike Us

All The People Who Dislike Us

by Bryan J. Neva, Sr.

Don't worry about all the people who dislike us; concentrate on God who loves us!

People come in and out of our lives all the time: one week they're our friends, and the next week they're our enemies. It's rare to find a true and devoted friend who'll stick by us through thick and thin; it's even rarer to go through life without making enemies. And if we dwell on it too much, it’s quite natural to start questioning ourselves by asking, “What did I do wrong?” or “Did I say something wrong?”

Most people become cynical and develop defense mechanisms so people can't hurt them. They become self-centered, materialistic, and shallow. So it's helpful to remind ourselves that we’re all a work-in-progress; there’s nobody who’s perfect, and anyone who starts judging others doesn’t have the humility to see their own faults. Jesus taught, “Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Luke 6:41). You could be the best human being in the world, and there would still be those who dislike you. We live in a broken world where hate, indifference, and selfishness live alongside love, kindness, and generosity.

So we should try not to worry too much about all the friends who abandoned us or all the people who dislike us; instead, we should concentrate on God who loves us!  We should all try as much as we're able to completely trust God and not people in everything we do and say. It'll give us peace-of-mind when we put God first, others second, and ourselves third. We should all try as much as we're able to be patient, humble of heart, and forgiving of others. We should all try as much as we're able to completely trust in God and not in ourselves or others. Because it's simply NOT possible to please everyone, but it IS possible to please God. The only way we could ever get most people to like us is to do nothing, to say nothing, and to be nothing! But then we’d no longer be the unique human beings that God created us to be; we wouldn't be able to become the best version of ourselves.

It's also important to keep in mind that it really doesn't matter whether or not others LIKE you or how THEY treat you, but whether or not YOU LIKE YOURSELF and how YOU treat others! There are many reasons for other people's unfriendly and unkind behaviors. You can only try to positively influence others, but you can't control others! How others behave is ultimately their responsibility, not yours! YOU are only responsible for YOUR behavior, NOT other people's behavior. 

Think about this, Jesus was the perfect human being and what did the world do to him? Jesus even warned his disciples, "If the world hates you, remember the world hated me first. If people did wrong to me then they'll do wrong to you too." (John 15:18, 20). St. John wrote, "Don't be surprised if the world hates you!" (1 John 3:13). And St. Paul wrote, "Indeed, all who want to live good and righteous lives will be mistreated." (2 Tim 3:12).

It's counterintuitive, but for many and varied reasons people in general dislike those who strive to live good and decent lives. The old cliché, "No good deed goes unpunished!" is quite true. It's amazing how many famous and wealthy people who live sinful lives are venerated as secular saints. Jesus warned of this too, "If you belonged to the world, the world would love you."  (John 15:19). 

People will reject you, betray you, abandon you, and mistreat you; don't treat them the same way: just forgive them and continue to love them as Jesus described in his Sermon on the Mount in in Matthew chapters 5-7 and St. Paul described in I Corinthians chapter 13. So if others are unfriendly, rude, hateful, or disrespectful to you, then return love, kindness, blessings, and prayers instead. When our lives are over, it really won't matter how many friends we had, but whether or not we were a friend to others (especially to those who are society’s outcasts).

I think Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta said it best:

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self-centered; forgive them anyway. 

If you are kind people may accuse you of selfish ulterior motives; be kind anyway. 

If you are successful you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget about tomorrow; do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough; give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway.   

Something is Wrong - And It's Holding Us Back! by Allen Laudenslager & Bryan Neva

Something is Wrong - And It's Holding Us Back!
by Allen Laudenslager & Bryan Neva

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in his annual letter to investors on April 4, 2017, said he has high hopes for the U.S. economy but warned, "Something is wrong - and it's holding us back!"

Dimon is absolutely right that something is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. economy. Our economy has been growing much more slowly in the last sixteen years than in the previous 50 years as shown in the chart below. From 1948 to 2000, real per capita GDP grew 2.3%; whereas from 2000 to 2016 it only grew 1%.

Household incomes in 2016 were 2.5% lower than they were in 2000, and the middle class has actually shrunk. The middle class was 61% of the population in 1971; today it's only 50%. And believe us, they didn't move into the upper class as research has shown that social mobility (those moving from the middle to the upper class) has declined by 20% since 1980.

The Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) has declined for men (ages 25 to 54, the prime working ages for men) from over 96% in 1968 to 88% today. (See chart below.) This is way below the LFPR of most developed countries today. And if you factor in the number of discouraged workers who've left the labor force entirely, our unemployment rate is actually double or triple the official 4.4%.

This lack of economic growth and opportunity in the U.S. has led to anger and frustration among the American people evidenced recently by the populist election of President Donald Trump in November 2016 and the strong polarization between liberals and conservatives. Americans are angry at politicians and government bureaucracy; they're angry at Corporate America; they're angry at our educational institutions for the exorbitant costs and not preparing them for the job market; they're angry about illegal immigration and the abuse of the H-1B visa program by high-tech companies as these are taking jobs away from U.S. citizens; they're angry about the double standard of the rule of law: one for the rich, powerful and special interest groups, and another for the rest of us; they're angry about the lack of job opportunities for their children; they're angry at the exorbitant cost of healthcare in our country; and they're angry at each other thinking all this is the fault of the left or the right.  

Dimon wrote further in his letter to investors, "We need coherent, consistent, comprehensive and coordinated policies that help fix these problems. The solutions are not binary — they are not either/or, and they are not about Democrats or Republicans. They are about facts, analysis, ideas and best practices (including what we can learn from others around the world)."

Dimon's observations are correct but we believe these disjointed, inconsistent policies of the government can be traced to the inordinate influence of corporate lobbying and donations to political parties and candidates. The founding fathers had a deep distrust of corporations and originally limited their formation and size exactly for these reasons. In the case of Jamie Dimon, his statement is akin to the pot calling the kettle black as Big Banks like JPMorgan Chase have substantially benefited from all the legal financial loopholes they've lobbied for.

Rana Foroohar, who is the Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at the Financial Times, in her 2016 best-selling book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, makes a compelling case about why Capital Markets no longer support business, and that Finance and not just poor economic theory is mostly to blame for our current economic problems. She makes a point that from Presidents Carter through Obama, most Presidents have slowly deregulated the Financial Services sector of our economy. She also argues that the Dodd-Frank law, enacted after the 2008 financial meltdown, made everyone feel a bit better, but didn't really change the way the Big Banks and Wall Street operate due to so many loop-holes written into the law (mostly by their lobbyist).  This is a prime example of crony capitalism hard at work!  She argues that only by enacting new, stricter laws and regulations can America break the stranglehold the Big Banks and Wall Street have over our economy.

In a note in the 2017 paperback edition of the book, the Author writes:

President Trump has sold the American people on any number of falsehoods—that immigration is a leading cause of our economic woes, that globalization can be curbed and that tax cuts for the rich will lead to greater prosperity for all. Despite these untruths, the President’s unprecedented rise to power from political no man’s land was fueled by a fundamental grasp of our nation’s central economic dilemma: there is no room on Wall Street for Main Street. 

The current economic “recovery” period, which has been underway since 2009, is a sham. GDP growth is anemic. Corporate debt and leverage are at record levels and stock price indices have shattered past peaks. Scarier still, the top 1 percent of Americans have captured 52% of real income growth since 2009. For the towering glass financial castles of the financial elite, yes, wealth has been restored. But for the vacant store fronts, the abandoned warehouses and condemned homes of the forgotten makers of the American economy, the nightmare of the 2008 financial crisis has never ended. 

In 2008, the United States experienced the biggest market meltdown since the Great Depression. NOW, NEARLY A DECADE later, the key lessons of that financial crisis still remain unlearned—and our financial system is more vulnerable than ever. Many of us know that our government failed to fix the banking system after the subprime mortgage crisis. But what few of us realize is that the majority of the financial regulations promised after the 2008 meltdown were either not passed, or are in danger of being repealed by the Trump White House and a Congress bought and paid for by Wall Street. 

Dr. Mark Mizruchi, and Dr. Howard Kimeldorf, Sociology Professors from the University of Michigan, in their article published in 2005 in the Journal Political Power and Social Theory titled, “The Historical Context of Shareholder Value Capitalism” offer an explanation of the rise in prominence of Institutional Investors and Securities Analysts as a function of the changing political economy throughout the late 20th century. The crux of their argument is that their rise in prominence can be credited to three significant forces: organized labor, the state, and banks. The roles of these three forces were abdicated and can no longer keep corporate abuse in check.

They write, “Without the internal discipline provided by the banks and external discipline provided by the state and labor, the corporate world has been left to the professionals who have the ability to manipulate the vital information about corporate performance on which investors depend.” In laymen's terms, the fox has been guarding the henhouse.

We believe there are two fundamental issues here. First, despite what the Supreme Court has ruled, corporations are not people! (When was the last time you saw a corporate officer go to jail for the misdeeds of their company?) Rather they're an aggregation of people with many of the drawbacks of a mob and none of the strengths of an individual. Second, the concept that shareholder value is the single measure of a company’s success. It's not! Rather, stakeholder value is the measure of a company's success. (We've written in depth about this previously.) When the Big Banks, Wall Street, or Corporate America don't share the wealth with Main Street America, our economy as a whole suffers.

There is an old military aphorism, “The troops do what the commander checks,” used to remind military leaders they need to check that key things are being done by their troops. It can also illustrate why our economy is in such disarray. Government regulations are the "commander's checks" on business. And with corporate efforts to tailor those regulations to enhance the industry's profits, either the checks are not being done or the government is checking the wrong things. Government regulations are supposed to be intrusive! They're supposed to help ensure that business doesn't harm society as a whole - sometimes at the expense of profits. 

24 Things Dying People Wished They'd Done Differently

24 Things Dying People Wished They'd Done Differently
by Bryan J. Neva, Sr.

In his book Resisting Happiness, Matthew Kelly writes about a time he was performing consulting work for a hospital. He spontaneously held an informal focus group with several of the hospital's hospice care nurses. He asked them, "When people are dying, what do they talk about?"  The nurses said that when people are dying they often talk about how they wished they'd lived their lives differently. Here's a list of 24 things dying people wished they'd done differently:

1) I wish I had the courage to just be myself.
2) I wish I had spent more time with the people I love.
3) I wish I had made spirituality more of a priority.
4) I wish I had not spent so much time working.
5) I wish I had discovered my purpose earlier.
6) I wish I had learned to express my feelings more.
7) I wish I had not spent so much time worrying about things that never happened.
8) I wish I had taken more risks.
9) I wish I had cared less about what other people thought.
10) I wish I had realized earlier that happiness is a choice.
11) I wish I had loved more.
12) I wish I had taken better care of myself.
13) I wish I had been a better spouse.
14) I wish I had paid less attention to other people's expectations.
15) I wish I had quit my job and found something I really enjoyed doing.
16) I wish I had stayed in touch with old friends.
17) I wish I had spoken my mind more.
18) I wish I hadn't spent so much time chasing the wrong things.
19) I wish I'd had more children.
20) I wish I had touched more lives.
21) I wish I had thought about life's big questions earlier.
22) I wish I had traveled more.
23) I wish I had lived more in the moment.
24) I wish I had pursued more of my dreams.

All these dying people lacked the one precious resource each of us still have...time! So here's the question that begs asking: what's stopping you from doing all the things you wished you could do?

How to run a company with (almost) no rules by Ricardo Semler (TED 2014)

How to run a company with (almost) no rules
by Ricardo Semler (TEDGlobal 2014)

Why you should listen

After assuming control of Semler & Company (Semco) from his father in 1980, Brazil's Ricardo Semler began a decades-long quest to create an organization that could function without him, by studying and then implementing what could best be called "corporate democracy", allowing employees to design their own jobs, select their supervisors, and define pay levels. He has then applied the same principles to education, banking and hospitality. All with very good results. 

He's now promoting the idea of designing organizations -- companies, schools, NGOs -- for wisdom. With a question as a starting point: If we were to start from scratch, would we design organization X the way we have done it?

What others say

“Business plans are just wishful thinking. Have you ever seen one that says, 'I’m going to go up 5% and then down -14%'? Because that's what happens in practice.” —

LA LA Land: Ambition vs. Love

LA LA LAND: Ambition vs. Love ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
by Bryan J. Neva, Sr.

"LA LA Land" is a romantic musical drama released in August 2016 starring Ryan Gosling, as an aspiring jazz musician and entrepreneur, and Emma Stone, as an aspiring actress, who meet and fall in love in Los Angeles, California. The title refers to the the city and also to those who are somewhat out-of-touch with reality. The film went on to win six Academy Awards (including best director, best actress, and best song). It was also financially very successful too as it earned over $430 million (and counting) on a meager budget of just $30 million. 

The plot of the movie revolves around the struggle between ambition and love; how much are the characters willing to sacrifice to realize their dreams? They're both so tempted by the allure of fame and success that they have to learn the hard way that those things won't bring you lasting happiness. The plot has been repeated over and over again in the movies for years, but this film masterfully takes it to another level. It's a reflection of life itself as people will sacrifice everything to achieve their dreams including true love. I highly recommend you see the movie and take to heart the lessons learned.  

Chobani's billionaire founder on creating jobs in America by Steve Kroft, CBS 60 Minutes

Chobani's billionaire founder on creating jobs in America

Hamdi Ulukaya built the best-selling yogurt brand in the U.S. after coming here 23 years ago. Today, 70% of Chobani employees are American born, 30% are immigrants and refugees

• 2017Apr 09
• CORRESPONDENTSteve Kroft

The following is a script from “Chief of Chobani,” which aired on April 9, 2017. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Michael Rey and Oriana Zill Granados, producers.

At a time when Americans are debating whether immigration and refugees are a good thing or a bad thing for the country, it is sometimes noted that Tesla, Google, eBay, and Pepsi Cola are all either founded by or currently run by immigrants, and, in one case, a refugee. It’s a reminder that foreigners don’t always take jobs from Americans, sometimes they create them. And of all the success stories none seems more relevant to the current debate than the tale of Hamdi Ulukaya, who came here from Turkey 23 years ago on a student visa with almost no money. Today, he is a billionaire who has changed American tastes with his Chobani yogurt, resurrected the economy in two communities, and drawn praise and some hostile fire for the way he’s done it.

Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya

 CBS NEWS

He is a familiar, paternal presence on the factory floor, where everyone calls him Hamdi.

Hamdi Ulukaya: Hey brother, how you doing?

He oversees every detail of a product line that barely existed a dozen years ago.  Greek-style yogurt -- a thicker, tangier version of the dairy product that Ulukaya popularized here and named Chobani. It’s now the best-selling brand in America.

Steve Kroft: What is the word, “Chobani,” mean?

Hamdi Ulukaya: It means shepherd.

Steve Kroft: Shepherd?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Shepherd. It’s a very beautiful word. It represents peace. And it meant a lot to me because, you know, I come from a life with shepherds and mountains and all that stuff.

Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya samples yogurt

 CBS NEWS

His family raised goats and sheep and made cheese and yogurt in a small Kurdish village in Eastern Turkey. During the summer months, they would move to the mountains and graze their flock under the stars. He says he was born on one of those trips but he doesn’t know the date or the year.

Steve Kroft: So how did you come not to know your birthday?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Yeah, in the old days, you know-- the nomads they didn’t deliver babies in the hospitals.

“[Chobani means] shepherd. It’s a very beautiful word. It represents peace. And it meant a lot to me because...I come from a life with shepherds and mountains and all that stuff.” Hamdi Ulukaya

Steve Kroft: Midwives?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Midwives, yeah. They would register when they come back. The registration officer would put everybody in January. Says it’s easy for math. Like, 70 percent of our town at that time, born in-- somehow in-- January. I’m January 20th.

Hamdi Ulukaya: This reminds me of home.

He came to the U.S. at 22, a passionate, idealistic student who had gotten in trouble with Turkish authorities for writing articles sympathetic to the Kurdish rights movement. He was hauled in for questioning and decided it might be a good idea to leave.

Steve Kroft: Did you speak any English when you came?

Hamdi Ulukaya: No.

Steve Kroft: None?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Zero

Steve Kroft: No family, no--

Hamdi Ulukaya: Nothing. Nothing.

Steve Kroft: No friends?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Nobody. No.

It took him a year to find his footing in upstate New York where he spent the next decade finishing his studies, working on a dairy farm and starting a modest feta cheese business here one day he spotted an ad.

Hamdi Ulukaya: It said, “Fully equipped yogurt plant for sale.” And it has a picture in front. It said 1920 on the back. There was small, small picture of various per-- parts of the plant. And I called the number.

The real estate agent said the 85-year-old factory was owned by Kraft Foods which had decided to get out of the yogurt business.

Hamdi Ulukaya: And I asked for the price. And he says $700,000. I mean, you cannot even get a tank with $700,000. How could this be? So I didn’t ask the second time because I didn’t want him to think that I--

Steve Kroft: Didn’t believe him?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Yeah.

Steve Kroft: Or get him to reevaluate the price?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Yeah, he says, “Oh, maybe-- we’re asking too little.” 

Sensing an opportunity Hamdi set off to the small village of New Berlin, New York, to have a look. There he found the last employees of the last plant in the area closing it down.

60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft interviews Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya

 CBS NEWS

Hamdi Ulukaya: I remember like yesterday. It’s like this sadness in this whole place. Like as if somebody died, like, somebody important died.

Steve Kroft: Two hundred jobs?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Two hundred jobs was gone.

Former employees Frank Price, Maria Wilcox and Rich Lake were among the mourners that day.

Rich Lake: Your whole livelihood’s gone. You don’t really know what you’re gonna do or where you’re gonna go.

Steve Kroft: So in comes this guy. Did you think he was for real?

Rich Lake: Honestly, it was a little farfetched sounding at first. There was a little bit of doubt. At least for me there was. You know, I mean--

Hamdi Ulukaya: It’s OK. I doubted myself too.

He didn’t have any money, but he managed to get a regional bank and the Small Business Administration to split the risk of a million-dollar loan...that put Chobani in business and allowed Hamdi to hire his first five employees four of whom had been let go by Kraft.

Hamdi Ulukaya: And we had no other ideas what we were going to do next.

It would take them two years to come up with a product and figure out how to produce it. Hamdi spent most of his time in the plant, except to grab two meals a day at the local pizzeria owned by another immigrant Frank Baio and his wife Betsey.

Hamdi Ulukaya: This is the only place in my, you know, in my early days of coming here, this is the only place you can come and connect to life again and society and go back to whatever you do.

Frank Baio: And I want to say something, ‘Scuse me if I interrupt you.  Before Hamdi showed up in this town, I was the king.

Steve Kroft: What did you think of his plans?

Frank Baio: Well. let’s put it to you this way: I kind of felt sorry because I don’t think he know what was get into it. I mean, I-- you figure for Kraft to shut it down, who the hell is this guy that he’s gonna open up and make it right, make it going?

Almost all of the early Chobani meetings took place here…along with some small celebrations. Betsey remembers one where Hamdi offered this toast.

Betsy Baio: He said, “Here’s to wishing we could ever make 100,000 cases of yogurt in a week and not worry about the light bill.” I said to my husband, “I’m gonna feel so bad when he loses his shirt ‘cause he’s never gonna sell 100,000 cases in a week.”

Actually it would take only a year. The first order of Chobani yogurt –150 cases-- was delivered to a kosher grocery store on Long Island in October of 2007…no one knew if there would be another.

Hamdi Ulukaya: The store manager called me and said, “I don’t know what you’re putting into these cups. I cannot keep it on shelf. Don’t tell me what you’re putting in there.” At that moment, I knew this was-- like, three months in, this was not going to be about if I could sell it. It was going to be about can I make enough.

It would require more machines, bigger facilities, more milk from the surrounding dairy farms, and a lot more people. Between 2008 and 2012 production of Chobani yogurt grew to as much as two million cases a week, revenues reached a billion dollars a year and the number of employees shot up to 600 ... It’s now roughly a thousand.

Hamdi Ulukaya: Anybody in the community who wanted to work for those years would find a job at Chobani. Anybody, we were hiring. And if they were not working for us, they were working for the contractors that were doing job for us. Because the-- my-- my number one thing is I was gonna hire everyone local before I go outside.

Hamdi’s recruiting effort included a stop at a refugee resettlement center in the city of Utica 40 miles away, where he heard they were having trouble finding people work.

Hamdi Ulukaya: They said, “Well, the language is a barrier. And transportation.” I said, “OK, let’s try some. I will hire translators. And we’ll provide transportation. Let them come and make yogurt with us.

Steve Kroft: And they worked out?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Oh, perfectly. And they are the most loyal, hard, working people along with everyone else right now in our plant in here, we have 19 different nationalities, 16 different translators.

By 2012, the capacity of the plant in New Berlin had maxed out. They were running out of people, running out of milk and running out of room. So Hamdi decided to build a second facility -- the largest yogurt plant in the world, in the town of Twin Falls, Idaho, all based on a sketch he’d roughed out on a napkin at Frank’s pizzeria.

Hamdi Ulukaya: And if you look at the plant and the-- and the napkin, it’s basically the similar-- similar design. The piping in this plant is-- if you put it together-- from here to Chicago and we built them less than a year.

There were some initial growing pains: a shipment had to be recalled because of mold contamination and early production delays necessitated an emergency loan. But the business survived and has thrived in large part because of Hamdi’s competitive nature.

Hamdi Ulukaya: I love innovation, I love competing. I hate my competitors.

Steve Kroft: You hate your competitors?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Of course, I do. I wanna beat them up.

Steve Kroft: You want to make Dannon yogurt and Yoplait suffer?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Back to France. Just kidding aside. What I mean is you cannot be in the world of business-- when you don’t have this consciousness of winning. But in a right way.

Today the Twin Falls plant has 1,000 employees with above average wages and generous benefits. It pumps more than $2 billion-a-year into the regional economy, which is now running at close to full employment. It’s allowed Hamdi to hire fellow immigrants and refugees, not instead of American workers but alongside them.

We met two of them in Twin Falls, sisters, and agreed not to use their names or disclose the Middle Eastern country they fled because they fear reprisals from the human traffickers that separated them from their family then abandoned them as young girls on the street corner in Eastern Europe.

Steve Kroft: How did you manage to get out?

Sister 1: Took us a long time. I prefer really not to talk about it because it is really painful--

Sister 2: It’s painful, yeah.

Steve Kroft: Would you have survived if you had stayed there?

Sister 1: No.

Steve Kroft: You’re sure of that?

Sister 1: Yeah. Definitely. I was not sitting here alive if I was not leaving.

Hamdi Ulukaya: They got here legally. They’ve gone through a most dangerous journey. They lost their family members. They lost everything they have. And here they are. They are either going to be a part of society or they are going to lose it again. The number one thing that you can do is provide them jobs.  The minute they get a job that’s the minute they stop being a refugee.

Hamdi Ulukaya insists he’s not an activist just a businessman.  But the fact that he comes from a Muslim country, supports legal immigration and helps refugees has not been universally popular in Idaho, one of the most conservative states in the country.

During the past election, Chobani was attacked by far-right media, including Breitbart claiming it had brought refugees, crime and tuberculosis to Twin Falls, none of which is true yet both Hamdi and the mayor of Twin Falls received death threats.  

Steve Kroft: One publication had a headline that said, “American yogurt tycoon vows to choke U.S. with Muslims.”

Hamdi Ulukaya: Yeah.

Steve Kroft: People targeted you?

Hamdi Ulukaya: Yeah, It was an emotional time. People, you know, hate you for doing something right. I mean, what can you do about that? There’s not much you can do.

The situation has cooled somewhat and Hamdi enjoys the full support of Idaho’s very popular and very conservative Governor Butch Otter.

Butch Otter:  I think his care about his employees, whether they be refugees or they be folks that were born 10 miles from where they’re working-- I believe his advocacy for that person is no different. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

We traveled with Ulukaya to Europe, where he has made the international refugee crisis the focal point of his personal philanthropy.  He’s donated millions to help survivors like these in Italy.

Hamdi Ulukaya: What’s your name?

...who risked everything fleeing Iraq, Syria and Africa in hopes of finding a better life. He’s also enlisted the support of major U.S. corporations in the cause and pledged to give most of his fortune to charity.

Hamdi Ulukaya: She died?

Refugee: Yes.

Hamdi Ulukaya: And the kids died too?

Hamdi says he had no idea that things would turn out the way they have when he came to America 23 years ago and bought that shuttered yogurt factory in upstate New York. He is now showing his gratitude. A year ago, he gave 10 percent of all of his equity in Chobani to his employees.

Hamdi Ulukaya: It’s not a gift. It’s not a, “Oh look how nice I am.” It’s a recognition. It’s the right thing to do. It is something that belongs to them that I recognize. That’s how I see it.

© 2017 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Steve Kroft (born August 22, 1945) is an American journalist and a longtime correspondent for 60 Minutes. His investigative reporting has garnered him much acclaim, including three Peabody Awards and nine Emmy awards, one of which was an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement.