No one should have to apologize for being wealthy, unless they stole the money. I don’t resent a soul who inherited his or her wealth, won the lottery or hit a jackpot in Las Vegas. And I applaud those who earned a fortune by working long and hard.
Bashing rich business people has become our new national pastime. Even TV commentators—many of whom earn a bloody fortune themselves—have the unmitigated gall to criticize someone like Mitt Romney because he made his money by “eliminating jobs.”
Anyone who has even a drop of business sense knows Mitt Romney did not make money by eliminating jobs. He had to take cost cutting measures to save companies from going under or getting them in better shape for future growth. Terminating employees was a means to an end. It happens in business all the time, even when times are good. I was terminated as a reporter for The Daily News in 1981 when the paper was on the verge of folding. The management was just doing its job. The paper survived and so did I.
Mitt, front and center, and former colleagues at Bain clutch money for a photo shoot
Let’s say you employ a gardener to tend to your backyard, a yoga instructor to improve your balance and a dog walker to exercise your beloved Lab. One day you learn your house needs a new roof, which you’ll never be able to afford unless you cut expenses. So you terminate the gardener, yoga teacher and dog walker. They were great employees but your priority is having a roof over your head. You need to get your house in order. Mitt’s compensation was based on getting businesses in order.
Business people are no different than actors, ball players, comedians, doctors, lawyers, architects, you or I. Some of them are superb at what they do and some of them stink. A bunch of them even get paid way more than their talent would seem to merit. But if someone in a position to pay them big bucks wants to pay them big bucks, that’s their business.
Criticize Mitt because you don’t like his waffling about national health initiatives, his seeming lack of connection with the electorate, or his attitude about our military. Criticize him because you don’t think a businessman should be in the White House. But for heaven’s sake, let’s stop condemning, abusing and censuring him because someone thought he did a good enough job to pay him a lot of money.
By the way, please don’t think I’m endorsing Mitt for president just because I’m defending the way he accumulated his wealth. One has nothing to do with the other.
This is a non-partisan blog.
I took an invigorating 2.5-mile walk with Rigby today, in the bitter cold. We were both bundled up, so we didn’t feel the frigid temperature. (Actually, I have no idea whether Rigby felt it, but he didn’t seem to mind, maybe because he’s a dog.)
We were out for over four hours, which gave me a chance to clear my head before it gets crowded with a gazillion details once the “work week” begins.
We walked most of the way on Madison Avenue so I could window shop, one of my favorite pastimes (at least on Madison Avenue, it is.) I noticed a preponderance of orange on the clothes the mannequins modeled in the windows: Orange with purple, orange with red, orange with green, or orange all alone. Bright, clear orange is my favorite color. Actually, my youngest sister adopted it as her trademark color long before I did. Although orange has been showing up all over the fashion industry for a few years now, it seems bigger than ever, maybe because it’s a happy color. And we all need as much happy as we can get.
A man I overheard talking on the phone, in the shoe department at Bergdorf Goodman, could have used a dose of orange.
“What do I want?” he said to the person on the other end, sounding somewhat agitated. “What I want is to find out if you’re okay, if you’re alive, if you need anything,” he said, immediately after repeating the question the person on the other end had obviously asked.
“Why can’t you just ask me when I call: ‘How are you doing, dad?’ Why do you always assume I want something?” he said to his child (I couldn’t tell if he was talking to a boy or a girl child, but it really doesn’t matter. They’re all generally the same when it comes to their complete and utter inability to understand that their parents are people with feelings, that their parents care about them more than anything in the world and really do like to know how they’re doing.) Our kids don’t care how we’re doing. We’re irritating them with our calls and that’s that.
A close FOF friend has given up calling her 26-year-old son, a graduate student, because he never answers his phone. So she’s decided to just text him, his preferred mode of communication. “I swear he wouldn’t know if I was dead as long as someone kept making believe she was his mother and continued texting. “This could go on for years if he didn’t come home for the holidays,” she said. “Even then he might not notice.”
Orange is a hot trend now. Kids who hate to talk to their parents on the phone don’t constitute a trend. They’re a fact of life. By the time they’re FOF, most of them start to develop feelings for us. Hopefully, we’ll all live that long!
I’ll never forget how excited I was to be able to take a science course Pass/Fail. I knew I was smart enough to pass, with minimal effort, but if I had to take the course for a real grade, I’d be lucky to get a grade higher than 75. Science wasn’t my strong suit. The Pass/Fail system doesn’t encourage diligence. It allows mediocrity.
New York City’s public school teachers are all “graded” on the Pass/Fail System, and 98 percent of them “Pass.” The unions wouldn’t have it any other way. While unions were created to protect employees from management abuses and foster equality for all, they now allow far too many poor to average performers to keep their jobs.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his 11th year in office, is determined to change the education system in my hometown and I’m behind him all the way. Public school children must have the opportunity to get the same education as their private school “cousins,” whose parents can afford to shell out $30,000 a year for their elementary school education. Teachers must be graded as they grade their own students and those who fail to make the grades must be send packing.
Proponents of the Pass/Fail principle say it allows people to be more relaxed so they can perform their best, without the pressures of being “graded.” Hooey! Many of our teachers are so “relaxed,” they’re practically asleep, and so are their students, not to mention apathetic or angry. Sure, hard-working go-getters will do their best, even when they’re not being graded, but they don’t grow on trees.
There is nothing like a good teacher, who is not only smart, but also dedicated and diligent. I’ll always remember Professors Sidney Towne and Meyer Stein, who taught in the journalism program at NYU, my alma mater. Sidney was a pushover for pretty girls (he was a grandfatherly type), while Meyer was a stern fellow. But each of them helped give me the groundwork for what would become my career as a writer, reporter and editor.
Kids can’t wait to get to college to experience great teachers. But if the quality of New York City’s teachers continues to go down, students won’t have to worry. They won’t be able to get into college in the first place.
Help! I’m being buried in an avalanche of mailings from AARP/United Healthcare, telling me why I should sign up for their Medicare Supplement plan. Lest you think our health care system is on the way to cutting costs, let me set the record straight. It isn’t. AARP is stalking me–and millions of other Baby Boomers–as we’re about to turn 65 this year. It stands to clean up if we chose its Medicare supplement (provided by United Healthcare) versus plans from numerous competitors, including Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna and Prudential. And it doesn’t intend to let us forget about it, even for one day.
How can a company justify sending me not one, not two, not three, but about 25 thick packets filled with dozens of pages, all saying the same thing? And all within a couple of months. The cost of the paper, printing, collating and stuffing envelopes, as well as mailing and postage, is not insignifant. No wonder our insurance costs are continually rising.
Today, I swear, I received two more identical packges in the mail from AARP, one addressed to me and the other to my ex-husband. Douglas and I have not lived together since 1988. Maybe AARP knows we’re good friends and figured we’d be spending our time discussing Medicare options.
What’s especially ironic about all these mailings is that I decided, months ago, to choose AARP’s plan. I’m actually thinking I may NOT sign up for it, however, in light of all its massive bureaucratic waste.