I read The New Yorker every week, and I always turn first to "The Mail." This is the magazine's "Letters to the Editor" column, and other than a Table of Contents, and a "Contributors" list, "The Mail" is the first substantive material contained in the magazine. Of course, those New Yorker covers are often pretty substantive themselves. Witness the cover reproduced above.
Getting back to "The Mail," though, I find that "The Mail" is often quite interesting. Sometimes, it really makes a good point!
In the November 27, 2023, edition (the cover of which is shown above), Virginia Blanford, of Chicago, Illinois, hit the nail right on the head - at least as far as I am concerned. Here's her letter, in its entirety:
Not so long ago, I was writting about the billionaire class, and my commentary was not really too complimentary about those billionaires who have managed to sequester such great personal wealth, at a time then we need to be mobilizing all of our collective assets to deal with the incredibly challenging problems confronting us. I listed global warming, and the need to provide housing, education, and health care for everyone, as examples of the challenges that will require the fortunes of the billionaires to be directed to solving our common problems.
Virginia Blanford has it right, I think, when she says that the CEOs, and others high in the corporate hierarchies, receive the salaries they are paid not really because they "earned" them, but simply because that's what they got paid. Our language should not provide semantic "cover" for those corporate executives who are actually being "overcompensated." As with the billionaires, we need to direct the wealth that is generated by our economy to benefit everyone, not just the very few.
You know... because we are in this together!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!