Skip to main content

Jared Kushner & the Meritocracy


Congratulations to Jared Kushner for getting the federal government to cover a well-deserved $800 million loan! This is such a feel-good story, showing our meritocracy at work:
As a child, Jared's family ran a small business of owning 25,000 apartment units. They barely scraped by on less than $100 million income per year. The Kushners were forced to live off of government assistance, via the rent received from their low-income tenants. When it was time to apply for college, Jared didn't have the advantages of other applicants. For example, he wasn't a great student, his GPA was low, and he got a bad score on the SAT. It was only by a stroke of luck that Jared's dad Charles cobbled together a $2.5 million donation to Harvard. Just in time to get him a spot. 
Yet even with a Harvard degree and Ivy League connections, poor Jared didn't find anyone willing to hire him! Except for his dad. So, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps and took an entry-level position as a vice-president for Kushner Companies. Through hard work, plus the fact that his dad Charles was sentenced to federal prison for multiple felonies, Jared quickly rose to become CEO. Jared was, by far, the most qualified among all the children of Charles Kushner (Jared’s only sibling, Joshua, was still a teenager).
It turns out that being CEO for the company your dad owns is not much of a time commitment. So Jared signed up to take classes instead. He completed a law degree as well as an MBA during his first couple years as CEO. Additionally, he worked as an (unpaid?) intern for the Manhattan district attorney while he was CEO. I ask you, how many 26-year-olds can say they did that? (full disclosure: the district attorney Jared worked for was not the same office that arrested and convicted his dad.)
As CEO, through little more than his own sweat and tears, Jared took the small nest-egg of 1 billion dollars he received from Charles, then turned it into 1.1 billion dollars. Minus the $500 million debt he borrowed from the federal government (for a total of approximately $0.6 billion). Not so bad for a hardscrabble kid from New Jersey! Jared has been described as "very smart" by both his father and his father-in-law. He also has either a large or small amount of what is known in the industry as “business acumen.” That, my friends, is how the son of a billionaire from a forgotten corner of Jersey rises from obscurity to become the point person for solving the opioid epidemic, fixing the VA, running the Office of American Innovation, reforming the criminal justice system (here’s looking at you, Charles Kushner!), and creating peace in the Middle East. 
Once Jared entered government, he attempted to not lie on his disclosure forms, but unfortunately he did lie several times (which is a felony, though for the record it is not his fault that this act is classified as a felony). Once they sorted out the things he had lied about, Jared was unfairly forced to turn over control of his company to other family members. So technically speaking, all the work of getting this week’s new capital injection was done by people who are not Jared Kushner. Yet this $800 million subsidized loan only confirms what we already knew about Donald Trump's son-in-law: Jared Kushner has totally earned the level of admiration that everyone has for him.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/kushner-cos-gets-800-million-federally-backed-apartment-loan

Comments

kipaustinhinton said…
Hopefully this will be the end of his family's financial struggles. As children of billionaires they have had to work so hard to make something of themselves in this difficult economy. This is the opportunity they so desperately need.

Popular posts from this blog

translation of the Manu Chao song "Me Llaman Calle"

this is about my translation of the Manu Chao song "Me Llaman Calle." [ video below ] i'm reasonably close to a literal translation, with changes to fit the rhythm and number of syllables per line. "baldosa" is like ladrilla (a brick to build a house) except flat like a tile. based on context, i translate it as "cobblestones." Chao also uses "maquinita," literally "little machine," but this implies a small device in english (a machine that does something, but does not move itself - such as a laminating machine, a blood-glucose meter, or an ATM) - so i use "little engine" instead, to imply movement. the one line i'm not happy with is the translation of "no me rebajo"; if i wasn't worried about rhythm, i would translate it as "it doesn't dig ruts into me." the tricky part is that this word, rut, is almost never used as a present-tense transitive verb in english. we generally use it as a noun (...

Refugees in Europe deserve help, but refugees in U.S. deserve to "be sent back"?

--> September 4, 2015 Hillary Clinton on the refugee crisis in Southern Europe:   “Well the pictures, well the stories, we’ve been watching this terrible assault on the Syrian people now for years, are just heartbreaking. I think the entire world has to come together, it should not be just one or two countries, or not just Europe and the United States. We should do our part, as should the Europeans, but this is a broader, global crisis.   We now have um, more refugees than we’ve had, in many years, I think since the second world war. And as we’ve seen tragically, people are literally dying to escape the conflict in Syria. Uh, I think that the, the larger Middle East, I think Asia, I think everybody should step up and say we have to help these people. And I would hope that, under the aegis of the United Nations led by the Security Council, and certainly by the United States which has been such a generous nation in the past, we would begin to try to...

Should we use a capital framework to understand culture? Applying cultural capital to communities of color

The Acceleration of Metaphorical Capital, from my published article. Copyright Kip Austin Hinton. "Social science research on communities of color has long been shaped by theories of social and cultural capital. This article is a hermeneutic reading of metaphorical capital frameworks, including community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge. Financial capital, the basis of these frameworks, is premised on unequal exchange. Money only becomes capital when it is not spent, but is instead invested, manipulated, and exploited. Metaphorical capitals have been criticized as imprecise, falsely quantitative, and inequitable. Some research assumes that, rather than reinforcing economic class, metaphorical capital somehow nullifies class or replaces economic capital. Yet marginalized students, by definition, have been excluded by dominant culture. Compared to low socioeconomic status (SES) students of color, high SES students have a wealth of capital, in all forms. Metaphorical ca...