GOLDMAN Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein has warned his employees to avoid high-profile spending, as The Post reported — but his wife evidently didn't get the memo.
Laura Blankfein and her friend Susan Friedman, wife of another Goldman honcho, Richard Friedman, caused a huge scene at Super Saturday in the Hamptons last weekend when they arrived at the event before the noon start time and balked at waiting in line with the other ticket-holders.
“Their behavior was obnoxious. They were screaming,” said one witness. Blankfein said she wouldn’t wait with “people who spend less money than me.”
Another observer said the women were so impatient, it was as if they were waiting on line for a kidney transplant instead of a charitable designer clothing sale.
Friedman shouted at the event organizer, “You have lost so much money because of this … Why should we be treated like the $650 donors?”
Sources said Blankfein and Friedman had bought tables with blocks of tickets going for $833 apiece, as did many of the women who were waiting patiently in line, happy to raise $3.4 million for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.
In the end, the hot-headed duo got in at 12:03 p.m., three minutes after those who arrived before them.
That’s how the winners in this life behave. And they have won. They’ve come out on top of the empty, Darwinian scramble for money that is the basis of American life. That they did so through marriage is utterly beside the point. They succeeded, and in America success is all that matters; and success in America is always determined by one single, exclusive, immutable, ineluctable fact: $$$$$. How you get it is your own business.
These are the kind of contemptible gnats that Americans are implicitly taught to envy, admire, and become. If there was any justice in the world, these people would be shunned, reviled, pelted with dung and reincarnated as worms, but they won’t be. Instead, one of these petulant rumps of humanity will write some goddamn book about helping poor kids or starting a charity, and then Larry King and Oprah Winfrey will slobber all over her as if she was Florence Nightingale or Gandhi, or maybe even Cher.
You know, America is often compared to Rome, but that’s an unfair comparison to the Romans. The Roman aristocracy, unlike our own, had the decency to kill each other off with some regularity. (On a related note, it also occasionally produced writers and scholars of some repute, like Pliny the Elder or Cicero. What kind of intellectual paragons come bubbling out of the froth of our upper classes? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? Fuck that. I want my money back.)
But don’t get me started.
(h/t to Mark Ames at The Smirking Chimp)
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