Welcome Shareholders!

I'd like to welcome you all to our annual shareholders convention. Shareholders of what you ask? Shareholders of Bank of America, Citigroup, Merril Lynch, Citifield (new baseball park of the New York Mets), and the Suleman Octuplets..to name just a few.

Yup, the stake we share in these very public holdings was not chosen. None of us asked the banks to invest in risky loan programs. None of us asked the Mets to build a new stadium and sell the naming rights to Citigroup (which just received around 30 billion dollars under the TARP fund). None of us asked a 33 year old woman, with questionable mental status, to bear 14 children. The depths of this irresponsibility erode the fibers of our country that were built by hard work and pride.

Nadya Suleman, a 33 year old woman from California is not married and lives at her parents house. She worked at a (ironically) mental health state hospital in California up until a several years ago, when she was injured on the job and received a worker's compensation settlement of over $100,000. She hasn't worked since due to her "disability." What did she do with that chunk of change? Move out of her parents' house perhaps? no. Invest it in furthering her education? no. She spent all that money on freezing her embryos.

Her sperm cocktail resulted in 6 children. I repeat, 6. 6 Kids without a job, a home, a father, etc. So, what better way to remedy the situation but to have 8 more children. As you are well aware, she gave birth to 8 more children in Januay of 2009. Due to the complexity of the delivery and the babies' low birth weight, they've now been in pediatric intensive care for over a month.

For those of you keeping score at home (or even if you are by yourself....citation to Keith Olberman on that one), that makes 14 children, a single mother, no father, and a partridge in a pear tree. Some experts have estimated the cost for the 8 babies in ICU so far to be around $200,000.

Have fun with that California taxpayers! Keep busting your tail at work and watch the taxes dissolve your net pay, while Ms. Suleman plans phase 3 of her birthing plan.

Why is it that this country continues to enable system abusing bottom-feeders like this? And how fitting is it that, while those 8 newborns will be suckling the teet of their mother, the mother is suckling the teet of John and Jane Doe taxpayer.

Obe-City?

As "Auld Lang Syne" chimed in the new year and the emanation of soon-to-be broken resolutions permeated every party, I sat watching the ball drop in Times Square like everyone else. And, like everyone else, I announced my own resolution of eating healthier and dropping a few pounds.

Reading the news the first few days of every year, there are a plethora of stories about weight loss, "biggest losers", and even the urbanized version of going "From Fat to Phat." But this year more than any other, i've read numerous amounts of stories about how fat our children are. That they are the fattest kids in the world, how they don't get any physical activity, and how all they do is eat and text, text and eat. I read so much about childhood obesity that I was ready to drink the Kool-Aid (no pun intended...ok, yes, a pun was intended) on this issue being of "epidemic proportions."

I purposely spent the first 5 days of the new year making an effort to observe kids, observe their activity levels, and to notice what they were eating. What I saw was the vast majority of kids being active, skateboarding, having snowball fights, sledding, and eating fairly well. I thought to myself "where are these huge, inactive, super-sized generation kids that I read so much about?"

Yes, I saw a young girl at Home Depot with her mother that looked significantly overweight. Besides that, the kids appeared to be at a healthy weight. Then, this past Saturday, I attended a swim meet that my two nieces were competing in. There were probably 100 kids at the meet. 90% of these kids were in great shape with the remaining few probably classified as overweight, but even they were racing these swim heats and being active.

Sometimes, it seems like we are inundated with "facts" that we forget to look around us to compile our own representative sample of the areas that we live in. The way the media paints the image of our kids' health, you'd think the sky was falling. Maybe the only thing falling is the credibility of these major news companies. After all, when was the last article you read about how active and healthy nearly 90% of kids are?