She likes Cheerios that much we know. But she misjudged Duluth.
Ely has her kind of people, Open, welcoming, unquestioning. It's a natural.
She apparently published a pouting peice in WSJ. Behind a paywall. Ordinary people don't read it. Rupert Murdoch's flagship, along with FOX and NYPost. (Clearly, if wanting even the riffraff to read and know her snit fit dimensions, she'd have been better using the NYPost. Probably, writing for her people, like those in Ely, who dutifully subscribe to WSJ; never mind the prols - aim for Ely.)
But when the mayor of Duluth asked Kathy, "Wa's 'appening," all she said is, "Cheerios go better with milk."
Noblesse oblige has a hair trigger, so take that you rubes, you clowns, you huddled masses without generations of family wealth to heal your sad wounded spirits - something like that along the way to saying, no N.O. for questioning miscreants.
Brooks at Strib wrote:
Finally, the billionaire spoke.
Yes, she admitted, she had been snapping up properties, claiming she wanted to build a few homes for her relatives and spruce up the neighborhood. Besides, she said, all the homes she was bulldozing were "pieces of crap" and full of garter snakes.
In return for jacking up everybody else's property taxes with her inflated purchase prices and unleashing homeless garter snakes on the world, she swore — billionaire's honor — that she had planned to give the neighborhood a nice new coffee shop and maybe some pickleball courts.
Think of the theoretical pickleball courts Duluth could have had. If only they had silently, reverently and unquestioningly let a passing billionaire do whatever she pleased. But Duluth's mild curiosity seems to have soured Cargill on the idea of snapping up an entire 7-mile sandbar.
"The good plans that I have down there for beautifying, updating and fixing up Park Point park or putting up that sports court, forget it," she told the Wall Street Journal. "There's another community out there with more welcoming people than that small-minded community," she said.
Bingo! She does know about, and perhaps treasures, Ely. Help her learn that instead of pissing up a rope in Duluth, she could have her Cheerios in Ely.
Brooks continued:
And then she unleashed the world's most revolting metaphor on an unprepared Minnesota.
Referring to newly elected Duluth Mayor Roger Reinert, who had suggested that residents hold off on selling their homes until Cargill did the polite thing and actually talked to her neighbors, Cargill said: "I think an expression that we all know — don't pee in your Cheerios — well, he kind of peed in his Cheerios right there, and definitely I'm not going to do anything to benefit that community."
Reinert, who was out at 3 a.m. Monday morning, riding along with city plows as they dug out between snow storms, responded Minnesota Nicely by posting a picture of his actual breakfast. It was pancakes. That other expression is not an expression we all know, Kathy Cargill.
Yeah Kathy, pissing up a rope is how we say it. Cheerios are for fourth generation folks who've got it made in grains. And, perhaps if Ely turns inqusitive, there is always a return to roots, La Crosse, WI.
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On the web: "Our company was founded in 1865 on the belief that 'our word is our bond.' It's a tenet that remains at the heart of how we operate today. Shaped by our history, we stay true to the values and ethos of a family company."
"Our word?" That hardly sounds like using an anon LLC to snap up opportunity one property at a time. Doing it silently. But what do I know? Perhaps, just perhaps, what it means is no word, no bond; which seems to fit Kathy's snooty way of behaving.
___________UPDATE____________
This is an image of Kathy Cargill, from an NYPost item:
She looks like a decent enough human being. She's got the money to buy up properties, and the right to do so. Nobody in Duluth has been forced to sell to her. She offers a price, sellers accepted it. Note that her McLauren collection behind her represents more money than 90+% of us likely would earn over a lifetime. The barn she keeps them in could house three homeless families, or more.
Her approach of offended entitlement was her mistake, but she's likely never been called out for it before. It's just been part of things.
What the entire story, and her response to informed inquiry from city officials has led to is something she and spouse, and firm should consider further.
Seeing wealth flaunted, under the name Cargill, in Minnesota, in Duluth from which much grain is shipped leads one with normal curiosity to go to Wikipedia. She has no entry there under her name, or at least none was found by normal web search.
But, there is an entry for Cargill which might have less traffic than otherwise with the lady's real property dealings, and public followup after the front firm's been traced back to her, with some public disapproval, and a part of the firm's entry, in total, from the sidebar, is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill#Criticism
Well, gee. Some find fault, you know, with business as usual. As with Kathy's business, as, perhaps, usual? Being a point of a story not viewed well in media can lead to looking at not just the consequences of the extreme wealth, but to the source and how the firm's business is done, warts and all.
And last point, that barn full of McLauren toys is obsolescent technology, all internal combustion, and Kathy should build another barn and go electric. Or not. It's her cash to spend, bless her and how she chooses. Making waves, in Duluth, is not unnatural. They've waves there at the sand bar every day.