Forbes 400 and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay.
Money, it’s a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team.
-Pink Floyd, Money

Greetings and welcome back to the Un-Zone, offering the look inside the random mind of a KU Law School student who tends to be verbose with sentences and unrepentant of this supposed failing. For some reason, it's a bad thing to write long sentences. People supposedly have short attention spans. Anything over seven words...forget it. I don't care. I'll continue to write sentences that qualify as paragraphs by most standards.

Forbes Magazine came out with their annual list of the 400 Richest Americans. As usual, the top ten hasn't changed that much. Bill Gates is at the top and the Walton family of WalMart fame hold most of the Top Ten positions. There are many names that people will recognize like Donald Trump, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Phil Knight of Nike, and the number one talk show host, Oprah Winfrey. The collective net worth of the nation's wealthiest climbed $125 billion, to $1.13 trillion. Think about that number. According to the CIA Factbook, the Gross Domestic Product of the US was $11.75 trillion. Their collective net worth is about 10% of the United States' GDP.
And what about Hurricane Katrina? What effects did this natural disaster have on the people who made it to this list? Let's see. Hmm...Micky Arison, head of Carnival Cruises, said the company might lose $24 million from earnings. He's worth $5.8 billion. Donald Newhouse is a media baron of Advance Publications, which counts New Orleans’ Times-Picayune among its broadsheets. He lost 75% of his readership in this paper due to Katrina. Don't be too sad. He has a net worth of $7.5 billion. Craig Neilsen of AmeriStar Casinos would have made it on the list with a net worth of $1 billion, but didn't due to Katrina. To make it on the list, you need to be worth $900 million. Because of the hurricane, his net worth is now only $825 million. Oprah Winfrey had two special episodes devoted to Katrina on location. She got access to the Superdome and showed the hellish conditions. Her friends like Chris Rock and Kelly Preston helped out in the relief effort. The shows were rating hits in the top ten media markets. Her net worth is $1.4 billion.
According to a Forbes article, the rich aren't getting richer than ordinary Americans. Apparently, even ordinary Americans are doing good. Millions own stocks. Real estate values are going up, so Americans have a larger percentage of their net worth in their house, much more than Bill Gates. That's going to make me feel better? Supposedly, wealth is being spread around. It just hasn't been spread to the lower class citizens living in abject poverty. Maybe it has, but it isn't getting to them very well. Geez, if I could only get $32 million for three months of work by tanking a company into oblivion. Enough said. And isn't it nice I can see what sort of houses the rich live in? What resorts they can go to. Or what cars they might buy in the near future.

And this is supposed to make me feel better? This is supposed to make "ordinary" Americans feel better. The message their sending?
Here it is: "Yeah, so these rich people can make googobs of money by screwing over companies and putting thousands out of work, but you've got a lot of money invested in your house, quite possibly the only asset of value you have. And it's hard work to figure out what car to buy and where to go to on vacation. And all those people on the Gulf Coast, we, the rich, feel your pain too. You lost every asset you have and possibly some of your family members. We lost millions and that hurt. But, we still have millions left over to donate to you so you can live a slightly better life than poverty."
What's unsaid is this: "We're going to use this tragedy to make millions or get better ratings. Oh, I'm still rich."

Time to end this screed. That's all for now.

http://www.forbes.com/home/lists/2005/09/19/400-richest-americans-2005-list_05rich400_land.html