The haves and the have yachts- "There is a great deal of money sloshing about"

[Jcrowley]

"Le Pretre Marie," by surrealist Rene Magritte, sold last month at Christie's auction house in London for about $10 million, far above the estimates.

For London's New Super-Rich, No Whim Need Go Unfulfilled
By Mary Jordan and Karla Adam
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 8, 2007; Page A01


LONDON -- They call themselves "the haves and the have yachts": rich London bankers and traders who drop tens of thousands of dollars for an evening of cocktails and hire "personal concierges" to get their girlfriends dresses like those worn by movie stars.

Long a hub for the world's ultra-rich, London has just welcomed an unprecedented number of newcomers into those ranks. Analysts here estimate that London's financial stars were paid a total of $17 billion in annual bonuses in recent weeks -- including more than 4,200 people who received bonuses of at least $2 million each, on top of salaries already sagging under the weight of zeros.

"There is a great deal of money sloshing about," said Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, noting that 15 years of uninterrupted growth in one of the world's most open economies has set London's financial sector swaggering.

<snip>

Quintessentially has handled requests for an elephant-shaped cake studded with rubies and emeralds, and a parachute trip over Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border in southern Africa. Simpson explained it this way: "The adrenaline rush you get from making a 10 million-pound bonus is the same as falling off a cliff at 3,000 feet."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/07/AR2007030702643.html?referrer=email



Cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently adding a million babies and migrants each week. Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950. According to the Financial Times, China in the 1980s alone added more city dwellers than did all of Europe (including Russia) during the entire nineteenth century.
In this process of rampant urbanization, the planet has become marked by the runaway growth of slums, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. UN researchers estimate that there were at least 921 million slum dwellers in 2001 and more than 1 billion in 2005, with slum populations growing by a staggering 25 million per year.

Today, new arrivals to the urban margin confront a condition that can only be described as marginality within marginality, or, in the more piquant phrase of a desperate Baghdad slum dweller quoted by The New York Times, a "semi-death." An International Labor Organization researcher has estimated that the formal housing markets in the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock; out of necessity, people turn to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks. These are moves of sheer survival. And because the geographic location of slums is becoming more and more marginal, the destructive power of natural elements leaves today's slum residents in an ever more vulnerable state.

http://www.orionsociety.org/pages/om/06-2om/Davis.html

[AX10]

1. If someone wants to pay 8 figures for some painting, that is there right.

I believe that art is subjective. Some people like some things and they don't like other things. I would not have paid 1 cent for that thing pictured above.

I have to ask though, how did they get that much monet...I mean..."money" to piss away in the first place?

[Jcrowley]

2. No

We're talking privilege here. Grotesque opulence.

Rights are things like food, shelter, clothing, health care, diginity and so on. People who are involved in buying million dollar paintings are involved in privilege and are looting others lives and destroying their basic human rights.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

3. Besides, a Magritte belongs in a museum. -nt

[Kurovski]

5. I agree with you there,

and fortunately so have many wealthy patrons of the arts throughout history.

Some people believe wealth is a reason to indulge one's self endlessly and conspicuously, while the best-- those with character and self-respect, those with a sense of responsibility and humanity, will see it as a way to improve the world.

[blondeatlast]

6. Yep--some filthy-filthy-filthy rich slimeball has "The Scream" on his or her

wall in a huge closet in an immense mansion.

You know said scumbag paid an obscene sum to have it stolen and there's no way in hell they can ever let it see the light of day again.

Absolute tragedy and completely dspicable.

[Kurovski]

7. I thought it had been returned.

But there are three versions of the painting, and I may be thinking of a different theft.

Edit: Here we go...I guess it's back, and there were two different thefts.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-08-31-scream-recovered_x.htm

[blondeatlast]

8. That's a relief! Thanks for the update--perhaps I ought to read the news more often...

;)

[Double T]

4. The world economies will eventually fall apart thanks to these.......

filthy, arrogant greed mongers. I'll be glad to open the windows for them when they jump.