that’s rich A Swiss company, Erfolgswelle, will happily research a unique name for your new addition to humankind. Cost? Just $30,000
bucks. Talent agencies no longer just book their clients into arenas and nightclubs. They book their talent into mansions, too. Want a stud like Ed Sheeran singing at your personal shindig? Count on paying somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 for the privilege. Or you can go in a slightly more ambitious direction. You can book a superstar for your own private party and then reserve an entire nightclub as your party site. One club in Dubai even offers a valet service for helicopters. Match that, Manhattan! A really rich life, of course, must have more than parties. Today’s ultra rich have a serious side, too. They like to reflect on the lives they’re leading – and make sure the rest of us realize just how diligently they’ve been reflecting. A company called My Special Book can help here. The expert staff at this global service will actually write your autobiography for you. This book-birthing process typically takes six to ten months – for just around $150,000. And if you’d rather birth a kid than a book, the serve-the-rich crowd has another innovative little service for you. A Swiss company, Erfolgswelle, will happily research a unique name for your new addition to humankind. This name comes guaranteed not to belong to anyone else on Earth. Expect to pay north of $30,000 for your one-of-a-kind moniker. How many people can afford services like these? Researchers at Wealth-X and Sothe-
Killing is not a way of life Read an excerpt at http://davidswanson.org
8 ColdType | March 2015
by’s International Realty have just counted up 211,275 people worldwide with personal fortunes over $30 million. These “ultra high net worth individuals” – the financial industry’s polite label for the filthy rich – typically hold about 30 percent of their net worth in houses, yachts, and other fixed property assets. That leaves a lot of liquid assets sloshing around in their portfolios for renting divas and figuring out what to name their kids. Do these ultras, we wonder, ever stop to think about the millions of people on our planet who can’t even afford to adequately feed their kids? Probably not too often. Fortunately, we have other people on our planet who do think about this stark contrast between the super rich and everybody else – like the folks at the global charity Oxfam. These good people have launched an international Even It Up campaign that’s seeking – through vehicles like taxes on financial speculation and wealth – to put some of those dollars now spent on helicopter joy rides to some more productive uses. More productive uses, I suspect, won’t be especially hard to find. CT Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, edits the inequality weekly Too Much at http://toomuch.org His latest book is “The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class”.
A new book of essays by
david swanson $17.52
(Amazon.com}