One small suburb of Los Angeles has arguably the most exclusive postcode in the world – 90210. Hollywood calls it home. The capital of celebrity, a billionaire’s playground, a world where style is status, luxury rules the roost. Who you know, what you drive, and how much you make, is all that really matters. Inside Beverly Hills: The Land of the Rich and Famous s1e1, Channel 4 2021
The average house price in 90210 is $4.5 million. ibid.
Nearly half of Beverly Hills adults are single. There are twice as many women in the market for love than men. Inside Beverly Hills: The Land of the Rich and Famous s1e2, captions
Beverly Hills boasts more millionaires than any other town in the world. ibid.
Appearances are everything in Beverly Hills. And what you drive speaks volumes about your wealth and status. Inside Beverly Hills: The Land of the Rich and Famous s1e3
Gothic fantasy, medieval romance, temples of astrology, oriental exotica, fairytale castles, all made real. Their creator was one of the most extraordinary man of the Victorian age, a blue-blooded aristocrat who supported women’s rights, striking miners, an intellectual who was a ghost hunter and a welsh-speaking Scottish nationalist. Bute: The Scot Who Spent a Welsh Fortune, BBC 2021
It was in the Celtic cousins of Wales and Scotland where Bute made his dreams come true. ibid.
The secret of the Bute family’s immense wealth lay in the alchemy of turning Welsh coal into gold. ibid.
When he was 18 he met the eccentric architect William Burgess. The two shared a passion for medieval art and design. ibid.
Owners of assets have all made out like bandits. The Decade the Rich Won I, dude, BBC 2022
Bailout: ‘The rich survived and got even richer.’ Bailout to UK banks: £124 billion. ibid.
Google £395m, estimated corporation tax £6m; Facebook £175m, estimated corporation tax £238,000; Amazon £3.3b, estimated corporation tax £0; Starbucks £398m, estimated corporation tax £0. ibid.
World leaders were plotting an exit from the pandemic. But our prime minister walking talking about the 2008 crash. The Decade the Rich Won II
Printing money: ‘Only game in town’. ibid.
Total Bank of England Quantitative Easing August 2016: £445 billion. ibid.
QE benefited the richest the most … It is the top one or five per cent who have benefited the most. ibid. Paul Marshall, Marshall Wace LLP
Britain’s economy is producing more billionaires than ever. ibid. caption
Uber drivers in the UK are not alone. Protests spring up around the world. ibid.
Total Bank of England QE March 2020: £645 billion. ibid.
Super-rich Russians like Roman Abramovich have become part of British life. But the war in Ukraine has ended the UK’s love affair with wealthy Russians and their cash. We’ve been investigating how Britain’s most famous Russian made his money. We uncover new details about Roman Abramovich’s murky past. And we reveal how he really made his fortune. Panorama: Roman Abramovich’s Dirty Money, Richard Bilton reporting, BBC 2022
Roman Abramovich has pumped £1.5 billion of his own cash into Chelsea, buying success on the peach. He was one of the super-rich Russians who were welcomed into the UK. ibid.
1992: Russian detectives are investigating the alleged theft of a trainload of diesel. Roman Abramovich is the main suspect … ‘Abramovich personally met the shipment and using forged documents had it rerouted to Riga where the diesel oil was sold … It would be a multi-billion-dollar rip off and would make his fortune. ibid.
A giant oil company called Sibneft was formed. It was then auctioned off. But the auction was rigged so Roman Abramovich would win. ibid.
Most of the money borrowed by Roman Abramovich to buy the new oil company came from the Russian government. ibid.
It was the Russian people who were ripped off by the rigged Sibneft auction. ibid.
He sold the company back to the Russian state for a staggering $13 billion. His corrupt Sibneft deal is where his fortune comes from. ibid.
These are the playgrounds of the rich and famous. Destinations that sparkle with more glamour and sex than anywhere else. Playgrounds of the Rich and Famous: The Hamptons, Channel 5 2022
100 miles east of Manhattan is a collection of towns and villages stretching along the Atlantic coast. Welcome to the Hamptons. What used to be fishing and farming communities became the coastal escape for New York’s wealthiest families in the late nineteenth century. ibid.
Beachfront homes on the Hamptons can cost as much as $175 million. ibid.
But the numbers were also having a strange and perverse effect on New Labour’s vision of a freer and more open Britain. They were in fact creating a more rigid and stratified society. At the heart of this was Education and the league tables for schools. The tables showed parents which were the best-performing schools and which were the worst ones. The government said that this would incentivize the less successful ones to compete and improve their services. And then standards would rise across the country. In fact the very opposite happened. Rich parents moved into the areas of the best schools which then caused house prices to spiral, keeping the poor out. And nearly all schools taught their pupils only those narrow facts they would need to answer in exams. And so would help the schools rise up the league tables. What was lost was the wider education that would help the poorer children rise up in society. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot 2007
In 2006 a series of reports made it clear that there was a definite link between the government’s policies in Education and the rise of social segregation based on wealth. This has contributed to a much wider problem. Social mobility in Britain has now ground to a halt. ibid.
In Russia that same dream seemed to have led to disaster … Russia had been taken over by a small group called the oligarchs who had looted the country of much of its wealth … No-one believed in communism or democracy any longer … They had been promised a democracy but what they got was chaos and corruption on a vast scale. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head VI Are We a Pigeon? Or Are We Dancer? ***** BBC 2021
Extreme poverty increases as billionaires’ fortunes balloon by $2.7 billion-a-day.
The richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70 per cent of Britons.
The richest 1% have pocketed $26 trillion (£21 trillion) in new wealth since 2020, nearly twice as much as the other 99 per cent of the world’s population, an Oxfam report reveals today.
Survival of the Richest highlights how extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years.
It shows that the 1% are getting an ever-greater share of the world’s resources, despite already capturing around half of all new wealth during the past decade. In the two years up to December 2021, the 1% grabbed almost two-thirds (63 per cent) of the $42 trillion (£34 trillion) of new wealth created.
The report is published as elites gather in the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the opening day of the World Economic Forum. Inequality is expected to be high on the agenda following the World Bank’s announcement last year that global progress in reducing extreme poverty has come to a halt amid what it expects to be the largest increase in global inequality since World War II. Oxfam online report 16th January 2023, ‘Richest 1% grab nearly twice as much new wealth as rest of the world put together’
We need redistribution of wealth in this country because it’s all being stored by the people at the top and it’s all being taken away from the people at the bottom. Mick Lynch, RMT general secretary
The rich individuals are increasingly hoarding everything. If the billionaires want to go to space, they could at least leave their money on Earth to solve the critical Earthbound problems. We now have an estimated 2,775 billionaires with a combined net worth of around $13.1 trillion. I have it on good authority that you don’t need more than $1 billion to live comfortably. Even if every billionaire kept $1 billion, that would leave around $10 trillion for ending hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction. We should be taxing the vast and rapidly growing billionaire wealth to help finance a civilized world. Jeffrey Sachs, speech UN Food Systems Pre-Summit 27th July 2021