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No outrage at extravagance of super-rich

Michele Hanson

As megabillionaires throw their money around, why is there no outrage?

ENORMOUS AMOUNTS of money are swilling around. I open a paper in London and on page after page someone is making some whacking great purchase or other: buying a whole football team, the London Stock Exchange, £940 million for a chunk of a TV company, £137 million for a gaming group, $4.2 billion for an airline, the Olympic bill is zooming up to £9 billion, $4.2 billion for PetroKazakhstan, an art collection worth £780 million, £6 billion for a new Airbus, £580 million for MySpace.

Every day, more sickening news appears of someone making, or spending, billions, then, turn the page, and there's starving, raggedy, sick persons scraping around for the odd crust. But there is scarcely a squeak of outrage.

And what are the billionaires spending their money on? Sandstone kitchen worktops, (marble is now common), lifts for cars, gold this and that, private jets, a clutch of classic Ferraris, $2,000 truffle/steak sandwiches, gadgets to turn your home central heating on from your yacht in the middle of the ocean, mansions, and servants.

Not all the rich are grasping and mean, of course, only most of them. But bad luck for my friend, Rosemary. She had a mean one living above her — a pop starlet who played staggeringly loud music at all times of the day and night and almost drove Rosemary round the bend.

Then, one day, the starlet's partner fell asleep in the bath, which overflowed and flooded Rosemary's home, wrecking the bedding, ceiling, carpets, and floor. There was Rosemary on her widow's pension, and there were the upstairs neighbours with their hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, but what a job she had prising an apology out of them.

At last, after months of begging, they awarded her £125 for paint and a new duvet. Rosemary and I would have preferred that they, and anyone similar, have their wealth confiscated, and be confined to a slum dwelling for years on end, but it isn't allowed.

My American cousin came to live in the U.K. 20 years ago and loved it because no one cared about how much you had, or who you were. It was so different from the U.S. What went wrong? — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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