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The Rich Got Richer

From the Street...

The richest Americans are getting richer, according to the latest release of the Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Americans. At a combined wealth of $1.37 trillion, the 400 richest Americans saw their wealth increase by 8% over last year.

Hurrah!

But on the downside, the market for movie stars is collapsing!

Today the actors who used to make $15 million are making $10 million. The filmmakers who used to make $10 million are making $6 million.

And why have salaries for all varieties of Hollywood "talent" declined? Some people blame a 25% decline in DVD sales, and many Hollywood insiders look all the way back to the writers' strike in 1988 as an epiphany for studio moguls, who suddenly realized that money could be made without any talent whatsoever, and the first "reality shows" were born.

But whatever the root-cause or causes may be, the no-talent paradigm of Survivor Vanuatu now extends all the way to major releases!

The end result is a huge recalibration of the money being paid out to talent, especially in an era where a surprisingly large percentage of the biggest hit films, from "Up" to "The Hangover" to "Star Trek" and "Transformers," are star-free movies, potential franchises that involve interchangeable parts.

And when even movie stars have been degraded into "interchangeable parts"...

What kind of individuality remains for you and me?

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    And the poor got poorer! (5.00 / 1) (#1)
    by Jacob Freeze on Sat Sep 25, 2010 at 05:20:01 AM EST
    The percentage of Americans struggling below the poverty line in 2009 was the highest it has been in 15 years, the Census Bureau reported Thursday, and interviews with poverty experts and aid groups said the increase appeared to be continuing this year.


    According to John Nellis of The World Bank, (5.00 / 1) (#2)
    by Edger on Sat Sep 25, 2010 at 03:38:46 PM EST
    Muscovites say:

    "Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie."

    "Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true."

    The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I'll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun "to normalize the unthinkable."

    [snip]

    America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented amount of Americans living in dire straights and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

    The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50 percent of U.S. children will use food stamps to eat at some point in their childhoods.  Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day.  In 2009, one out of five U.S. households didn't have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24 percent, as the hunger rate among U.S. citizens has now reached an all-time high.

    We also currently have over 50 million U.S. citizens without health care.  1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32 percent increase from 2008.  As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60 percent of them, and over 75 percent of the medi