- It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper
middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities
this large sum wouldn't cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
-
- When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole
Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts
as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald
Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
-
- The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie,
Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones
pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
-
- Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
-
- Now comes the politicians's daughter as celebrity. According
to news reports, Chelsea Clinton's wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky
on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily
Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000
apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for
protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as
the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand,
Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor
Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
-
- Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such
an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder
aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of
the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
-
- The American people did not take up a collection to reward
him for his service to them.
- Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving
during his eight years in office?
-
- How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with
an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars)
as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
-
- These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently
asked.
-
- While Chelsea's wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding
cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling
to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local
people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers,
job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa
Roberts' food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house
roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according
to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
-
- The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts' food
pantry has "had to cut back to half rations per person in order to
have something for everyone who needed it."
-
- Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the
starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President
Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless
war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment
of the military/security complex and its shareholders.
-
- The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government
reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama
regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children
in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
-
- The Guardian's reporting relies on a US government report
from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million
people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to
buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
-
- US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said
that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey
for 2010 is released.
-
- Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans
is living on food stamps.
- The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions
of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed
and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay
alive.
-
- The world has not witnessed such total failure of government
since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs
are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down
the drain.
-
- And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
-
- _______
-
-
- Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street
Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, <http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html>HOW
THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.
He can be reached at: <mailto:PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com>PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
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