Beijing Versus the Billionaire

But Thaksin, a self made billionaire, allowed his greed and huge electoral successes to get the better of him.

The populist billionaire and former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, appeared to be different.

The insider trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam, a billionaire hedge fund manager, has now begun.

The one thing that seems certain from the upcoming vote is that barring any last minute surprises the billionaire Berlusconi will re assert his hold over Italian politics. In fact, he has been Italy s true ruler for the past 13 years.

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens, a famous convert to environmentalism, drafted a plan (which he named after himself) to increase America s reliance on renewables.

Egyptians witnessed the most unexpected verdict in the history of their judiciary system Billionaire Hesham Talaat Moustafa, along with his hired hitman Mohsen El Sokary, have both been sentenced to death for their roles in the murder of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tameem.

But a few vulture funds most notoriously the hedge fund Elliott Management, headed by the billionaire Paul E. Singer saw Argentina s travails as an opportunity to make huge profits at the expense of the Argentine people.

Impossible? The Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawaris is currently negotiating with the owners of two Greek islands a plan to resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees and put them to work building homes and infrastructure.

Since 2003, when the billionaire oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested for alleged embezzlement and fraud after he dared to support Putin s political opponents Russia s elite has been largely brought to heel.

The billionaire investor Warren Buffett argues that he should pay only the taxes that he must, but that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that taxes his income at a lower rate than his secretary is required to pay.

These negotiations have been ongoing, and India s ONGC, in alliance with Mittal Energy, part of the Mittal companies run by Indian billionaire Lakshmi Mittal, is tipped to get the right of first refusal for a number of blocks.

Rouhani s relations with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and other security forces are of more immediate concern. Last month s unceremonious killing of a billionaire businessman detained by security forces on corruption charges seemed to reflect the tacit division of power between the president and Iran s security apparatus.

As late as this past May, the FDP defended the ownership rights of US billionaire Christopher Flowers, a major stockholder in the failed German bank Hypo Real Estate, which was saved from oblivion by state guarantees worth more than 100 billion of taxpayers money.

But who are all those people wildly cheering for the billionaire s dream, on of all days the anniversary of Martin Luther King s speech? They are almost uniformly white, largely middle aged and above, and for the most part far from wealthy.