Amazing amounts spent on corporate extravagance

Title: TW DREAM SUITE
Source: New York Post
Date: February 10, 2004

From the article:

Call it the Richard Parsons Project.

Though Time Warner cost shareholders billions of dollars with its disastrous merger with AOL, the Time Warner chairman is about to move into the swankiest, and priciest, office space in the city.

Parsons' suite of offices at the twin-towered Time Warner Center, is being built out at a cost of some $25 million and is to be completed next month. The raw space alone would be worth $20 million on the open market.

Also:

The floors will be marble and the paneling made from rare woods, and the office suite will have concierge services, a real estate source said.

Time Warner has bought 800,000 square feet on 15 floors of the 2.7 million-square-foot complex at Columbus Circle - considered the most expensive building in the world, at a price of more than $1.8 billion.

Instead of concentrating those billions of dollars on needless extravagance for a handful of executives, the money could be returned to consumers -- cable TV subscribers and AOL subscribers -- in the form of lower subscription prices. Or it could be used to pay rank-and-file employees more. Instead, it is spent on the elite few for no reason, and the concentration of wealth increases.

Enron represented a pinnacle of corporate extravagance, but thousands of corporations spend untold billions of dollars in their attempt to outspend Enron. These expenditures have no value to anyone but the powerful elite. If that money was instead returned to consumers in the form of lower prices, the price reductions would be substantial -- several thousand dollars per household.