The Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the United States just came out for 2009. No real surprises. The Waltons are still comfortably in the top 10 but George Soros made it into the top 20 this year, mostly because a number of folks fell off the list. In fact, the total worth of the 400 wealthiest in the United States fell by $300 billion to $1.27 trillion and the worth of the top 20 dropped by nearly 14%. But before you shed too many tears over this, I correlated a list of the top 20 wealthiest in the United States to countries with the closest GDP as I had also done in 2008. Bill Gates still has an equivalent worth equal to the GDP of Cuba (based on 2008 CIA Factbook data).

The net worth of the 20 wealthiest Americans for 2009 ($374.3 billion) is equivalent to the GDP of Belgium. And despite significant losses in the values of their portfolios, the 400 wealthiest Americans for 2009 still total $1.27 trillion which is the GDP of Canada or the combined total GDP of Chile, Ghana, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia or 9% of the $14.15 trillion GDP of the United States.

Please go to justlists.wordpress.com to find the rest of the list of the wealthiest people in the United States (and equivalent country GDPs).

Meet Samantha Kirby on the Phone Forum this Monday (she'll be calling in from Chicago not the desert)

Every Monday night there is a fascinating community meeting near you: as close as your phone, in fact. You can join in from your armchair or your washing-up sink. Better still, thanks to the wonder of the web, you can listen in at any time on your computer or iPod.

It’s like a Tikkun radio show for the first twenty minutes, in which I interview some of the people most interesting to spiritual progressives. Then I unmute the lines and you can offer your own questions and comments to the speaker for their response: the Q and A is sometimes the best part.

There is no phone company charge: the call is free. This is our gift, though, to those who subscribe to Tikkun (only $25 a year, $18 for students, and you can do it online) or join the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), which is a sliding scale fee and is a way to support our work beyond the magazine.

So check out the recordings of past Phone Forums online and if you’d like to be on the conference call itself, please subscribe and just call in (no one will ask if you are signed up, and if you truly can’t afford it, call anyway).

The last two Tikkun / NSP Phone Forums were on vital topics

Over at The Immanent Frame, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer discuss the results of their research on the growing number of Americans professing “no religion.” Hout and Fischer’s study suggests that while institutional affiliation and confessional identification are on the decline, traditional religious belief systems are not. They attribute this dynamic largely to the religious Right’s appropriation of religion as a signifier of identity, leaving centrist and liberal believers out in the cold:

We identified political tension and generational succession as the main sources of the trend away from religious affiliation. In the most recent data – collected in 2006 and 2008, and combined to improve statistical precision – 28 percent of political liberals answered “no religion” when asked what their religion was, compared with 15 percent of political moderates, and 5 percent of political conservatives – a gap of 23 percentage points from left to right on the political spectrum. From these contrasts and other supporting tabulations we concluded that the growing identification between organized religion and a conservative social policy agenda was pushing liberals and moderates with weak attachments away from organized religion.

Continue reading Hout and Fischer’s “Unchurched believers” at The Immanent Frame.