1) Jay-Z

2) Diddy

3) Akon

4) Lil Wayne

5) Dr. Dre

6) Ludacris

7) Snoop Dogg

8) Timbaland

9) Pharrell Williams

10) Kanye West

11) Drake

12) T.I.

13) Swizz Beatz

14) Eminem

15) 50 Cent

16) Young Jeezy

17) Common

18) Soulja Boy

19) T-Pain

20) Lil Jon

21) Gucci Mane

22) Rick Ross

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Topping the list this year is newcomer The New Frontiersman, news staple of the Watchmen Cold War world. The right-wing Frontiersman has accumulated a tremendous following in the last year on the strength of its endless braying about the nation's turn toward socialism. The addition of guest columnist Erick Erickson drove the publication's fourth quarter to record subscription numbers. Additionally, because its wing-nut readership cannot use the Internet with confidence, The Frontiersman's print numbers remain above 2 million. (They have only 1530 Twitter followers.)

After a disastrous 2008, girlie mags surged back last year. Miranda Priestly's Runway remained at top (1.2 million including newsstand) despite increased competition from Mode (900K), which, after Fey Sommers' death, is exceeding expectations even while averting near-disaster high-jink after near-disaster high-jink under the helm of Daniel Bradford. Meanwhile, ageless Erica Kane's Tempo Magazine (355K) continues its endless, nothing-new battle with Nicole "Nikki" Newman's Restless Style (330K) with no end in sight. Making the list, but just barely, is Composure (400K), which saw a recent large surge despite negative publicity from Andie Anderson's hit tell-all memoir, How to Lose a New York Magazine Job in Ten Days, exposing editor Lana Jong's complete lack of journalistic ethics.

Other publications making the list include American Sports Magazine, which, thanks to the experience of Dan Foreman and the pluck of newcomer Carter Duryea, also saw a spike in its ad revenue. In sadder news, both Hush-Hush and the New York Inquirer saw their numbers drop following the deaths of their founders. ("Death" being assumed in the former's case, as Sid Hudgens' body has yet to be found.)

New to this year's list: Rhode Island Slut (210K), the small smut-mag-that-could from the smallest state in the union. Despite wide availability of free porn, Rhode Island Slut has shown that a print publication that remains hyper-focused can achieve relative success. The success of two other highly targeted blue titles, Taint Magazine (182K) and Juggs and Ammo (275K), further evidences the importance of a tight focus. Also, Juggs and Ammo has seen especially strong gains thanks to an atmosphere or right-wing paranoia (see New Frontiersman above).

Comeback title of the year is Particle Magazine (400K). After a disastrous experience with Editor Stathis Borans that almost brought the magazine to bankruptcy, Particle surged back after receiving loads of positive publicity from one-time writer Veronica Quaife's gripping, Oprah-selected memoir of her fantastic dealings with both Borans and Seth Brundle.

The Daily Prophet is the highest profile drop-off this year. The wizarding publication saw the largest readership swing in Fabricated 15 history, from an estimate circ. of "a muggle-ton" last year to less than 50,000 today. Yes, it has the ability to replicate itself without the need for a press–but how much exactly is that worth if everyone reads the Wizzeb on their iWand?

Surprisingly not making the list this year? Former newspaper heavyweights The Daily Planet and The Daily Bugle. Even in the fictional world, apparently, classic daily newspaper publishing is in the sewer. Also, may we suggest Lou Grant focus on growing the quality of his Los Angeles Tribune editorial content instead of leaving filthy messages on our voicemail. Also, Spy dropped off after star writer C.K. Dexter Haven put his column on hiatus to enter sex rehab.

Finally, Fabricated 15 perennial contender The Washington Post (673K) failed to make any gains in the last year despite only-in-fiction stunts like hiring porn-named writers like Woodward and funny characters like "Carl," offering to sell access to corporate interests willing to pay thousands for private dinners with publishers and stocking its online site with plagiarized material. Only in the movies, people!

To qualify for the Fabricated 15, we require that candidates be a fictional print publication, a rule which excludes mythological and folkloric works. Titles must appear in a specific narrative work or series of works. And they must be known, both within their fictional universe and by their audience, for having better long-term prospects than their real-life counterparts.

We reserve the right to bend or break any of our own rules–because we're online, baby. (With (a very few) Apologies to Forbes.)

Abe Sauer has his very own fictional magazine.

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What's more, the big takeaway from this year's billionaires list-that "Asia is leading the comeback" of the global economy, as Cheerleader Steve put it, turns out on closer inspection to involve many of the same forces that led to the great financial calamity of 2008, which claimed the nest eggs of untold ordinary workers and homeowners, and a few billionaire portfolios into the bargain.

"These are paper billionaires," Brookings fellow Homi Kharas told the Guardian about the ballyhooed new class of globalized moguls-noting that they have typically run up their heroic stock gains as financial exchanges in emerging market economies have matured. While much of the new wealth is resource-based and therefore presumably less volatile than the dubious assets involved in the mortgage collapse, there's nonetheless been no shakeout of overall exposure in the global derivatives market, which last year officially passed its one-quadrillion-dollar milepost. All in all, there's little to celebrate in a flush new billionaire class minted from economies already groaning from the strains of gruesome levels of poverty and domestic inequality-and still less reason to believe that such pelf marks an empirical gain over the multileveraged fictions that plunged the oughts global economy into oblivion.

But let's not dwell too long on such glum thoughts, and spoil the Forbesters' fun. The "Fictional 15" list is clearly intended to be a lark for the long-suffering Forbes staff, which is routinely tasked with the quasi-fictional duty of making paper-wealth impresarios seem like the heart and soul of entrepreneurship.

So let's have a look at how they go about gleefully ransacking pop culture and literature for figures of monied fun. The list is topped by Carlisle Cullen, the patriarch of the vampire family in the YA "Twilight" franchise-though in lieu of any distasteful analogies Forbes readers might draw between the lords of the investment economy and, well, bloodsucking fiends, Noer and Ewalt conjure more harmless japery involving the immortality and supernatural gifts of the undead. Cullen, aged 370, amasses his fortune via "long-term investments made with the aid of his adopted daughter Alice, who picks stocks based on her ability to see into the future," they write.

Likewise, "Gossip Girl" Lothario Chuck Bass doesn't occasion much comment from the entrepreneur-worshipping monthly for being born into his real-estate fortune, or leveraging its proceeds into an endless round of dreary adolescent sexual intrigues. Instead, he's seated for a painfully contrived fictional interview, which mainly permits him to repurpose his "I'm Chuck Bass" catchphrase to nothing even faintly resembling comic effect.

Bass and Cullen-together with the Watchmen's delusionally pacifist titan of commerce Ozymandias– pretty much exhaust the Forbes list of imaginary well-to-do villains. Oh, sure, there's the "Simpsons" energy mogul Montgomery Burns, but he's too broad a caricature-seemingly as ancient as Cullen and as self-infatuated as Bass-to get up to much in the way of hard-core expropriation. And Jay Gatsby, for all the whispers of mob ties helping to bulk up his drugstore-cum-bootlegging fortune, is too dreamy a figure of romantic tragedy for his wealth to be much more than a haunting reminder of his shady past.

Indeed, the absence of any serious malefactors of great wealth speaks volumes about the pinched state of the Forbes collective imagination. The list strains all sorts of credulity to include entries like the Tooth Fairy, who-let's face it-distributes all her revenue on hand in exchange for a commodity that represents even less tangible value than a credit default swap, and yet can't find room for a Patrick Bateman or an Augustus Melmotte.

Hell, there's a rich murderer featured almost every week on some "Law and Order" franchise or another, yet we're treated to TV entries like Topham Hatt, from the prissy U.K.-set "Thomas the Tank Engine" kiddie franchise-together with hoary Nick-at-Night perennials like Thurston Howell from "Gilligan's Island" (a layabout scion in the Chuck Bass vein) and Jed Clampitt of "Beverly Hillbillies" fame (an oil mogul improbably cast as a plain-folks adversary of scheming West Coast bankers).

Likewise, ur-free-market heroes are curiously shortchanged by a magazine that fondly refers to itself as a "Capitalist Tool." How can someone like the great Rand mouthpiece John Galt escape inclusion, for example, given his elevation to the front ranks of Tea Party protest? Are we really to believe that comic-book protagonist Richie Rich is a more arresting avatar of ever-striving privilege? (One can only really imagine Mr. Rich's legacy inclusion on the list is based on the striking affinity his own CV shares with that of Steve Forbes-a comparison bruited even by former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, one of the most ardent champions of Forbes' beloved flat tax.)

And of course, the list also contains a pointed political sideswipe at the growth of government spending, evicting the figure of Uncle Sam from atop last year's list for the crime of living beyond his means-without pausing to note, of course, that the spendthrift icon was largely sent into Keynesian overdrive by the significant chunk of the real-world Forbes pantheon that produced the financial crisis in the first place. It's a bit like pinning the death of Little Eva on the abolitionists.

Taking in the full sweep of the Forbes list, indeed, prompts one to worry that the crisis in American free enterprise is far worse than anyone suspected. We know from painful experience that an entire generation of investment banks, market watchers and federal regulators were on the verge of sacrificing our collective livelihood because of their failure to imagine the worst. So what, exactly, are we to make of a financial press that confuses biting satire with write-ups of the Tooth Fairy?

Chris Lehmann is also undoubtedly thinking, "And what about Armando Mendoza"?

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Befitting the whole "Arrested Development" tone of mounting parvenu desperation, there's even an unlikely dollop of political self-awareness: "It's tough out there when everybody hates you," write Daniel Fisher, Steven Bertoni, and Devon Pendleton (one lagging recession indicator is that Forbes is evidently flush enough to grace all this anecdotage with a triple byline) "or at least suspects you had a hand in the collapse of the global financial system, the shredding of trillion dollars of assets and the issuance of 5 million pink slips since January 2008."

Yes, I can see how that could be a mite tough-ish. But never fear; our sage trio has divvied up sidebars explaining what's needful to "survive the populist revolt against affluence."

First, there's the mandate of 'Protecting Assets"-also the point where the Forbesian experiment with self-awareness abruptly ends, since it opens with a long quote on the virtues of conspicuous consumption from Thorstein Veblen, who clearly didn't mean a word of what he was saying. But never mind; shielding your pelf from your creditors is serious business, and Forbes-itself the ideological plaything of a second-generation mogul-is here to remind its distinguished readers that "the best ways are the old ways."

"Trusts for children are nearly impossible to crack." Don't forget, though: That only holds "as long as the assets weren't derived from criminal activity."

You can also park your assets in states like Alaska, Delaware and Nevada, which permit "self-settled trusts" that bypass charities and offspring for the sake of their originators-"(read: you)" the authors helpfully stipulate. But there are downsides: You actually have to establish residency in those backwater states, plus "you generally can't hide behind [a self-settled trust] to avoid paying alimony."

Even before President Obama announced his crackdown on offshore trusts, Forbes pronounced them "a waste of legal fees." These days "judges have jailed debtors in order to cough up information about their foreign trusts."

Like they said: tough. And don't let your outrage get the best of you and renounce your US citizenship in snit-vowing to join the new wave of liberatarian seasteaders, for instance.

It's one thing to buy a flat in London till things blow over, but "a 2008 law snags most citizens and permanent residents worth more than $2 million by requiring them to pay an exit tax-at 40 percent, the highest marginal rate-on paper gains on assets above $600,000." That's hardly sporting.

The smart thing to do, it seems, is to convert as much as you can into real property-gold, diamonds, and other stuff that won't appreciate on paper-and move them into foreign holding services. But again-tread with caution: "getting the money offshore without reporting it to the proper authorities is still a minefield of potential felonies."

The next bit of big-money counsel-"Sidestepping Taxes"-is of course the kind of advice Forbes can churn out in its sleep. And actually, the authors remain surprisingly level-headed here: Sure, Obama is pushing the marginal tax rate back up to 40 percent, eliminating capital-gains breaks on hedge-fund fees and whatnot. But remember, they were north of 90 percent in Eisenhower's day, making today's rates "a sale" according to securities counselor Robert Gordon.

Besides, the real threat is from cash-starved state governments; well-heeled Manhattanites should spend at least half the year in a state without income tax-you know, "the house in Florida." You can also engineer fake sell-offs of Treasury bonds that you can later re-purchase. "Thanks to the magic of bond-premium amortization, that maneuver reduces your taxable interest income over the life of the bonds."

Likewise, "owners of low-basis stock in a public company can buy a put below the current price, sell a call above it and borrow most of the value of the stock," thereby producing "the economic benefits of a sale without an obligation to declare a capital gain." Sure, the IRS may come after you, but so long as "the option strikes aren't too close to the stock's spot price," you'll probably prevail in Tax Court."

And now, let's reward all this nervous-making reshuffling of assets! In "Keeping Your Toys," Messrs. Fisher, Bertoni and Pendleton cannily invert that old Biden saw about tax-paying: "Spending is your patriotic duty."

Just check out the sweet Lear jet deals now going. Grocery-chain baron (and alleged New York City mayor candidate) John Catsimatidis reports that he "was recently offered a Gulfstream once worth $40 million or so for $15 million." The reason? "I was told that it belonged to one of the people who accepted TARP money," Catsimatidis said. "They didn't want to anger Washington."

The discreet market for such now-stigmatized baubles is online, where high end bargain hunters can hoover up their toys "anonymously," our correspondents report. The high-end Web retailer Net-a-Porter.com (sorry, but I'm running out of steam-please inset your own scornful aside here) had a 45 percent upsurge in sales for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31. T

here was the Balman embroidered minidress for a mere $12,355; the $19,5000 Bottega Veneta crocodile bag; and the Halston peep-toe ankle boots that fetched $2,325.

Oh, and yes-the ever-awkward servant problem. The upside to being forced to lay off some of your domestic support staff, our investigators find, is that "the recession provides a good smoke screen for disposing of a servant you don't like anyway." And hey, come to think of it, that one's probably a twofer-after all, the intro piece helpfully suggested countering public outrage with a little strategically leased muscle: "Have you hired a security firm yet?"

Just be sure you let the right sort of disgruntled servants go, and presto-a significant reduction in the complement of people likely to cut your throat in the dead of night. Now, who's up for some tennis?

Previously:
· Understanding How Obama Is Not Robbing The Rich For His Scary Social Agenda
· On 'New York' Magazine

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