A Storm of Greed
Ehrenreich, Barbara
Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich A Storm of Greed After the hurricanes comes the cold, and with heating oil prices leaping up 30 percent in the Northeast, you better have a winter survival strategy in...
...Not that the oil executives are totally unaware of the problem...
...Her latest book is "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream...
...Ramp up grandma's chondroitin sulfate dose and hope the fifty-degree nights don't inflame her arthritis...
...Expect joules to start replacing jewels as a key marker of wealth...
...According to Senator Barbara Boxer's website, the average pay of energy company CEOs has soared by 215 percent since 2002...
...When CNN's Soledad O'Brien posed it to one such executive, he kindly suggested that it was "the responsibility of government" to help the needy...
...I had, in my innocence, thought it was the hurricanes that were driving up energy prices...
...Last summer, an enterprising New York Times Style section reporter measured the temperature inside various Manhattan stores...
...Forget hurricanes, this is a greed-storm...
...It's hard to hold a pencil when your hand is frozen into a claw shape...
...When voluntary discomfort becomes a sign of status, you burn up all the BTUs you can...
...There are things they could have done, and still might do, that would have been brilliant PR for petro-capitalism...
...It shouldn't be that hard to achieve blast furnace conditions...
...No, I suspect that much of the $33 billion extracted from the pockets of drivers this fall will go to the usual items of conspicuous consumption favored by the $10-million-a-year-and-up demographic...
...But no, it turns out, as usual, that the flip of misery is gluttony...
...I'm sure you weren't ordering $600 table settings for Christmas anyway...
...Strangely, from a pure comfort perspective, the classier the joint, the colder it wasranging from 68 in Bergdorf-Good-man up to 80 in Old Navy...
...And we thought all those CEOs hated "big government...
...Flip Side Barbara Ehrenreich A Storm of Greed After the hurricanes comes the cold, and with heating oil prices leaping up 30 percent in the Northeast, you better have a winter survival strategy in place...
...Or the oil companies could reach into their pockets to help people with fixed incomes, low incomes, and no incomes stay warm this winter...
...Lee Raymond, CEO of ExxonMobil, will be raking in $26 million in salary, bonus, and stock gains...
...What are they going to do with all the money...
...The more ritzy the establishment is trying to be," he concluded, "the colder the air conditioning is kept"-even if it discourages the casual shopper in T-shirt and shorts...
...So maybe this winter guys like Lee Raymond will be displaying their earnings with ungodly hot indoor temperatures...
...Or invest in one of those new fireplaces that move heat into the room instead of sucking it up the chimney...
...Put the toddlers to bed in double layers of bunny suits, with mittens attached...
...The interesting thing is that more and more of these feature extravagant wastage of energy-not just private jets and Hummer limos, but frigid indoor summertime temperatures...
...For fuel, you can always burn the Williams-Sonoma catalogs that have been arriving in bulk...
...In fact, if you're a top oil company executive, you have earned the right, in more ways than one, to burn in your own personal hell...
...The top five oil companies-ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Royal Dutch/Shell-reported total earnings last quarter of nearly $33 billion...
...They could donate a chunk of that $33 billion to the victims of Katrina and Rita, for example...
...But he wasn't offering to pay windfall profit taxes to help the governmentalready strapped by war and tax cuts for the wealthy-in this mission of mercy...
...Or, as Senators Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, are urging, they could start helping to pay this winter's school heating bills...
...Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive...
...How hot could you make your house, even a 10,000-square-footer, on $26 million a year...
Vol. 70 • January 2006 • No. 1
