Chris Hayes did something remarkable Tuesday evening. He talked about how climate change relates to income inequality in America. Take a look at the short clip above. "Here's what I've learned," he reported. "The people at the bottom of the social pyramid, the poor, those without assets, or no assets other than their home, with debts piled up and low-wage jobs; those people who are struggling to just hang on by their fingernails to something that looks like a middle class existence… Those people, when the waters come in from the storms, those people are the first ones dragged out to sea and the ones who take the longest amount of time to get back to shore." And he pointed out that "55% of the storm-surge victims in New York City were very-low income renters, whose incomes averaged $18,000 per year."
But what about the people on the other end of the income spectrum? We've been looking at how grotesquely inappropriate and destructive of democracy it is for the two party establishments to fill Congress with multimillionaires with zero capacity for empathizing with their constituents. But they can empathize with people who read Angeleno. It's a slick magazine/advertiser that comes to all the homes in high property value neighborhoods. I glanced at a copy yesterday and saw pages of ads like this one:
I bet you can't read the captions. Let me give you a hand:
Ottoman jacquard ball gown in sepia, $10,990, by Zac Posen, similar styles available at Sachs Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills; yellow and white diamond tiara with detachable bracelet set in platinum and 18K gold from the 2013 Blue Book Collection, $335,000, at Tiffany & Co., Beverly Hills' Nougat yellow gold ring, $9,000, by Dior Fine Jewelry at Dior, Beverly Hills. Opposite page: Black panne velvet one-shoulder gown with draped shoulder, $4,900, by J. Mendel at 212.832.5830; oval ruby ring with diamond pave shank from the Graff Bombe collection, price upon request, by Graff at Sacks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills; triple emerald slice and irregular diamond invisible hook earrings in 18K gold, $16,250, at Kimberly McDonald, West Hollywood.
That $335,000 baubly little headpiece costs about the same as the total annual income of 35 average families that had the misfortune to be in the path of the storm surge, a storm surge largely resulting from the efforts of the captains of industry and their quest for the cash to buy those lovely yellow and white diamond tiaras for their mistresses and wives.
I suspect that tiara and those triple emerald slice and irregular diamond invisible hook earrings will never get washed away in a storm surge.
