A Conscious CEO Among a Growing Group of Women Business Leaders

Vermont is dear to Screwnomics’ heart because of its “good neighbors with good fences” policies, and also because we call this beautiful Green Mountain State home. Women entrepreneurs, women legislators, and women “thought leaders” thrive here—and nowhere else do so many business people care about a larger picture than their dollar-profit “bottom line.” The biggest chapter of Businesses for Social Responsibility in the country, Vermont BSR, is here: https://vbsr.org/

This month, the CEO of Green Mountain Power, Mary Powell, a rare entity in herself in the energy industry, made #12 of a list of Thirty World Changing Women in Conscious Business, 2018. As background, a Catalyst study, in Nov. 2016, found that there are fewer women in the energy field than there are women in tech. http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-energy

If you look at Mary Powell’s direction, predating the time of Trump, you may see why her touchy-feely management has brought her success. Says Rachel Zurer, the editor of Conscious Company Media:

““Is it just a coincidence that the first electric utility to become a B Corp is also one of the few led by a woman? We don’t know, but since she took the helm at Green Mountain Power (GMP) in 2008, Powell has continued to break barriers and shake up assumptions about what a utility can be — going as far as to call the business an “un-utility.

In one example of her obsessive focus on knowing customers, she moved the company HQ from a steel-and-glass fortress into a building shared with line-workers — in other words, the ones who meet customers every day. Under her leadership, GMP also became the first utility to partner with Tesla on Powerwall home energy solutions, and the first to offer a battery/solar off-grid package to its customers. Her focus on “leading with love” seems to be working: in a survey required by Vermont regulators in 2016, GMP received a 94 percent customer service satisfaction score and a 96 percent on providing reliable electric service.””

Powell advises other corporate leaders to “Be bold. Don’t think of yourself — think about the impact you can have. Make the mission larger than yourself.” How does she do that? What gives her hope? She said, “Love. I have long believed in the power of love: the power it holds to transform lives, the power it holds to transform companies, the power it holds to solve problems and to innovate a future that is better than our present or past.”

It’s EroNomics, the invisible passion, the renewable fuel for an economy we talk about in Screwnomics!

If you’re looking for more hope, you can access the whole list of 30 transformative business leaders, investors, and “conscious capitalists” here. This looks like a great media site. https://consciouscompanymedia.com/sustainable-business/30-world-changing-women-conscious-business-2018/

You’ll find among these another woman hero many Vermonters have shaken hands with:  the amazing Judy Wicks, who founded the White Dog Café with its local-sourced excellent food, who also founded a woman-friendly Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). https://bealocalist.org/

Nevertheless, She Persisted—

The Sung family is at the center of this stirring film that reveals much about the American banking system, and way too much about American justice. The fiesty Sung sisters run the savings bank founded by their father, competently serving a neighborhood of immigrant Chinese. When they catch and report an employee’s fraudulent loans, they soon find themselves being investigated; it becomes apparent to many that their whole community is being scapegoated. Wait until you see their chain gang arrest!

In fact, their Abacus Federal Savings Bank was the only U.S. bank indicted for mortgage fraud related to the 2008 financial crisis. The film asks why this tiny bank—2,651st largest in the country when it was brought to trial—had to fight to save its reputation, while the biggest bankers on Wall Street that brought us the 2008 meltdown never were charged with any wrongdoing. 

The Sung family’s answering courage marks them as true American underdogs, our favorite kind of heroes. Directed by filmmaker icon Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life Itself, The Interrupters), Abacus aired on Frontline in Sept. 2017, (where you can still stream it) and just was nominated for a “best documentary” Oscar for 2018.

James told a Frontline interviewer that the story has relevance today, “given that no justice was ever brought….Not only were the big banks not prosecuted coming out of that crisis, they were not regulated in a way to ensure that we’re not going to have more of these problems.” We agree with James and Oscar, and highly recommend it in the spirit of "Nevertheless, she persisted!"

Rotten is Grrrrreat!

I had a stomach flu yesterday and got through it by binging on the best series I've seen in a long while. Yes, it's a Netflix documentary series, and yes, it's about our global food supply—like spinach, one reviewer wrote. But oh my, I felt like Popeye afterward!  It is so very engaging, relevant, and beautifully told. 

I learned details about global trade, and the financial-ization of our food.  Each of the five episodes had gripping stories at their heart: an horrendous chicken serial killer, bee thievery, a convicted restaurant no-nut murderer, tales of New England's Codfather, and international intrigues of organic garlic farmers and raw milk producers. These were not just painless, but illuminating, enlivened by real people who cared about things real people care about. You see in this series,  close-to-home picture of dairy farmers, chick-growers, fishing folk, and hive-keepers, issues that you and your family and neighbors talk about: our bees disappearing, our new food allergies and fears, cheap chicken, expensive seafood, and garlic in everything gourmet.

China and trade policy figure largely in this, but all is enlivened by people on all sides you can care about. One of my mother's concerns, which I write about in Screwnomics is "the little guy," the real heroes and heroines in this film series. You see in this that regardless of national boundaries, we little guys have much more in common with each other, than with the looming and freakishly overlarge financial powers moving in on all of us, globalizing our food chains, cheapening our work and our health in ways we can collectively address—but only with knowledge. This series provides us with that.  I highly recommend it.  

Whose Asset? Whose Debt?

You and I think of our loans as debts or a minus. But banks consider them an asset, a plus—as in money in the bank. The bank or creditor has gotten you to sign on the dotted line. You have promised to repay the borrowed money, plus more, with extra charges called interest added in. Whether mortgages, car loans, or student loans, these interest charges are paid upfront, with the principal, or money owed, barely touched. In that way, loans are worth a lot to the loaner

So here is something to keep you up at night. Wall Street has begun securitizing student loans, a phenomenon they have newly named SLABS (Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities). Ellen Brown has been writing about this extensively, and if you want the wonky details, read her at Common Dreams. https://tinyurl.com/y877wemWhy should you care? Do you remember the 2008 mortgage crisis that led to a global financial meltdown? Back then, Wall Street had securitized the nation’s mortgages to re-sell to investors. To securitize means to take an asset, like a bank’s mortgage loans, and through “financial engineering,” as Investopedia puts it, https://tinyurl.com/y7yskx78, transform those into a more liquid and fast-traded “asset-backed security.” An even bigger global Wall Street bank then sells them to big-time investors.

This financial re-engineering first began in the 1990s, hailed by Washington.Wall Street made so much new money that everyone tried to cash in on the nations’ bank assets, namely US  citizens’ debts. Real estate prices soared! Loans were easy! You remember what happened then? Fraud, subprime liar loans, and a huge crash, which citizens then bailed out with their taxes, rescuing the biggest banks, instead of letting them fail from their fraud and bad judgement.

So now with student debt liabilities amounting to $1.7 trillion for 44 million borrowers (the 2016 student average was over $37,000 each), says Forbes, ( https://tinyurl.com/y73pr83u )—are we seeing another crash in the making?  College tuitions, so necessary for any kind of survivable future,  may create assets and soaring numbers for Wall Street. But thinking of this unprecedented burden on an entire generation as an “asset” accrues only to the wealthiest few. For the many who face an indebted future of laying golden eggs for the SLABS omelet, their goose is already feeling cooked.  

Look for #unscrewed student debt stories in future.

Mortality is Universal but Health Care is Not—So Who Dies? When?

photo by John Dominis

Health Care is the issue that Americans keep naming as their top worry for pollsters. The latest survey found 48 percent saying so to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. We ranked it above taxes, the environment, and immigration, the other biggest priorities named. A US News & World Report article said the reason some people gave: costs are not getting any more manageable. https://tinyurl.com/ya9hqgg9

You think?

Despite Trump’s campaign promises of making health care “much less expensive and much better,” Trump’s cabinet and staff never proposed anything but repealing ObamaCare. Their “replace” part, half-baked in secret meetings of Republicans, ultimately resulted in a failed vote. But that didn’t stop Trump and his allies. The new tax bill scraps a mandate that makes the insurance pool more affordable and less sick—which he and syncophant Republican leaders count a victory thanks to his “exquisite leadership.”

Meanwhile, the Childrens Health Insurance Program has not been renewed and the White House canceled ACA insurer subsidies, creating market mayhem and premium jumps. Our progress in reducing the numbers of uninsured is over; their numbers and expensive emergency room medicine will only increase with a mandate repealed.

Apparently Congress failed to notice what its own government reported in early December. How long can we generally expect to live?  For the first time since 1993, when AIDs was a new plague, overall US life expectancy fell, particularly among people younger than 65! The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) tracks these numbers, the latest data from 2015. In the context of other developed nations that continue to see longevity increase, US health declines are very troubling. https://tinyurl.com/y9zurzr6

Investment in prevention could reduce our costs. In early November NCHS reported on the second year of increase in gun deaths https://tinyurl.com/y8v3fztv, our gun-toting ethos now even tolerating Trump’s “fire and fury” and threats of nuclear war. Did I mention our mental health?? The American Public Health Association lists as our top five health threats, climate change, environmental health, health equity, gun violence, and health reform. More than 40 people a day die of opioid overdoses, and it is not as if any of this despair and pain has a place to go without our uniting to care for all of us, come hell or high water.  https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues