The Lions and Lambs of March

March began by roaring in like a righteous she-lion with #MeToo at the Oscars, and Oprah's speech about the loud collapse of dozens of male bullies. These included two at the White House who resigned when a photo of an ex-wife with a black eye punctured their collective male denial of their crimes against women. Yet March showed no sign of leaving like a lamb.

All month we endured more stories of women’s bodies claimed as sexual property, bought and paid for—sued and countersued over then-candidate Trump’s affairs.  Pay-off money and unkept business deals to silence women before the election is part of that news-roar. A Playboy bunny and a porn star, young enough to be Trump’s daughter, both alleged that before sex he admired them for being as smart and beautiful as his daughter—ee-yew! http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/stormy-trump-compared-daughter-sex-article-1.3895543

NBC’s Heidi Przbyla and other women journalists have lately brought to the forefront a lamb that hasn’t gotten as much attention. Quieter, it bleats another tale of young female bodies treated as property. In mid-February, Planned Parenthood joined with eight local government, healthcare, and advocacy groups to sue Trump’s HHS (Health & Human Services). The Washington Post reported $220 million in sudden cuts to a reauthorized national Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, despite evidence it was working. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/02/15/planned-parenthood-sues-trump-administration-for-ending-grants-to-teen-pregnancy-programs/?utm_term=.0ed6cb57010b

Reporter Przbyla found the program, begun in 2010, had bipartisan support in Congress and had trained more than 7,000 health professionals and supported 3,000 community-based organizations. The result, reported most recently in 2017, was record lows in US teen pregnancy and birth rates.  http://time.com/4843652/teen-birth-rates-record-low/

Damningly, and in keeping with Trump cuts in other programs benefiting women and children, she reported that experienced female administrators at HHS had been kept out of the decision-making loop and were told to “get in line.” Cuts came down by command from Steven Valentine, an anti-abortion abstinence activist put in charge of HHS family planning.  One administrator said she was “so rattled” that “my reaction when I got on the phone was to cry.”

But now picture her singing along with that old song of Helen Reddy’s: I am woman, hear me roar! Because a week after Przbyla’s story came out, HHS withdrew some of its cuts. And I suspect women aren’t done yet with evidence-based programs that work to prevent teenaged pregnancies. We're just done with protection of outdated male claims on women’s bodies and decisions. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/hhs-agrees-protect-some-funds-teen-pregnancy-prevention-program-n860581

Red and Blue Both Fly in America's Flag

E Pluribus Unum

Out of many, one. That motto was first put on an American coin in 1795, and by the late 19th century was standard.

Maybe we citizens have seen it so often by now, we've stopped thinking about its importance. Our divisions grow more polarized, with name-calling and rejection becoming more common than listening, respecting, reasoning and compromising. Pew Research has been looking at our political polarization, our many shades of red, blue, purple, fuschia, etc., at their research site, and even has a "quiz" to take if you're curious where you are on the spectrum. http://www.people-press.org/quiz/political-typology/

Now an organization calls on our higher selves. Calling on our Better Angels, this organization is actually holding workshops to help "the reds" and "the blues" sit down together and talk. Only this isn't just a photo op. They get results. They teach skills and help each side reach clear positions, teach how to fact check and agree on what is real and what is "fake." 

Their idea is that it's important to understand one another's position, be able to talk about facts and differences, and discover what you and "they" have  in common so you can reach a compromise and move forward. No one says this is easy. But this is how politics works, when it does—and lately it mostly doesn't. Better Angels is working to help E Pluribus, our very diverse America, to unite again.

Our shared money is at stake in every budget decision. What we decide together affects the economy. For appealing to our higher American selves, and our tradition of unity, statecraft and compromise, we applaud and recommend them. You can check out what they're doing, and talking about here:  https://www.better-angels.org/bam

SNEAKPEEK Chapter 16

SNEAKPEEK Chapter 16:

“Money is a token or symbol. No practical reason makes gold or silver more valuable than paper or wampum or conch shells or cows. Rather, any currency’s worth depends on what people agree or imagine is fair to exchange as a signal of trust. Tally sticks, coins, and paper generally represented something of tangible, touchable value, like gold, sterling, or land—at least until fairly recently.

During the Renaissance in Marco Polo’s time, the royalty of Italian city-states and their merchants traded in coins, often stored in the safes of goldsmiths and moneychangers. These men tracked the value of different coins and could exchange, for example, florins for ducats when needed for business. Sometimes they went further and rented out money for a fee, called interest, on the sly.
Weatherford describes how the old limits of those kinds of concrete exchanges were transformed by the Renaissance moneylenders’ bills of exchange. While a royal bag of coins might have sat idle, hidden away for years, bills of exchange enabled moneylenders to loan that money out several times over, so that merchants in several cities exchanged the paper bills—while the king still had his gold florins, untouched, on deposit. When paper bills circulated as money, there was more of it than ever.

This “magic” of bank-created, air-money was eventually named fractional reserve banking, the kind we use now…"

We Interrupt This UnReal Reality Show....

The news got crazier this week, but there’s a piece that’s dangerous, but eye-glazing, —easy to miss in the midst of a porn star’s lawsuit against our President, followed by the House Intelligence Committee’s Republicans issuing an all-clear on Trumpish collusion with Russia https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/12/politics/house-republicans-russia-conclusions/index.html.

It feels like some horrible Trump reality show. You're fired, Rex, for faulting Russian government. But now for an important commercial: Pay attention to Pocahontas!

That’s Trump’s nickname for the smartest Senator on the Senate Banking Committee, Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts (originally from Oklahoma, where her family lore claimed native blood when that was a racial slur). Warren’s books are an important source in Screwnomics. She tracked bankruptcies back in the 90s and found medical costs the top cause for rising rates. She next headed a commission overseeing TARP bank bailout program, and seeing Wall Street’s bamboozles, proposed the Consumer Protection Agency. Elected the first female Senator from Massachusetts in 2012, she and her money-saving agency have been under attack ever since.

Now she’s sounding a new warning. After the 2008 meltdown, Congress passed a banking reform bill called Dodd-Frank, and ever since Wall Street has tried to undo it. The devil’s in the details. Many of the bill’s measures, designed to regulate Wall Street’s mega banks, were hard for small banks, and resulted in bank mergers. What we need is a healthy network of local, small banks. But in a legislative effort to lessen the regulatory load on these smaller banks and credit unions, Wall Street’s bullies have laid claim to the same regulation break.

Isn’t that fair? No, all things are not equal, says Warren. S.2155 is called The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act,” and is supported by 50 Republicans and 16 Democrats. What would it do? https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/opinions/mitch-mcconnell-bank-lobbyist-act-opinion-taub/index.html. Dodd-Frank required all bank holding companies with more than $50 billion be supervised by the Federal Reserve. What Warren has renamed as The Bank Lobbyist Act raises that threshold to $250 billion, increasing risk five-fold.

It would weaken stress tests for 25 of the 38 biggest banks in the country, megabanks like Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup. Ten years ago these same billionaire banks got billions in taxpayer dollars, after they collapsed the economy. So now they get an anniversary present??! Warren’s right to rename it. Tell your Senator you want an amendment. Yes, help community banks, but small is less risky. Wall Street’s bigness, which always puts them first in line for government welfare, crushes the communities we live in. http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/377534-warren-rankles-colleagues-in-bank-fight.

Booklist Review

We are thrilled to recieve the following review from Booklist:

Issue: March 1, 2018

Screwnomics: How Our Economy Works against Women and Real Ways to Make Lasting Change. Diamond, Rickey Gard (Author)
Apr 2018. 256 p. She Writes, hardcover, $24.95. (9781631523182). 331.4.

"In time to capitalize on the #MeToo movement, Diamond, fiction writer and author of the award-winning series An Economy of Our Own for Vermont Woman, dissects the foundation of economics: what it is and why it must change, from the female point of view. She simplifies the complex—CDOs and Pareto efficiency, for just two examples—and streamlines everyday money talk. Need to understand how inflation might affect you? Go no further than asking “Are you worried about becoming poorer in the future?” as one chapter’s “EconoGirlfriend’s conversation starter” suggests. Or what does a dollar really stand for? It’s all here in an occasionally male- or Wall Street–eviscerating narrative that tracks everything needed to know about pay equality (or the lack thereof). No one is spared, from Congress to economists such as Milton Friedman. Diamond’s solutions are logical yet will spark debate among all demographics, all geographies. Is it time yet? Includes chapter endnotes, a glossary, and recommended reading." 

— Barbara Jacobs

Sneak Peek! Chapter 13

“You may not have heard of something called national accounting, but no doubt you would recognize its result, Washington’s most often cited number, the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. Politicians love to talk GDP in the same way Wall Street likes to talk about income statements and immediate earning potential.

        Both these numbered accounts emphasize an imperative to grow, while confusing paper dollars with a healthy economy. GDP only adds up money made from market transactions. Its numbers equate your value to your salary or wages. By GDP’s account, men are therefore more important than are women because they make more dollars. GDP accounting helps keep things that way

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GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP) The GDP began as the Gross National Product (GNP) when American economist Simon Kuznets at the US Dept. of Commerce created a new report called “National Income: 1929-1932.” It gave government a new economic profile of sales income industry-by-industry. When WWII broke out, it revealed industrial production abilities that enabled more efficient coordination of war production. GNP, which measured dollars of Americans no matter where they lived, was replaced by the GDP in 1991, as more multinational corporations appeared. GDP measures all dollars produced within a nation’s boundaries, including by foreign companies.

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...Today GDP remains largely unquestioned by the general public in the US. It’s a boring subject, complex enough to make the eyes cross.       

         To wake you up, I’ll call its system of accounts the numerical tales of privileged global elites, who weave a complex royal robe of GDP threads to cover the naked power that money alone wields. Robert Kennedy gave a remarkable speech about the GDP’s misdirection in 1968, just weeks before he was assassinated. He said that GDP’s materialism failed to account for the things Americans most valued, such as “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.”

        It wouldn’t be until the ’90s that women’s challenges to GDP details began to be voiced…”