Big Gifts and Little Tokens

The day BEFORE the tax bill was completed by a Republican Congress, Wells Fargo’s CEO Tim Sloan told CNN Money their expected tax windfall would go to increased dividends for  shareholders and stock buybacks http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/18/news/economy/wells-fargo-taxes/index.html. But by the next day, while Republicans’ delivered fawning kudoes to the “exquisite” leadership of you-know-who, Wells Fargo (and other huge companies like AT&T, Comcast and Boeing) were promising bonuses and raises for workers, thanks to the wondrous tax reform. http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/20/news/companies/wells-fargo-bonuses-tax-cuts/index.html

We’d love to believe Wells Fargo’s CEO had misspoken, 'cause it sure did look greedy just before Christmas. Perhaps when the board saw CNN’s story and what their CEO said, they shouted NO! Be generous! Give our people bread! But more likely, given scandals and falling stock prices, raising their minimum wage to $15 is a public relations strategy. About 25,000 employees will be affected, getting a raise of $1.50 an hour, or $3,120 a year, assuming 40 hours/week. That's better than a sharp stick in the eye.

But consider that back in 2014, Tyrel Oats, a Wells Fargo customer service employee who earned $15/hour wrote to their then-CEO, John Stumpf. His letter pointed out the bank’s net income in its second quarter alone had been $5.7 billion. Oats suggested the bank improve its image by giving a $10,000 per year raise to ALL its employees, or an hourly raise of $4.71 per hour. He copied his letter  to 200,000 workers because unions aren’t allowed at the bank. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/09/wells-fargo-email_n_5960072.html

That same year WF’s then-CEO John Stumpf had pulled in $19 million for his one-man job, 473 times more than their median employee, nevermind the low life minimum. That same year Citizens for Tax Justice reported that Wells-Fargo had received federal tax subsidies from us taxpayers worth $21.6 billion over the previous 5 years. And Stumpf's piss-poor job performance ultimately cost the bank in legal fines, plus earned him a public shellacking by US Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Congressional threats of shutting the bank down in 2016.

Sloan replaced Stumpf, but Wells Fargo's legal problems from cheating people—ranging from overcharging for insurance, overdraft fees, appraisals, and their actively targeting African Americans and Latinos for overpriced mortgages—has added up. In 2012 they paid out $6.5 million in fines for SEC charges of failing to disclose risks of securities they sold; in 2013 they paid $203 million to settle a suit with 24,000 Florida homeowners, and faced new alleged violations of an earlier agreement with 49 states attorneys. In 2015, they paid out $4 million for credit card violations, and in 2016, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a combined total of $185 million in fines for their 1.5 million notorious fake accounts and 500,000 unauthorized credit cards. Forbes Magazine reported that in 2017 alone, Wells Fargo’s legal troubles had cost them $1 billion. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2017/10/13/legal-troubles-hit-wells-fargo-third-quarter-earnings/#107268a9358e

Wells-Fargo’s promise of raises for its lowest-paid, if kept, might cost them as much as $78 million, still a far cry from Oats’ suggested $3 billion in raises, and a tiny trickle from the gushing billions in that bank’s  polluted revenue stream—reported in 2016 at $88.3 billion. As CEO Tim Sloan (paid $12.8 million last year) told CNN Money on Dec. 20: Yes, the bank has “excess capital.” With this "Christmas gift" tax reform, they’ll soon have billions more.

Outside, Soft Fluffy Snowflakes...

...are falling, not in a hurry, but steadily, as if they can be counted upon to not give up, to keep on. Typically such snow makes me cozy, and inspires me to sing holly-jolly songs of the season, the cornier the better, my croaky voice the perfect foil. But today I am weepy, in touch with a fear of looming tragedy, theirs and ours.

Across the country unusual warmth is promised, while in California it bursts into flames that won’t quit. An airport loses power, holiday planes are downed by heavy fog, Houston and its neighbors are still swamp and poorer—and in Puerto Rico my fellow Americans face the season without water and electricity. In a Washington run by Wall Street and its unhinged wealthiest, Americans face yet more debt in pursuit of more growth in hopes of a trickle. Just a trickle is all we ask, and instead we get a Christmas Goose egg from a Congress of Scrooges and Stooges, who keep on selling us out.

They kick us out of the halls of power when we protest in our wheelchairs, saying Don’t Kill Us, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and Gay is Good. God Bless Us Everyone, says Tiny Tim, the least of us—but in this year’s Christmas tale, he gets backhanded, not picked up and fed.

We can look forward to our “entitlement programs,” the insurance we’ve long paid for with our taxes, being cut or eliminated, like the environment—now deemed too expensive, given the corporate giveaway. Trump and Putin are making chummy phone calls to replace state-craft, making billionaires better off worldwide by selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and Syria in exchange for more fossil fuel money.

All is wrong with the world, it seems, although snowflakes are still falling in Vermont. Bit by bit, they float down and pile up and remind me, united we stand, divided we fall, to everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn.

Here's What Slut Put-Downs Will Get You!

Soon to-be-elected US Sen. Doug Jones (D-Alabama) with women voters who made the upset possible last night, and Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) campaigning in Alabama—where Roy Moore was soundly defeated despite Steve Bannon and Donald Trump campaigning for the accused girl-stalker. 

When Donald Trump says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand came to him “begging” for donations and “would do anything,” he knew damn well that his “anything” would be heard as “anything sexual” in the halls of male power. (See CNN story https://tinyurl.com/y9bz )

Men like Trump, who use force, or pimp their money out for favors they can’t get unless they pay first, have always used surplus money for power, closely aligned in the male imagination, with sex. Mounting someone, whether with money or slut-language-putdowns, supposedly demonstrates your masculinity, even when your hands are tiny. Sex is the male metaphor used to explain dominance—the pattern a supposedly male-only-God-intended one—with males mounting weaker females expected to “submit.”

Any evangelical woman waiting for Mike Pence or  Roy Moore to admonish the President about Jesus’ sermon on the mount (yes, a play on words), will have to turn blue before she’ll hear a respectful word for principled females like Gillibrand. To patriarchal ways of thinking (not that of real-Biblical Jesus), all females are inferior to males. And females either are begging for it, or having to be forced.  

We’re sorry, but we didn’t make up slut-mounting metaphors, or those silly and contradictory sexual rules. Women say we’re overdue for some new ones. How about getting consent before you make your power move? How about our making love together for the good of all involved? That would be democracy, wouldn’t it?

The hypocrisy Jesus meant when he called the conspicuously religious Pharisees “white-washed sepulchers” surely applies to Pence, Moore, Trump, and Bannon. So to put current matters in the sexual terms powerful men like to use, the pale male sluts of Washington are due to deliver big tax cuts to their big-money johns, effectively screwing the female majority without our consent.

We so agree with newly elected US Sen. Doug Jones from the great state of Alabama (where women’s votes made the difference) —it is time for Congress to fund CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. (See NBC story https://tinyurl.com/ybnhj9j5)

And Sen. Susan Collins of Maine? Until Republicans repent of corruption, winning your tax vote with a lie about affordable healthcare, it is time for you to become an independent! (See Washington Post story on House/Senate resolution process. https://tinyurl.com/ya6hvhpt)

Our Getting Poorer is Good for the Economy

The US has already produced the mirror-double of Sam Walton’s peddler genius, namely Wal-Mart, founded in 1962, and his current family of multi-billionaires. The Waltons have grown richer than Croesus selling to the low-income while employing the poor for wages that qualified for government subsidies.

Wal-Mart’s predecessor Dollar General (founded in 1939) had additional competition from Family Dollar (1959) and Dollar Tree (1986), but is now reportedly pulling ahead, selling even cheaper crap to the have-nots. Dollar General now has 14,000 stores across the country and a $22 billion market value.

Like Wal-Mart, it targets (and that’s the word to use) US customers making $40,000 a year or less. A great many of them are women, who despite working their asses off have to settle for buying cheap crap.

Todd Vasos, the CEO of Dollar General (a store demoralizing even to enter) confessed to The Wall Street Journal why the picture is so sunny for his company, while other retailers are having to close their doors:

“The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” Vasos said. https://tinyurl.com/y89u59mk

So Happy Holiday, America, hohoho! The General plans to increase numbers of stores in the future, especially in poor rural areas, expected to grow poorer, creating more “core customers.” Meanwhile, Congress has just passed two versions of a tax bill that will further favor corporations, their write-offs, and their way-too-rich owners, while sticking a bigger share of our national tax bill to the poorest, least able to defend their shrinking resources.

As Dylan Scott just reported to VOX, economic inequality has been increasing for the same years that Wal-Mart and Dollar General found so profitable. https://tinyurl.com/y9wm6f6d

Tagged: Wal-Mart, Dollar General, poor, low-income, core customers, tax bill, VOX, Wall Street Journal, Dylan Scott

#MeToo: Her Decade of Empathy

via justbeinc.org

Have you “met” Tarana Burke yet? Her story’s a lesson in the value of
persistence. She started #MeToo ten years ago. I heard her talk with Soraya Chemaly and Alicia Garza on Amy Goodman last week, and was both surprised and deeply moved by her soft-spoken empathy and her commitment to survivors. https://tinyurl.com/yd3uv43r

Tarana told Boston Globe reporter Crystela Guerra in late October that she wasn’t even aware of her tweets going viral until a friend showed her. She said about it:

“In many regards Me Too is about survivors talking to survivors. It was
never really about amplifying the number of people who are survivors of
sexual violence. It was about survivors exchanging empathy with each
other. But when I talk to young people, I use pop culture to promote the
idea of Me Too all the time. We have to have something that reaches the
masses. That’s what I’ve always known Me Too could do. This viral moment
is just confirmation that vision was real and was possible.”
https://tinyurl.com/yaejyba6

Like almost every women, I can name #MeToo encounters, though I want
to be careful to name them trespasses and shocks, not violent assaults of
the kind that threaten to undo a woman’s life. I knew such a survivor,
though, who was left for dead, and for whom attending college took such
courage “survivor” doesn’t say it. She’s a daily hero. She went on, as Tarana
did after her assault, to help and connect other victims of violence. The
trick is to ultimately outlive the bastards.

#MeToo applies widely and “reaches the masses” because every woman,
and some men too, know the special threat of sexual violence, a bodily
invasion and diminishment. But its verbal threat is everywhere, tossed off
in common parlance among men, especially powerful ones—F**k You, the
opposite of love, and the common parlance of suited street gangs in
Washington, Hollywood, and Wall Street.

Tarana says #MeToo is about survivors exchanging empathy with each
other. In the time of Screwnomics, let’s persist in sharing empathy among
us survivors aptly named the 99%. If we are to outlive Trumpish inequality,
only mutually pleasureable exchanges and partnerships will do, not
sexualized violence of any kind.