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

Why Do Men "Do It?"

Women and men have to ask themselves a creepy question: WHY  do men like Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein force women to watch them while they masturbate? It isn't just powerful men who do this.  When I was an A&W carhop decades ago, we had a weasly old man do the same when we girls delivered his tray of food and a mug of root beer. There isn't a woman alive who hasn't encountered or had a friend who encountered bizarre sexual threats.

Sex therapist Alexandra Katehakis, told Angelina Chapin at The Cut (NY Magazine), it's "sexualized hostility," or "eroticized rage." Call it a need to frighten women to put them in their place. Most tellingly she claims, "They sexualize their emotions, because they don't know any other way of comporting themselves." Really? Why is that?

David Brooks, the conservative columnist that PBS newsie Charlie Rose called on for expertise on this question (thanks, Charlie! We noticed the white rapper you featured on that show too) says Louis CK, Weinstein, Trump and Moore are the result of the country's "siege mentality. " Such men don't feel empathy. They cannot put themselves in the victim's shoes and understand their feelings.

Sexual predation happens to men too—as Kevin Spacey of House of Cards fame showed us. But it is women most often viewed as sexualized objects. All this penis-flouting is a way of keeping hierarchies in place via "mounting," symbolically or literally, something historian Robert McElvaine talks about in his groundbreaking book Eve's Seed. Who's on top?

An even bigger question encircles us: aren't more pleasurable positions possible for all of us?

Read Angelina Chapin's article here:  https://tinyurl.com/ybjvbfe2

See David Brooks comments here: https://charlierose.com/videos/31163 and in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/opinion/sexual-harassment-predators.html

#MeToo Includes Senators

Soraya Chomoly and Marya Stark of the Women’s Media Center present a troubling report on US democracy’s gender politics: when Senator John McCain cast a “no” vote for the ill-fated Republican repeal of Obamacare, he was hailed in the press as an independent. But when Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski did the same, they were called traitors to the Republican party, offline and in public.
 
Georgia GOP Rep. Buddy Carter said on national television, “Somebody needs to go over to that Senate and snatch a knot in their ass." Texas GOP Rep. Blake Farenthold said if Murkowski and other women GOP senators were men he would challenge them to duels. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke sent what Alaska GOP senator Dan Sullivan called a “threatening message,” about his department’s punishment of Murkowski’s Alaska in response to her vote.” Online comments were worse.
 
Those female US senators aren’t alone, Chomoly and Stark say, citing a 2016 Inter-Parliamentary Union survey of women in legislatures around the world, which found:

• 42% report wide distribution of “extremely humiliating or sexually charged images.”
• 44% receive death, rape, beating and abduction threats
• 33%  were harassed by persistent, intimidating messages
• 62% believe the harassment is aimed at blocking women’s pursuit of leadership.

Think this a picture of OTHER countries?

True, Republicans have a bigger problem with women than do Dems—three times the numbers of women get elected as Democrats. But regardless of party, US women are shockingly underrepresented. The numbers of Republican party women would rank the US 165th out of 193 nations, right alongside patriarchal Congo and Mali.  Tracking Democratic women in Congress would rank the US 38th in the world, right after Switzerland‑a country that finally granted women the right to vote in 1971. 
 
We agree with WMC. More Republican women would help the party stay sane; more women on both sides of the aisle would make Congress more functional. Sexual harassment is nasty and costly to women—and also to our nation. 

Thanks to CNN's Dana Bash, Senators Collin and Murkowski, and WMC's story, linked here: www.womensmediacenter.com/speech-project/what-women-politicians-online-harassment-tells-us-about-degraded-democracy

When EconoMan Does the Laundry....

...his ill-gotten money skidmarks remain his little secret. That lays the cost of thugs on taxpayers. Drug money creates a huge pile of dirty laundry, and so does the global economy's offshore banking and tax havens. (Estimates range from $800 billion to $2 trillion). The US indictment against Paul Manafort and RIck Gates unsealed this week says they used classic financial detergent to make Ukrainian and Russian mobsters look spic and span. Oh, and RICH. 

How?  Money laundering takes cash and deposits it in banks and company shells without reporting it as income. You or your "smurf" do this in amounts less than $10,000 so the bank won't be required to report it to the IRS. You wire money across borders, the more borders the better.  You then  write checks to buy real estate, life insurance, oriental rugs, art, or other big ticket items like stocks and bonds. Maybe you co-mingle it with legitimate money to cover your tracks. All makes it harder for state and federal prosecutors  to untangle your sources. 

Reports Kevin McCoy in USA Today: www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/10/30/follow-money-heres-how-money-laundering-works/813379001/“The indictment filed by Mueller's investment team lists 17 domestic businesses or limited liability companies allegedly owned or controlled by Manafort and Gates. The indictment also identifies 12 entities in Cyprus, and three others in the United Kingdom or the Caribbean islands of the Grenadines. [It] also identifies scores of transactions from 2008-2014 in which Manafort allegedly wired more than $12 million from the foreign accounts to vendors for personal expenses without paying taxes on the income.” 

Meanwhile, YOU are doing the real laundry, and paying for the privilege. Unlike Manafort's play book, Screwnomics will put you at the center of economic change. Aren't you  tired of money's dirty secrets?  Pre-order Screwnomics at your local bookstore, and ask your friends to like our Facebook page. Help us make change! 

#MeToo Adds Up to Economic Robbery

Last week, as we heard woman after woman tell her tale of sexual harassment, of her reduction to a sexual commodity, I kept thinking: the media tells us about the huge settlements that big corporations pay,--$32 million for poor Bill O’Reilly. How many millions for poor Weinstein? For poor Cosby? In exchange, they get silence. But what about the economic cost to all us women?Who is reporting or calculating the financial cost to women from having their confidence undermined? Or from their exit from a field they could excel in, if only they could put up with pawing and shaming?

Now the silence has ended, and a murmur of female voices weaves a net big enough to capture big changes. Brit Marling’s recent post in The Atlantic names the financial stakes with power. She started as an economist, a Wall Street intern for Goldman Sachs. When she found it soul-killing, she went into acting, and then noticed Hollywood’s stories were only those told by a handful of powerful white males, where women were bit players in sexy outfits. She became a screenwriter and producer, and her skills show in this moving piece about her encounter with Weinstein. I invite you to read it in full, and rise to the challenge she presents: to consider what consent requires, and to reconsider what stories we decide to watch. She says about #MeToo:

      "I’m telling [my] story because in the heat surrounding these brave admissions, it’s important to think about the economics of consent. Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families. He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world. They knew it. He knew it. Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him. That’s not just artistic or emotional exile—that’s also economic exile.
      "It’s important, too, to keep in mind where this power imbalance comes from. In the U.S., women were only allowed to have credit cards in their own names as of 43 years ago. Men had a two-decade head start (the credit card was invented in 1950). In the 1960s a woman needed to bring a man along to cosign any credit application. It’s stunning how recently women were afforded no financial autonomy. This is, of course, connected to the fact that women didn’t have bodily autonomy either. A woman’s husband could beat her or have sex with her without her consent in this country with no real legal recourse until the 1970s."

Read her whole tale here, and think about the costs, not just to a handful of a**holes with lawyers—but to half our nation’s people. What has been the economic cost of sexual shaming to you, your choices, your confidence, your bank account? 
www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/harvey-weinstein-and-the-economics-of-consent/543618/#article-comments

Women's Economic Status

The International Finance Corporation with the World Bank estimates that women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, produce 50 percent of its food, but earn just 10 percent of global income. 

Women comprise two-thirds of the world’s illiterate people, and one-third of the world’s girls are married before age eighteen. 

Women own 30 percent of registered businesses worldwide, but only 1 percent of property.

Say what?!