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.

Women's Day Is Not Just a Magazine

Family Values

Tomorrow, March 8, is International Women’s Day, a good time to take stock of how far we women have come. But wait—what do you mean we’re headed backwards? Laura Liswood with the World Economic Forum points out in an article that worldwide, women’s funding for reproductive health has been reduced, and family planning is harder to come by.

There is also a glaring “under-representation of women and minorities in US cabinet-level positions.”  Pale male EconoMan rules Washington’s swamp these days.  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/03/womens-rights-sexual-equality-in-revers

In Russia, Liswood reports, the Duma just voted 380 to 3 for decriminalizing domestic violence, so long as it doesn’t cause “substantial bodily harm,” and occurs less than once a year. Seriously?!

According to The New York Times, most in the US agree this is a better time to be a man than a woman in our society—except for Republican men. They say it’s a better to be a woman than a man, despite evidence to the contrary. No doubt, they also believe they do their fair share of housework. 

Most disturbing though was Liswood’s report on women’s voting patterns. In France, women are backing Marie LePen and her far-right nationalism, on a par with Trump here in the US. Let’s not forget that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump. Is it fear and greater job insecurity? Is it threats of nuclear holocaust cause women to hope for a strong man?

But 53 percent is still a minority of our sex, especially when you add in our savvy African American sisters. And here’s a salute to Tanya Plibersek, who is running as “minister for women” in Australia. She promised if elected her Labor party would re-establish the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ time use survey, which hasn’t been done there since 2006. Time use is an important measure of the value of unpaid work and gender inequity in household work. In 1997, Australia’s unpaid work was valued at $261 billions or almost half of Australia’s GDP that year.

Seeing what is typically invisible helps informs policy affecting parental leave, childcare, transport, education and workforce participation. Women’s groups in Australia have long argued for the survey’s re-establishment, and Plibersek put it simply: “[T]he Australian economy [and] Australian society rests upon women’s unpaid work.” US women could do a great deal more with time studies here. 

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/06/labor-to-restore-survey-measuring-mens-and-womens-unpaid-housework

Fat Cats of America

My cat Azula knows I could have blogged every moment of every day this past week, reacting to: Scott Pruitt’s steady dismantling of the EPA; the Trump infrastructure proposal that promises to profit the wealthiest and further indebt the public; a White House staffed by wife-beaters without security clearance; indictments of lying Russian and American men paid to corrupt our faith in elections and facts; a social media which eats up our time while creating more billionaires and smears; and a Florida legislature voting down debate on gun control because surviving kids from our latest school massacre were actually protesting, Never Again!

How did America, the land of the free, get here? It boggles the mind. But one constant does connect it: fat cat money. Who exactly has it, and who gets to make the rules that govern money and us by essentially violent means? 

How much money should the fattest pale male cats have at their paws' disposal? As I write in Screwnomics, millions and billions sound alike, but they’re worlds apart.  Calculated in time, a dollar per second, one million adds up to 12 days. A billion is 13 YEARS. Meanwhile, the median US household (which most often these days includes two earners) is $59,039, or 16 HOURS of time. Half of us earn less and are hustling.

Up until 2016, the median had yet to catch up to where we were in 2008, before the crash, created by Wall Street’s richest. By contrast, Bill Gates, our richest fat cat, had a measly $43 billion in 2008. Now he’s worth $86 billion, or 27 CENTURIES of time. This isn’t due to his overtime pay.

I’ve nothing against Gates or cats, but I do have a problem with a system that so reliably moves money up to those who already have the most. It undermines democracy for us church mice. We need money control as much as we need gun control. The founding fathers never anticipated AR-15s or billionaires, but they did know of Kings—and declared themselves disobedient to despots.

So, be heartened by those young, caring Americans, who courageously wave our nation’s authentic power. American money can be put to much better use than more guns, more billionaires, more corrupt government and lies. Even Azula knows fat cats aren't healthy cats! 

—Rickey Gard Diamond

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.