Sneak Peak: Chapter 5

Here's a Sneak Peak from Chapter 5:

"My mom worried about the little guy—the small grocer, the independent pharmacist, the hardware guy in business for himself—swallowed up by larger national chain stores impossible to compete against. Big box retail was less than his wholesale, she’d say, so she knew the little guy was being squashed. She refused to buy anything made in China.

            And yet she never saw herself as one of the little guys. She was, in fact, among the littlest. She would hate my saying that, but she had been an employee, not an owner. She was a woman, not a man, a bargain for bosses. That put her in a majority she never claimed. She retired to live as if near poverty, with her only sizeable wealth her housing asset.

            That asset separated her from many more women even less well off who lacked that security. African American or Hispanic homeowners in her neighborhood were a tiny minority, distrusted and viewed by her as threats to her property value. Until their houses were paid in full like hers, they were more at risk.  Like my mom, they too had to pay rising property taxes and rising prices for keeping a middle class life..."

Our Populist Plutocrat at Home

I laughed when I first heard billionaire candidate Trump called a “populist.” He was a Republican! They’re the ones with money. But everything stands on its head these days. Democrats seek out the ruling class with money too. The old labels no longer fit.

But misfit-ness isn’t just along these party lines. There is something deeply different about we, the American people. Last week I read a piece by the great late writer Ursula LeGuin. She noted how in 1947, during the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to give up eating meat on Tuesday and poultry on Thursdays. Why? So the US could stockpile more grain needed for people in Europe who were starving.

Who, these days, is asking us to do anything for anyone? Give up AR-15s? NO! Give up your grudge for the poor, those slackers? FORGET IT. Share health risks in a national insurance pool? NO WAY!

This past week “populist” plutocrat Trump, who just gave his richest friends a huge Christmas tax cut at the government’s expense, unveiled his budget. It cut $20 billion from our disabilities insurance program, $1.3 trillion from Medicaid, and $554 billion from Medicare, Sen. Sanders soon tweeted. https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/963101482714386432

Trump proposes cutting food stamps for our poorest families by a third, and wants to replace food stamps’ shopping autonomy in local stores with a food-delivery system—full of food he’ll decide the poor should have. Can’t wait to see what his multinational corporate friends find most profitable—for them, not for the poor. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/usda-proposes-replacing-food-stamps-delivery-service-increase/story?id=5305144

The populist plutocrats will also benefit hugely from Trump’s big military spending, and soon will be waving the flag at a military parade all along our new, expensive border wall. All these work for keeping poor people scared, and the rest of us, the majority, allied the wrong way.

Look around you, American woman. You have far more in common with the poorest than you do with any “populist” plutocrat, who pays off porn stars, protects wife-beaters, and is busy making money while in office, all on your dime and our diminishing American reputation. http://www.newsweek.com/trump-properties-special-interest-political-groups-spending-78601

—Rickey Gard Diamond

Sneak Peak: Chapter 4

//// SNEAK PEAK  from Chapter 4 of Screwnomics ////

Here's a sneak peak of a passage from Chapter 4:

“To understand better, we have to go back even further in time to the era just before the United States became a nation. I’ll be summing up two centuries of economic thought here in a few pages, so keep in mind I’m generalizing a great deal and will give it all short shrift. But in bare outline, classical economics describes the first modern economists of the eighteenth century. Yes, I know it’s confusing—usually “classical” doesn’t also mean modern.

Adam Smith, who published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, was part of a small circle of upper-class men who knew each other well. The early scholarly association of Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and a French group that called themselves physiocrats was a little like...an exclusive club. Each man had a personal interest in the money to be made by knowing men who made money….”

Wish U Were Here, Janet Yellen

Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Chair 2014-2018

I’m going to miss the first woman to ever head the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, appointed by President Obama. She has just served the shortest term of any recent Chair. No, she wasn’t ill, newly pregnant, or incompetent; she just wasn’t reappointed by President Trump. She was known for consensus building.

One of two mandates of the Federal Reserve is sustaining employment, helping to finance jobs. Under Yellen’s tenure, unemployment decreased from 6.7 percent in 2014 to 4.1 percent in 2018. Trump took credit, tweeting women’s job rates while pink-hatted women marched on his inaugural anniversary (while the government shut down.) But without explanation or complaint, he’d already replaced Yellen with yet another pale male, William Powell.

Her male predecessors served terms more than twice as long: Ben Bernanke (8 years), Alan Greenspan (19) years, and Paul Volcker (8) years. Longer tenures supposedly help ensure financial stability. In Screwnomics, I complain women like Yellen can and do learn to “mansplain” the economy. Her monetary addresses to Congress delivered like those before her:  a firehose of lukewarm, gushing water-words impossible to take in, and strangely mesmerizing. What’d she just say?? Still, the financial press widely appreciated moderate Yellen.

She exasperated Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who pressured her more than once. Most recently it was over the Wells Fargo frauds. That’s the other Federal Reserve mandate, to regulate the banking system. But then as Janet left, she gave two parting gifts to the country: one was a raise in the long-term Treasury bond rate to cool down an overheated market. The other was the first big-bank punishment of its kind for Wells Fargo, removing board members, along with some real structural changes to address its being overlarge. https://tinyurl.com/ycmlbvyl

Will Mr. Powell stay the course and enforce those penalties on WF? Those rising interest rates? The word is that Trump’s money-men want to further undo regulation, setting freer the already free market, making it a libertine. That hasn’t gone well in our near past. I’m nervous, seeing last week’s near 1600-point DOW drop last week, but generally agree with those like Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism,  who say it’s a needed correction for overvalued bubbles https://tinyurl.com/y8u7tud2.

But I also agree with those who warn this new volatility has less to do with interest rates, than with fears about US national stability. Wall Street on Parade writers, Pam Marten and Russ Marten, say that the stock market, which has shrugged off the President’s low approval rating at home, and a diminishing reputation for steady, credible world leadership, are fools to ignore Trump’s chaos. http://wallstreetonparade.com/2018/02/stock-market-panics-on-treasury-yields-fed-and-trumps-domestic-wars/

The whole world knows about the Republican tax gift to our richest, essentially gutting the government budget, weakening it further. We’re going to spend millions on a military parade, not on veterans health care, and money for ICE, not dreamers. About now, I am mentally writing steady Janet a note that says, Wish you were still here.

"Our first big review...wowza!!!"

Friends, we have such exciting news! We just received our first big review from, drum roll please...Kirkus! Here it is!

KIRKUS REVIEW

Diamond (Whole Worlds Could Pass Away, 2017, etc.) sets out to debunk the patriarchy of capitalism in this nonfiction work aimed at women.

Capitalism, throughout history, has kept women from pursuing an equal or gainful role in the creation and accumulation of wealth, according to the author. Even today, she says, societal norms discourage women from taking an interest in economic affairs. As she writes in her introduction, when it comes to the economic discussions, “letting yourself doze off is as dangerous as sleeping with a huge python in the house. Only when a greater number of women understand economic secrets, muffled by slithery language, will we find the political will to transform them.” To that end, she offers a crash course in basic economic theory along with investigative dives into how women and minorities have been shut out of economic growth, the cause and fallout of the 2008 global recession, and the ways in which the economy could be fixed to work better for everyone. Mixing personal narrative, history, definitions, and entertaining comic-strip asides, illustrated by Todd, Diamond encourages women to get informed, to get angry, and to talk about wresting control of society from the oppressive “EconoMan.” Diamond writes in a peppy, accessible prose that brings clarity to complex subjects: “Voilà! It’s free market magic. The bias of sexism and racism is easily eliminated,” she says while explaining economist Milton Friedman’s theory of the cost of prejudice. “You see how this works for us, girls?” But for all these flourishes, the author doesn’t shy away from tackling complex (and sometimes-dry) economic ideas. Diamond claims to be merely an amateur economist, but her experience as a novelist, journalist, and professor are all brought to bear to demystify difficult concepts, such as Pareto efficiency (“Pareto basically said that an allocation of resources is efficient if as a result, one individual is better off, and no individual is worse off”). Diamond’s wit and charm, combined with Todd’s quirky art, succeed in creating an economic primer that’s both informative and fun.

A smart, comprehensive economics guide with a feminist twist.

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Publish date: April 3rd, 2018

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/