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…”

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

US Sickies More Profitable than Brits

I’m happy to be upright and writing this because yesterday I wasn’t sure I had a future. I was on the fifth day of bedridden fever after suddenly being set upon by coughing fits. I’d met the virulent virus the flu vaccine didn’t touch.  For the first time, I believed the scare stories my doctor always told me about influenza: it kills. This year, the CDC reports 88 kids have died and flu season’s not over yet.  

So while I was sick I heard the President had tweeted about England’s protests he claimed were about the National Health Service going broke. He praised our wonderful healthcare system, apparently forgetting he’s tried to destroy it.

The NHS, begun in 1948, is as close as England has ever gotten to socialism. It turns out the NHS is not going broke, and the people marching weren’t protesting the NHS, much beloved and rated highly around the world. Its workers were demanding more pay.

Here’s how NHS works, according to Jim Edwards, a Business Insider writer with dual citizenship, who has lived in both the US and England for years, and used both systems. In England, you call the doctor, they make your appointment, you come in and the doctor sees you, right on schedule.  There’s little paperwork and you pay: zero.
http://www.businessinsider.com/an-american-uses-britain-nhs-2015-1

Well, actually you pay, he says, but through your taxes. The tax rates in England are similar to the US—but in England you get free healthcare in return, whereas in the US you pay taxes PLUS you then have to buy private health insurance, which may or may not pay for what you need. There’s maddening paperwork, impossible to understand. Uncovered medical costs remain the leading reason for US bankruptcy.

One other detail?  According to the World Health Organization, the average cost per Brit patient is $3480. Here in the US, our cost per patient is $8362.  Is that because of substandard care? No, it turns out the Brits live longer than we do—maybe because they’ve decided they’re better off united, especially when sick.

A postscript:  in 2009, when Obama was trying to pass the Affordable Care Act, Rick Scott, a multimillionaire hospital-chain CEO who’d made a fortune by defrauding Medicare and Medicaid, http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/floridas-medicaid-fraudster-governor-rick-scott-criticizes-new-yorks sponsored an ad campaign to convince Americans the Brits were dying because of their horrible socialized medicine. He then ran for governor of Florida as a “healthcare reformer,” steadfast against Medicaid expansion—the nasty public insurance that had caught him stealing red-handed.

—Rickey Gard Diamond