“Stuck On A Plateau”: Progress For Women Continues Flatlining At Top Ranks Of The Private Sector
After the election, word was that we had just lived through another Year of the Woman. After all, a record twenty women will now be serving in the US Senate next term, representing a fifth of all seats. We had previously failed to breach the 18 percent mark in that legislative body.
But women’s progress has stalled out somewhere else: the top of the private sector. The research organization Catalyst released its 2012 Census today, which tracks the number of women in executive officer and board director positions. Women held just over 14 percent of executive officer positions at Fortune 500 companies this year and 16.6 percent of board seats at the same. Adding insult to injury, an even smaller percent of those female executive officers are counted among the highest earners—less than 8 percent of the top earner positions were held by women. Meanwhile, a full quarter of these companies simply had no women executive officers at all and one-tenth had no women directors on their boards.
But as in the Senate, progress may be slow and even small percentages can be victories. Did this year represent a step forward? Not even close. Women’s share of these positions went up by a mere half of a percentage point or less last year. Even worse, 2012 was the seventh consecutive year in which we haven’t seen any growth in board seats and the third year of stagnation in the C-suite. Meanwhile, women may hold the majority of the jobs in growing sectors such as retail, healthcare and food service, but of the executive officers in those industries they represent less than 18 percent, under 16 percent and just 15.5 percent, respectively.
If this is the sign of the end of men or the richer sex, I fail to see how. Reversing these numbers may take time. But we’re not even on a steady uptick—we’re stuck on a plateau. Fortune tellers who tell us women are on track to dominate the economy need to explain how that can be if we aren’t seeing any movement in these top indicators. Representing half the workforce can still mean inequality if we aren’t breaking through to the top jobs.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, December 11, 2012
“An Issue Of Fairness”: Suddenly America’s Top Corporate Leaders Are Shunning Tea Party Extremism
Leaders of the American business community, who have long indulged the Republican far right as an instrument toward their own ends, seem to be growing weary of its political excesses. Recognizing the public verdict of last month’s election, corporate officialdom is moving toward moderation on taxes and other issues, showing support for the Obama White House and edging away from congressional Republicans.
The latest top executive to endorse the president’s position on rescinding the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent is Fred Smith, CEO of Federal Express and a former economic advisor to Senator John McCain — who denounced as “mythology” the notion that raising the top rate would damage the U.S. economy.
Smith joined a lengthening queue of business leaders from all sectors who have stepped up over the past week to voice their acceptance of increased taxes as part of a budget agreement to break the stalemate on Capitol Hill — not only to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff on December 31, but because fairness requires the wealthy to pay their fair share. Randall Stephenson, chief executive of AT&T, the nation’s largest telecom company, told Business Week that higher taxes and more revenue must be part of any budget agreement. So did Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And so did a group of defense industry executives from companies such as United Technologies, RTI International, TASC and Northrop Grumman.
Income tax rates “need to go up some,” said David Langstaff, the CEO of TASC, at a Washington press event organized by the Aerospace Industries Association, a defense lobby. “This is a fairness issue — there needs to be recognition that we’re not collecting enough revenue. In the last decade we’ve fought two wars without raising taxes. So I think it does need to go up.”
Indeed, the president was warmly received this week when he visited the Business Roundtable, a powerful Washington lobbying group that officially prefers Republican policy on maintaining the Bush tax cuts unchanged. “This room likes a winner,” said Roundtable chairman James McNerney, the CEO of Boeing, as his members applauded the president, who worked the room as if among old friends. They didn’t seem terribly upset when the president told them that tax rates — their tax rates — would have to go up, and in fact, they are reportedly supporting him on the need to avoid another destructive struggle with Congress over the debt ceiling. Evidently they won’t go along with the kind of blackmail game that congressional Republicans played with the debt ceiling in the summer of 2011, leading to a credit downgrade and slower growth for months afterward.
The suddenly sensible sounds emanating from the business community are astonishing when contrasted with the anger displayed toward the president by many of these corporate suits only weeks ago, when they berated Obama as “anti-business” and loudly yearned for a corporate-style Romney presidency. Resoundingly rebuked by the electorate, which overwhelmingly favors Obama’s positions on taxes and entitlements — and stands ready to blame the Republicans if no budget agreement is achieved — the business leaders are backing ever so subtly away from their traditional alliance with the GOP.
These brand-conscious executives suddenly have realized that the Republican brand, especially at the congressional level, is politically toxic. And they would rather not be too closely identified with it at this dangerous moment.
Remarkably, the Tea Party Republicans have now alienated their party’s most important constituency — the upper echelon of the business community. It is a profound irony that the issue raising friction between these politicians and their erstwhile backers is a fanatical partisan determination to defend the tax benefits enjoyed by those same wealthy executives.
The president’s opponents are backing themselves into a corner where even their own old friends cannot defend them. Meanwhile Obama may finally have learned that if he stands firm and refuses to negotiate with himself, he can win over public opinion and break the partisan obstructionism.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, December 7, 2012
“Bemoaning Their Hardship”: The Billionaire Obama Hate Club Up In Arms Over Obama’s New Tax Plan
So Obama, defending his plan to raise taxes on the rich, says this:
“If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties,” the President said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”
And billionaire hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, a former Obama supporter, responds with this:
“You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world … Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied.”
Cooperman, like so many of his fellow super-rich, is upset at Obama’s class-warfare “tone.” But in response, as Chrystia Freeland documents in her definitive New Yorker treatment of billionaire Obama hate, Cooperman raises the level of divisive rhetoric light-years beyond Obama’s, straight into a galaxy of ludicrous imbecility. It is beyond irrational to compare Obama with Hitler, or to argue that in any meaningful way his administration has waged class warfare against the rich. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times, Obama has been great for the rich!
Freeland says it again:
The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar TARP rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners.
Vein-popping blood-pressure spikes are hard to avoid when one reads about the hurt feelings of America’s billionaires. Seriously, if you’re looking for ways to provoke real socialist revolution in the United States, the behavior investigated by Freeland is surely the best way to go about it, outside of mass-mailing invitations to a storm-the-barricades party to every American on food stamps. Flaunt your entitlement! Bemoan the hardship of your 14.1 percent tax rate! Complain that you are not getting enough credit for endowing the local symphony!
But the real wonder is that Obama doesn’t take more advantage of this obvious public relations bonanza. It is impossible to imagine anything that could play better for Obama with working-class voters than the fact that “hostility toward the President is particularly strident among the ultra-rich.” Franklin D. Roosevelt knew what to do with banker ire — just a few days before Election Day in 1936 he famously told a crowd at Madison Square Garden that “I welcome their hatred.”
Obama should be doing the same.
Or maybe he is. Because if we want to understand why polls show Obama up comfortably in Ohio, at least part of the reason has to be that Wall Street billionaires hate him — and like the other guy.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, October 1, 2012
The Meaning Of “That”: Romney Finds Words To Twist Around To Make A Deceptive Point
If you’re Mitt Romney, it can mean whatever you want.
Mitt Romney is, without doubt, a representative of contemporary capitalism, a spectacularly rich financier who got his money not by making things but by buying and selling companies, exploiting leverage, and a whole bunch of other things folks like you and me will never have the privilege of understanding. So it isn’t surprising that this campaign has featured a debate about the nature of our economic system. That debate could be a salutary and educational discussion that leaves us all more informed and aware. Or it could be an occasion for some of the most vile demagoguery you could imagine. Do you need to ask which course it will take?
By now, we can all agree that a large portion of the Republican party has created in their minds an imaginary Barack Obama, one who is either a literal or philosophical foreigner (Romney has begun dropping the word “foreign” in as often as he can when discussing Obama), who hates America (here’s Rush Limbaugh on Monday: “I think it can now be said, without equivocation—without equivocation—that this man hates this country”), and one who hates success, hates rich people, and hates capitalism itself. And if you can’t find any actual evidence for these propositions—if “Barack Obama hates job creators so much he actually wants to increase the top income tax rate by 4.6 percentage points!” doesn’t have quite the ring you’d like—then it isn’t hard to find words you can twist around to make your point.
Which brings us to the word “that.” If you’ve been to a Mitt Romney speech in the last day or so, or if you’ve watched Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio, or even if you’ve watched some mainstream news*, you would have heard that Barack Obama said that people who own businesses didn’t actually build their businesses. Only a secret socialist could say such a thing, and Romney and his allies assure us that Obama did indeed say that and he is indeed that kind of person. But here’s what Obama actually said:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
When this quote worked its way up from the conservative media to the Romney campaign, they knew they had something. Sure, it’s obvious that when Obama said “you didn’t build that” he was talking about roads and bridges. But who cares? You can take that one sentence out of context, lie about what “that” in the quote refers to, and you’ve got evidence of Obama’s America-hating heart.
And yes, it is a lie, a word I use carefully. Romney and the people who work for him know full well what Obama was and wasn’t saying. But they decided to go ahead and engage in an act of intentional deception anyway, and I’m sure he’ll be repeating it many times.
There’s actually a discussion to be had about the radical individualism that has taken over the conservative movement, which Obama was responding to in his speech. I’d be interested to hear Mitt Romney’s thoughts on it, not in a “gotcha” kind of way, but because I genuinely want to know what his response to Obama’s arguments would be. Does he think that every rich person got rich completely on their own and owes nothing to the society that created the context that allowed their wealth to be created? I really have no idea. But the deeper into this campaign we go, the more it becomes clear that we’ll never know what Romney really believes about anything. And he may not be the most dishonest presidential candidate we’ve ever seen, but give him time—he’s working on it.
*Last night I saw Peter Alexander on NBC Nightly News do a story in which he showed Obama’s quote clipped exactly as Romney did, making it seem that Romney was being absolutely truthful. It was one of the most maddening acts of journalistic jackassery I’ve seen in some time.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“No Discernable Vision”: Knowing How The Economy Works Is Not Enough
This week will see the release of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, a collection of essays from the George W. Bush Institute with a forward by the former president himself. It’s true that annual GDP growth never actually reached 4 percent during Bush’s two terms in office and averaged only 2.4 percent even if we generously exclude the disastrous year of 2008. But look at it this way: Who knows more about what the president ought to do about the economy than Dubya does? After all, there’s only one living American (Bill Clinton) with as much experience being president, so Bush must have the answers we need.
A ridiculous argument? Of course. That’s because experience only gets you so far. It’s obviously a good thing, all else being equal, for the president to know a lot about the economy, just as it’s a good thing for him to know a lot about foreign affairs or domestic policy. But the truth is that although the government has to solve many practical problems, and it’s important to have smart, knowledgeable people in government to work on them, the presidency is not a technocratic position.
For a long time, Republicans grasped this much better than their opponents. It was the Democrats who seemed to prize experience and knowledge, looking admiringly at candidates who understood how government works and could be counted on to manage the problem-solving efforts that would be required, while Republicans favored candidates like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who argued that vision was more important than skills. Yet this year, Republicans have nominated a candidate with no discernible vision whose candidacy is based almost entirely on the knowledge and management experience he supposedly gained in business.
It’s odd that for someone whose argument is so much about his preparation and experience, Mitt Romney barely ever mentions the one job he held that actually resembles being president—the governorship of Massachusetts. But we’ve had former governors who made excellent presidents and former governors who made terrible ones. And the brevity of Barack Obama’s tenure in the Senate didn’t stop him from amassing what was arguably the most impressive string of legislative victories in half a century during his first two years in office.
Mitt Romney barely bothers to persuade the voters that he will be able to get things done in Congress or that he understands foreign policy. Instead, the phrase he repeats over and over on the campaign trail is “I know how the economy works.” The current arguments over Bain Capital notwithstanding, this has been the basic rationale for Romney’s candidacy, that during his time in business he gained a body of knowledge and a unique insight that will allow him, as president, to make dramatic improvements in the economy. During the primaries he argued that this experience would make him a better president than his Republican opponents, and today he argues that it would make him a better president than Barack Obama.
But if there were a magic key to unlock spectacular growth and widely shared prosperity, you’d think we would have found it by now. There hasn’t been a president in decades, the current one included, who didn’t have lots of businesspeople working in his administration. And Barack Obama talks to corporate leaders all the time. If Romney knows something they don’t, he hasn’t told us what it is. If you read through his economic plan, you’ll find that it contains the same things Republicans always advocate: lower taxes, reduced regulations, free trade, and so on. You’ve certainly heard Romney say that his business experience helps him understand the economy. But have you ever heard him say what exactly he learned that no one else knows?
Perhaps he plans to unveil this remarkable insight once the election is over; if so, one can hope that as a patriotic American he’ll share it with the country even if he loses. Because even if it involved some policies that conservatives like, you can bet that President Obama would be happy to take the bargain if it would deliver something like the sustained 4 percent growth George W. Bush promises. If you really could create a humming economy just by cutting taxes for the wealthy and creating some “Reagan Economic Zones” (yes, that’s something Romney proposes, though he doesn’t say much about what it means), Obama would do it. The reason he doesn’t isn’t that he’s a socialist; it’s that the argument isn’t all that persuasive.
So no, Mitt Romney is not in possession of a secret that can deliver us to economic nirvana. We can try to determine whether anything less than admirable happened at Bain Capital during Romney’s time there, and if so how much responsibility he bears. But even if all those questions are answered in Romney’s favor, it wouldn’t change the fact that the policies he advocates are derived not from his experience but from his politics and his moral perspective, just as Barack Obama’s are.
I’m not sure if Romney actually believes that keeping taxes for the wealthy as low as possible and scaling back regulations really does bring prosperity for all. But if he does, it isn’t because he concluded that after a careful examination of the evidence (if that were the case, the last decade would have been the most prosperous in American history). He favors those policies because that’s what his party believes and because they reflect his values. Romney may “know how the economy works” in certain ways. But that knowledge isn’t enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
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