Where Credit is Due

Women’s Equality Day is already over in New York City.  That’s half a shame, because it’s the most under-appreciated holiday in America.  The schools should have had today off like they will next Monday for Labor Day.  And some day in October for Columbus Day.

The fact that we close post offices, libraries, and schools for this guy who invoked a genocide while “discovering” America while I don’t remember a no-school day honoring a woman shows something about this country’s values.  Saying Columbus discovered America is a white-supremacist statement that does not respect Native Americans and is frankly out of date.

But that’s not the point.  I’m sure that designating Women’s Equality Day a national holiday would be destroyed in Congress, where anti-choice Republicans would say “we’re done.”  We’re not.

And Christopher Columbus is certainly done, but nobody worried about that when they gave him a holiday.

Believe me, this would make a big impact.  Children would learn about women’s rights in school leading up to the holiday the way they learn about MLK (great holiday) and Christopher Columbus today.  At first, they’d talk about sufferage and equal pay for equal work; as children got older they could possibly move into more sensitive issues, like sexual assault awareness and prevention.

Doesn’t that sound like a better use of your taxpayer money than teaching kids Christopher Columbus was great?

In the spirit of the mood, I will blog this great editorial by Gail Collins of the New York Times, entitled “Where Credit is Due”  It is one of the best op-eds I’ve read recently and touches on every aspect of this issue from workplace equality to who buys the towels:

A few months ago, a saleswoman at Macy’s tried to wheedle me into renewing my expired store credit card by offering a deep discount on the towels I was buying. So I dug it out of my wallet, where it was nestled between an expired press pass to the Texas State Capitol and an expired library card from Manchester, N.H., and happily handed it over.

She looked at it, puzzled. “But this isn’t your name,” she said.

The card said Daniel Collins. That’s my husband, who I believe has never been to Macy’s, or bought a towel, in his entire life.

I flashed back to a moment when I was living in Connecticut. I have no idea what year it was, except that it is very possible Richard Nixon was still president. I was in the Macy’s in New Haven when a woman with a clipboard came up to me and asked me if I wanted to apply for a credit card.

“Absolutely,” I said instantly.

She took up her pen. “What’s your husband’s name?” she asked.

I wish I could tell you that I made a speech about equal rights and headed for the door, but I just let her fill out my application. This was an era when women still needed a male co-signer to get credit. In some places, you needed a husband or father to even get a library card.

Anyway, I was proud of being newly married and dumb about the women’s movement. I worked as a reporter in the Connecticut State Capitol, where the male legislators and male lobbyists and male reporters met in a place called the Hawaiian Room to drink. When a female journalist demanded that she be admitted, too, the media was barred completely. The guys in the press room blamed it all on the one woman, who, I am sorry to say, was not me. My only reaction was to wonder why anyone would want to go to the Hawaiian Room, which was in the attic, with steam pipes along the ceiling festooned with limp plastic leis.

I’m telling you all this because on Monday we will celebrate Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women’s right to vote. That was in 1920, and there’s no longer anyone around who can tell us what that felt like to be disenfranchised because of your sex. But there are plenty of people who recall the time when women couldn’t get credit in their own name.

Next year, if we’re in the mood, we can celebrate the 40th anniversary of the day that Kathryn Kirschbaum, then the mayor of Davenport, Iowa, was told she could not have a Bank of America card without her husband’s signature.

The great thing about Equality Day is that it works in two ways. We can mull both how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. The one thought feeds the other. The idea of having 50 women in the U.S. Senate, or 250 female C.E.O.’s in the Fortune 500 seems less far-reaching if you contemplate the fact that in the 1960s, a spokesman for NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.” Now, one of the two American astronauts on the International Space Station is a woman, and that is so routine that we’re not even aware of her name. (It’s Karen Nyberg.)

Monday is also the anniversary of the 1970 women’s march for equality in New York, which almost no one expected to be a very big deal. The New York Police Department had only given the marchers permission to use one lane of Fifth Avenue. “Then more people came and more people came and we spilled over, and we took over the entire avenue,” recalled Robin Morgan, the feminist author and activist. “And that was the moment your heart really sang. People were hanging out windows. I kept yelling: ‘Join us!’ ” And some of them, Morgan said, did just that.

Parades are great. For a long time, the drive for suffrage was seen as a depressing slog of petition-gathering by middle-class clubwomen. Then the parades started, and the movement belonged to everyone.

“We did not eat our little lunches in lobster palaces, but out in the street in front of lobster palaces. We stand for plain living and high thinking, that’s it,” a marcher told The New York Times during the equality parade in 1912.

That comment does seem a tad reverse-snobby, but the mixture of socialites and factory workers, marching for one cause, sent a message. It also sounds as though it was a lot of fun. After the march ended, a woman The Times identified as “Miss Annie S. Peck, the mountain climber,” stood on a chair, “waved a Joan of Arc flag, and told her audience that this was the banner that she had planted 21,000 feet above the sea on one of the highest peaks of the Andes.”

There don’t seem to be a lot of parades planned for Monday, which is probably all for the best. Once a parade becomes an annual institution, it becomes less about a political point and more about the afterparties. But we are going to have one heck of a time in 2020.

I’m gonna try to be there in 2020.  I think I’ll be able to make it.

I certainly hope so.

“The House Just Wants to Snack”

Since I was too lazy to actually write an angry blog post on the House Farm Bill, I’ll just leave you with Gail Collins’s op-ed on the House farm bill entitled, “The House just wants to Snack.”

And, now, the Tasty Bites theory of government.

You may have heard that the House of Representatives passed a farm bill this week. Or possibly not. I have found that many Americans can go for a very long time without mentioning the farm bill. But we are going to talk about it today, and it will be absolutely fascinating.

For decades, Congress has merged food stamps — which help poor people pay for their groceries — with agricultural subsidies in one big, messy, bipartisan farm bill that made everybody happy. Well, not euphoric. There was definitely that messy factor. But it did merge the interests/needs of urban and rural lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans.

Lately, the House has begun chopping up big, complicated bills into what Speaker John Boehner once described as “bite-sized chunks that members can digest.” No more legislative sausage-making. No more bipartisan trading. The House was going to stick to clean, simple ideas, more along the lines of Liver Snaps.

So the farm bill got divided. The two parts were not equally tidy. As Ron Nixon reported in The Times, the rate of error and fraud in the agricultural crop insurance program is significantly higher than in the food stamp program. Also, the agriculture part has a lot of eyebrow-raising provisions, like the $147 million a year in reparations we send to Brazil to make up for the fact that it won a World Trade Organization complaint about the market-distorting effects of our cotton subsidies.

And while food stamps go to poor people, most of the farm aid goes to wealthy corporations.

So House Republicans passed the farm part and left food stamps hanging.

Say what?

Tea Party conservatives have an all-purpose disdain for anything that smacks of redistribution of wealth, and food stamps are a prime target. “The role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity, is to take care of each other. But not for Washington to steal money from those in the country and give to others in the country,” said Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee during a speech in Memphis.

So the food stamp program was the total opposite of a Tasty Bite to House Republicans. More like that Scottish thing with sheep stomach and oatmeal. But the agriculture part was billed as delicious restraint. They rallied behind the just-farm-stuff bill in a party line 216-to-208 vote.

“This is a victory for farmers and conservatives who desired desperately needed reforms to these programs,” said Representative Eric Cantor, the majority leader.

The House bill actually spent more money on subsidies for farmers than the bipartisan Senate version the Republicans scorned. It also dropped the Senate’s limit on aid to farmers with incomes of more than $750,000 a year. And while it mimicked the Senate in dropping most of the much-derided direct payments to farmers, the House gave cotton farmers a two-year extension.

Let’s take a special look at cotton, which is a particularly good example of the tendency of agricultural benefits to flow uphill. “Some of these guys — and they’re all guys — are getting more than $1 million in support. The bottom 80 percent are getting $5,000 on average,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group.

Faber’s organization, which keeps careful track of these things, says direct payments to cotton farmers since 1995 have totaled $3.8 billion. That does not count the annual $147 million the United States has been sending to Brazil in hush money.

Crop insurance gets bigger under the new plan. Here’s how: You, the taxpayer, fork over the majority of the cost of the farmers’ policy premiums. (Up to 80 percent in the case of cotton.) Also, you spend about $1.3 billion a year to compensate the insurance agents for the fact that they have to sell coverage to any eligible farmer, whatever his prospects for success. Plus, if yields actually do drop, you have to compensate the insurance companies for part of the cost of claims.

Is this beginning to sound a little like Obamacare? No! No way! The House Republicans hatehatehate Obamacare! They vote to repeal it as often as they change their socks! Because Obamacare will, you know, distort the natural operation of the markets.

The larding of benefits to farmers didn’t come up during the House debate. It was all about food stamps, and Democrats asking to know why their colleagues wanted to cut aid to hungry children and old people. During an Agriculture Committee meeting on the bill, Representative Juan Vargas of California quoted Jesus’ lesson that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

That raised Representative Fincher’s hackles. “Man, I really got bent out of shape,” he told that Memphis audience, proudly reporting that he countered with Thessalonians: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”

By now, you must be wondering why I keep bringing up this guy. Fincher is a farmer who has, over the years, received $3.5 million in federal agricultural subsidies, much of it for — yes! — cotton.