Wall Street Takes Welfare It Begrudges to Women

By Mimi Abramovitz
WeNews commentator

The bailout of Wall Street is particularly galling for women on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, says Mimi Abramovitz. They've already spent the past 30 years steadily losing ground without anyone seeming to notice or care.

Editor's Note: The following is a commentary. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the views of Women's eNews.

(WOMENSENEWS)--Today we sit and watch as the high-rolling gamblers and critics of "big government" take welfare. These are many of the same people who thought it was just fine to deprive millions of women of critical resources and let them fend for themselves.

Even before the catastrophic news out of Wall Street in recent days, women have been worried about their economic security.

Last March a Gallup poll found that in the past two years more women than men said that they worry about the economy (64 percent versus 57 percent). The same holds for health care, crime, the environment, drug use, unemployment, hunger and homelessness.

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More men are employed by Wall Street and more men have money invested there. That means the male anxiety meter is probably much higher now that they risk losing their jobs, pensions, portfolios and homes. But women's worries have probably shot up even more.

Women are likely to lead in the economic-anxiety gap because distressing economic events fall harder on people with less. "I don't play the stock market, but it does affect us. It affects me personally. It affects the little guy," a female dispatch supervisor of a limo company that serves investment bank employees recently told the New York Times.

The same holds for all the secretaries and housekeepers who keep investment houses clean and running.

Decades of Lost Ground

But what makes the bailout of the fat tomcats so galling is that women at the bottom of the economic ladder have lost ground during the last 30 years, with very few seeming to notice or care.

From F.D.R.'s New Deal in the 1930s to L.B.J.'s Great Society in the 1970s, the expansion of government programs for the middle class and the poor--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, public assistance, as well as health and social services--provided a modest economic backup for women who predominate among recipients.

Great Depression leaders who saw government as the solution to that economic crisis bailed out banks in exchange for tighter regulations to curb speculation. But they also created cash-assistance programs that increased women's purchasing power and protected them against economic hardship.

Those programs redistributed income downward and expanded the capacity of the federal government to kick-start the economy while cushioning consumers and workers from the vagaries of the market.

Beginning with President Carter in the mid 1970s, our leaders changed their tune, blaming economic woes on "big government." Successive administrations relaxed the rules on financial markets and cut funding for the safety net.

Benefits Didn't Trickle Down

Advocates of "less government" promised that benefits would "trickle down" to the rest of us. Instead their laissez-faire strategy weakened government benefits, one of the three interlocking pillars of economic support counted on by thousands of women from all walks of life.

The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that government spending for domestic discretionary programs fell from a high of 4.8 percent of national output, or gross domestic product, in 1978 to 3.4 percent in 2007. That equals billions of dollars in cuts. Except for rising health care costs, spending on entitlement programs--such as Social Security, unemployment insurance and public assistance--also fell from 8.5 percent of the gross domestic product in 1983 to 7 percent in 2007.

During the past eight years, war spending zoomed ahead, bringing us to the present spectacle, where we see U.S. military spending exceeding that of the rest of the world combined.

Meanwhile, Bush tax policies diverted dollars from public services and boosted corporate profits to a record high of almost 14 percent of national income while the share going to wages dropped to its lowest level since 1929. Combined with relaxed government oversight and rampant speculation the way was paved for abusive mortgage practices that turned Wall Street into one big profit bubble waiting to pop.

With these excesses as a backdrop, women saw their other two pillars of economic security weaken as well: marriage to a wage-earner and paid employment.

Falling marriage rates combined with three decades of sagging male breadwinner wages have undercut the capacity of matrimony to provide women with the financial security it once offered.

Wobbling Wages and Work

From 1979 to 2006, the real value of the median weekly wage of men 25 years and older fell steadily to $797 from $807.

The massive entry of women into the work force since World War II--one of the most significant social trends in modern U.S. history--gave them a third pillar of support. But this too is now wobbling.

As male wages stagnated many women went to work--not as a matter of choice, as headlines about women opting in and out might suggest--but just to make ends meet. Between 1970 and 2005 the proportion of married couples with two earners jumped to 62 percent from about 46 percent, Labor Department data show. The U.S Women's Bureau finds wives' contribution to family income rose to 35 percent from 26 percent.

But many of today's 68 million wage-earning women have recently suffered more job losses than men and a larger drop in wages than the general population, according to the Women's Bureau. In 2006 full-time female workers earned an average of $627 week or about $32,000 a year.

While we watch the spectacle of the government channeling untold billions of taxpayer dollars into failing Wall Street giants the three pillars of economic support for women--the safety net, marriage and wages--continue to crumble.

The public bailout of corporate America may be necessary given the risks of a collapse to the global economy. But why is it that the rich and reckless accept "welfare" for themselves while steadfastly rejecting the same for women in need? It's time to take a billion here and there to assist the women raising families on too little income to keep a roof over their heads.

Mimi Abramovitz, the Bertha Capen Reynolds Professor of Social Policy at Hunter College School of Social Work, is the author of "Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Policy From Colonial Times to the Present," the award-winning "Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in the U.S." and co-author of "Taxes Are A Women's Issue: Reframing the Debate." She is currently writing "Gender Obligations: The History of Low-Income Women's Activism Since 1900."

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.

Economists Fear Bailout Could Tighten Squeeze on Women

By Allison Stevens
hington Bureau Chief

As policymakers craft a Wall Street bailout, budget experts with women's policy groups worry about the fate of public programs and hail some Democratic provisions. Some activists and pundits, meanwhile, reiterate protests against the Iraq war.

WASHINGTON (WOMENSENEWS)--Congress is working at a fevered pitch to rush through a massive $700 billion emergency spending measure to bail out the ailing banking industry and protect the economy.

Lawmakers sparred Thursday over the broad outlines of the bill, and congressional leaders hoped an agreement could be reached in time to schedule a vote on final passage before the end of the weekend.

But women are headed for financial trouble whether the bill wins passage or not, women's rights advocates say.

"It's bad news all around for women," said Vicky Lovell, director of employment and work-life programs at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that focuses on women's economic issues. "I don't see anybody predicting that there's a way out of this that's going to be good for consumers or taxpayers in general, or for women."

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The proposed $700 billion bailout introduced by the administration amounts to about $150 billion more than has been spent to date on the war in Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project, a research organization in Northampton, Mass.

As lawmakers went back and forth over the details of the banking bailout bill, Joan Entmacher, a budget expert at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., took a dim view of the overall economic prospects for women.

Bleak Forecast

If the bill does not pass, and the economy worsens, women will suffer most because they have less wealth than men and are more vulnerable in economic downturns, she said.

If Congress does clear the bill, its high cost will put a fiscal squeeze on government programs that aid low-income people, most of whom are women, she said.

Under the plan debated Thursday, the federal government would assume $700 billion in bad debts of troubled financial firms to help them keep lending spigots open to individual and business borrowers. These measures are expected to help stem layoffs and deeper losses for retirement accounts tied to credit-hungry financial markets.

The high price of the package will have a similar--but potentially more profound--effect on the budget as the war in Iraq and the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, Entmacher said.

Those big-ticket items prompted lawmakers to rein in government health care programs, she said. More likely to live longer and to live in poverty, women--especially women of color--are the main beneficiaries of these programs, Entmacher said.

Women's rights advocates were hoping for the inclusion of two provisions advocated by Democrats earlier this week: helping certain borrowers avoid foreclosure and creating a federal fund to insure money market accounts.

"Because they've been disproportionately affected by predatory lending, this could be especially important to women," Entmacher said.

Despite using credit at rates comparable to men and averaging slightly higher on credit scores--682 versus 675--women have a disproportionate share of the high-priced "sub-prime" loans, putting them at higher risk of foreclosure, according to a 2006 report by Allen Fishbein, a scholar at the Consumer Federation of America, a think tank and lobby in Washington, D.C. About one-third of female borrowers took on sub-prime mortgages compared to about one-quarter of men.

Money Market Funds

A Democratic proposal circulated earlier this week also included an insurance plan for money market funds--low-risk, low-interest reservoirs of capital that invest in safe forms of debt. The plan would be modeled on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which was created in the wake of the Great Depression to insure bank deposits.

That would be especially helpful to women, said Lovell, of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, because women tend to have less personal savings and therefore are more inclined to invest in money market accounts, which have traditionally been viewed as safe havens. Several major money markets have collapsed during the crisis and fears that others could be at risk, however, have spurred the idea of federal insurance.

It was unclear Thursday if these provisions would end up in the final bill when a deal is reached.

Lovell also noted that Democrats' push to curb executive pay at the institutions that received federal aid--initially opposed by the White House and many Republicans as excessive regulation--would affect far fewer women because they hold fewer executive positions.

The guns-and-butter debate that typically emerges in wartime when another major cost arises has yet to rear its head in Congress.

But Leslie Wolfe, president of the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., a research group that focuses on women's human rights, predicted the onset of such discussions. So many people are "shell shocked" by the crisis that they haven't begun to discuss issues beyond the pending legislation in Congress, she said.

Anti-War Protests Revived

But female anti-war activists and pundits who have long criticized the Iraq war mobilized this week.

Code Pink, the anti-war group led by women and based in Venice, Calif., staged protests on Wall Street Thursday, calling on the government to pay for the bailout bill with new taxes on upper-income Americans and on financial transactions.

"They continue to find money for what they need, and borrow it, but they never find money for what the people of America need," said Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans.

"Welcome to Economic Shock and Awe," Ariana Huffington, founder of the online Huffington Post Web site wrote, comparing the rush to bailout to the Bush administration's rush to war. "Even the amount of taxpayer money being bandied about--$1 trillion--is similar. Think you got your money's worth for the Iraq war? Congratulations--you're about to buy another pricey debacle."

Linda Basch, president of the National Council for Research on Women in New York, said women are especially vulnerable during economic downturns because they are more likely to be unemployed than men; as a result they have less money and face longer periods without regular income. If they do have a job they tend to make less, have fewer benefits or have part-time positions, she said.

Women are also more likely to hold minimum wage jobs, to leave the work force to shoulder caregiving responsibilities, and earn less than men in similar jobs, advocates say. Women also save less money and have smaller pensions or retirement accounts.

"We have fewer assets and fewer savings than men and therefore we are very worried about personal financial security," said Debbie Frett, head of Business and Professional Women USA, a Washington-based lobby for businesswomen.

In the last two years, more than 200,000 women have left jobs in the financial sector of the economy, but the number of men employed in such jobs has remained stable, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor. That suggests to Lovell that the bulk of those laid off in the sector have been women.

Allison Stevens is Washington bureau chief at Women's eNews.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.

Thousands Go Online to Rate the Debates

WASHINGTON -- Free Press and the Tyndall Report are teaming up to give thousands of Americans a chance to instantly rate the media's performance during the four upcoming debates. Using the "Citizens Media Scorecard," viewers across the country will provide real-time feedback on how well the moderators' questions reflect the priorities of the nation.

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More than 7,000 people have already signed up to participate at www.RatetheDebates.org.

Noted media analyst Andrew Tyndall will use the online ratings to provide instant and meaningful analysis of the public's response. This information will be made available to journalists following the completion of each of the four presidential and vice presidential debates.

"We leave it to the spin-meisters to try to persuade us whether their candidate got his nose in front in the horse race," said Tyndall. "Our scorecard is an exercise in democracy. Which issues were overhyped and which were overlooked? Which leadership attributes of each candidate were addressed and which ignored? How about moderator Jim Lehrer's journalistic performance? Did he truly help us understand what is at stake in this election?"

Recent polling by Harris Interactive found that the economy and the Iraq war are the two issues Americans are most concerned about. There was widespread public outcry after the final Democratic primary debate when moderators from ABC News devoted the first 45 minutes to questions about flag pins, former pastors and personalities before raising a single question about either of those two issues.

"Debates are marquee moments in American elections," said Timothy Karr, campaign director of Free Press. "The few journalists selected to participate -- and the media narrative that follows -- will play a defining role in determining our next president. It's up to the public to hold our media -- and through them, our leaders -- accountable."

Andrew Tyndall, Timothy Karr and other Free Press experts are available for comment before and after each debate. To schedule an appearance, contact Jen Howard at (703) 517-6273 or press@freepress.net.

For more information, visit www.RatetheDebates.org.

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Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media, and universal access to communications. Learn more at www.freepress.net

The Tyndall Report has monitored the weekday nightly newscasts of three broadcast networks since 1987. This is Andrew Tyndall's sixth cycle keeping tabs on TV news coverage of the presidential election campaigns. Go to www.tyndallreport.com to follow each day's story rundown and search its database of almost 9,000 network news videostreams, including more than 1100 stories appearing on the network news on Campaign 2008.