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On Sunday, the NYT business section ran a piece called "Why the Sting of Layoffs Can Be Sharper for Men." It's got some not particularly evidence-based generalizations about how men are harder hit because their self-esteem is based on professional success more than women's. Also more interesting, if anecdotal, reports from psychiatrists that increasing numbers of men are coming in to talk about anxiety and depression related to the economic crisis. I'm skeptical about the broad claim that men feel the pain of layoffs more than women do. But I'm curious about how the downturn is playing out along gender lines. Are male egos collapsing because of the crisis? Are female ones? How are women supporting their laid-off or unemployed male partners, and how are men supporting the jobless women in their lives? If any of you readers have a story along these lines that you're up for sharing, please send it to doublex.slate@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in Slate unless the writer stipulates otherwise.
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OK, OK. Eve, you’re right. The bailout (whoops, stimulus—whoops, recovery) bill passed the House, without the family planning funds, and without any Republican support. So the big bad Democratic majority didn’t need to kowtow to Republicans after all—which means that Democrats are entirely responsible for the diminished support for women’s reproductive health. Maybe this is politically intelligent, but I don’t see how just yet.
To Rachael: I’m not particularly irked that this bill is saddling my generation with debt. Yes, this is a scary moment, about which I don’t think anyone knows enough, no matter which study which economist is brandishing. But, hyper-liberal that I am—and because in Washington, we get to call these things whatever is rhetorically expedient—I’m going to name all this cash a “strategic investment.” One that, in the case of contraception, is desperately needed in many Medicaid-qualifying households, and one that pays dividends in the long run—for individuals and, as I mentioned earlier, for Americans interested in expanding health care coverage. See Katha Pollitt for more on the topic, and on projected savings.
More importantly, providing birth control to underserved women should be solid political ground for Dems. Two thirds of the country supports birth control for teens. I don’t see why an aversion to GOP culture-warring—which didn’t stop passage of the bill—should be enough to get America’s hard-won Democratic leadership to fold like a cheap cocktail umbrella. So the Blue Dogs are howling—why no similar pressure on blue-state Republicans? Worse, this successful peer pressure allows Republicans to dismiss birth control and, say, new sod for the national Mall, in the same breath—though one is a public and personal health policy concern, and the other a matter of horticulture. (Both create jobs, but that’s beside my point.) At what point does the conciliatory tone that Obama so desperately seeks become an abdication of power? Because, let’s not forget what he told Republicans on Monday: “I won.”
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(Okay, Kim Kardashian would probably be a lot worse.)
So, I hope it doesn't violate any unofficial policy to discuss times certain of us XX Factorians have interacted "In Real Life" because I am going to mention the fact that some of us met Eliot Spitzer on Monday night at the Slate holiday party. Not because I care if he's sufficiently sorry for screwing prostitutes—I'm with you on that, Susannah—but because my brief conversation with the fellow speaks to a concern I have about the woman—and you won't be surprised I'm glad she's a woman!—Obama just appointed to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Schapiro. Spitzer agreed with me that the campaign of incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to oust FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair was worrisome, because it suggests Geithner is exactly what you'd fear of someone with Geithner's credentials (Clintonite, New York Fed, Council of Foreign Relations, Kissinger Associates)—an insider. Now we have Schapiro, current CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the supposed "self-regulator" of the financial services industry.
If any regulatory body involved in this disaster has been a more abysmal failure than the SEC, it's the "self-regulator" that was supposed to monitor all those concerns the real (i.e., paid slightly less than $2 million a year) regulators had so steadily deregulated out from under them over the past 10 years: mind-blowing overleverage and the attendant counterparty risk, unbridled short-selling, the over-the-counter derivatives that amplified the current crisis, etc., etc. What was Schapiro doing all that time? Cracking down on over-the-top Wall Street …
Parties! (What, you thought I was going to say "bonuses"?) Excuse me while I shoot myself in the face for a second. Would it have killed Obama to appoint someone with the perspective to understand that all those unseemly parties wouldn't have been possible if not for the phony "profits" Wall Street booked selling everyone on their mathematical model-supported certainty that everything would keep going up forever?
Schapiro also took credit in an October speech for pushing to regulate credit-default swaps, the "insurance" contracts on mortage-backed securities written with reckless abandon by many of the recipients of our trillion-dollar bailout. I'm no expert, but nowhere have I read that Wall Street's bank-funded self-regulatory trade group was a leading voice in favor of getting the government to regulate the financial instruments Wall Street claimed it could self-regulate. Even ickier, this smacks of the same sort of retroactive flip-flopping (flip-swapping!) Geithner's promoters have displayed in trying to advance the notion that Geithner, had he been "left to his own devices," would not have allowed Lehman Bros. to go bankrupt. We know who did advocate regulation of derivatives—Schapiro's successor at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born. By all accounts, Born was less "popular" in the post than Schapiro had been. Now more than ever, we need a few good unpopular people in these positions. Why not someone like Born or Bair? Or even less popular right now, a certain Slate columnist? A little exile can be an edifying thing, but no one seems more insider-y than Geithner and Schapiro. (And ugh, for that matter, Caroline Kennedy.)
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