Roster of bloviators is too pale and male

Anna Quindlen relayed an eye-opening and hair-raising experience to her readers in 1990. “A newspaper editor said to me not long ago, with no hint of self-consciousness, ‘I’d love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman,’” the New York Times columnist wrote. “Not only was there a quota; there was a quota of one.”

A quarter of a century later, many newspapers still have far to go. On a recent slow news day, white men wrote every bylined commentary in the The Washington Post’s op-ed pages.

Even the most well-meaning white men can’t speak for the rest of us.

Granted,  The Post  regularly features the analyses of Eugene Robinson, an African-American man, and Fareed Zakaria, an immigrant born in India. It also runs Kathleen Parker and other white women. Several of the paper’s Metro and Business section columnists are people of color, including at least two black women.

But that pale and male lineup that caught my eye was no blip.

While The Post does distribute columns written by Esther Cepeda and Ruben Navarrette, it doesn’t publish work by either of them or any other people of Latin American descent in its own pages. Given that the 54 million Latinos living in the United States compose our largest minority, can’t Washington’s dominant news source find room for the opinions expressed by a single person from this community?

Detailed research on byline balance is clear if infrequent. A 2012 Op-Ed Project study found that male opinion-page writers still outnumber female writers four-to-one.

This leaves most op-ed sections more testosterone-laced than the subset of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers who cheer when he disses Megyn Kelly.

In addition to this quantity problem, there are quality concerns. The Op-Ed Project found that a disproportionate share of women’s commentaries address “pink” things such as gender, food, and family, versus economics, politics, national security, and other hard-news topics.

The mainstream media’s even more muffled when it comes to amplifying voices from communities of color. The last time the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did the bean-counting, whites wrote up to 94 percent of the opinion pieces that ran in the three most prominent newspapers.

And like The Washington Post, The New York Times still doesn’t publish a single Latino columnist.

How does OtherWords, the editorial service I run, measure up?

Some background: William A. Collins founded Minuteman Media in 1998 as a bulwark against the growing dominance of conservatives in the nation’s opinion pages. When this avuncular former Norwalk, Conn., mayor handed me the reins of his editorial service six years ago, most of the folks writing the commentaries we distributed were pale and male.

By 2012, women were writing a quarter of the pieces that this editorial service, by then renamed, got published in newspapers. That was better but not good enough. Today, partly because of my column, women pen half of our work.

Achieving gender equality makes our scrappy outfit stand out. But people of color wrote only 5 percent of our commentaries in the first half of this year, in line with the media’s overall lack of diversity.

Working within the confines of a shoestring budget, OtherWords brings under-exposed yet bold voices to the kitchen tables of the good people from Union, South Carolina to Gardena, California — and hundreds of towns in between. Now that we’re less male, can we get less pale? We can and we must.

Because byline inequality matters.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords (OtherWords.org),  a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Emily Schwartz Greco/William A. Collins: Good news for public is bad news for Wall St.

  NORWALK, Conn.

For the first time since 1997, the U.S. economy just added at least 200,000 jobs per month for six months running. GDP grew at a 4 percent annual clip between April and June. The percentage of Americans who describe the economy as “good” has climbed to the highest level of President  Obama’s presidency.

Who wouldn’t rejoice over these happy milestones on the bumpy road to a real recovery?

Wall Street. On July 31, within hours of the release of a bunch of sunny indicators, stocks sank more than they had on any day since early February. The decline wiped out all gains the S&P 500 stock index had racked up over the month.

Global instability contributed to the sharp drop, but so did investors’ fretting over indications that workers are finally getting higher wages and more benefits.

And why exactly does Wall Street tank on news portending economic gains for most Americans? Don’t people with extra money in their pockets boost the economy when they spend more freely? Isn’t it something worth celebrating?

Not in an economy that caters to the rich.

You see, there are practical implications of the chasm between rich and poor for the conduct of commerce. For several years, retailers have increasingly doted on the affluent, the most alluring segment of the $10 trillion consumer spending market.

Consider how U.S. households differ. The richest 20 percent of Americans now pocket more than half of the nation’s income. The typical income for this kind of family tops $150,000, triple the norm for all of us. Together, these “high-value customers” (to borrow a phrase from LuxuryDaily.com) account for about 40 percent of all U.S. spending.

And the cost of real luxury has gotten a divorce from reality. A quilted Chanel handbag can set you back $4,900. An ultra-thin Piaget Altiplano watch could siphon 95 grand from your wallet.

There’s still some money made from selling cheap stuff to the poor and working class. That’s why the four biggest U.S. retailers are big-box behemoths Wal-Mart, Costco, and Target, along with the Kroger supermarket chain. Even the very bottom of the food chain, the people whose households eke by on $30,000 or less a year, account for a stagnant yet sizable $1 trillion bare-bones consumption market.

For them, dollar stores can be a bigger draw than the big boxes. They’re in a bind and so are the companies relying on their purchases.

“Customers are under pressure,” Dollar Tree Chief Executive Bob Sasser told The Wall Street Journal. “Unfortunately, that’s one reason why the space continues to grow.”

In a telling sign of today’s increasingly unequal times, Dollar Tree is merging with Family Dollar Stores. The No. 2 and No. 3 companies in this cut-throat market want to team up to compete with their No. 1 competitor, Dollar General. Together, they’ll fend off bids by Wal-Mart and its ilk to gobble up some of their territory with new smaller-box establishments.

Clearly, times are tough for retailers opting to sell stuff to the rest of us. But they’ve got it figured out for the most part and Wall Street worships predictability.

Think of all the economic models and assumptions that would be shattered if the drive toward wealth concentration were to take a detour toward shared prosperity.

Of course, financial experts won’t say these things out loud. Instead, they’ll mutter about inflation and freak out over signs that labor markets are growing tighter. Are those really big concerns in light of this protracted war on consumers?

If you would like to know more about how and why the rich are getting so much richer while the poor become steadily poorer (and you enjoy very long reads), check out Thomas Piketty’s 700-page masterpiece. In his wildly successful book Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the French economist has finally organized and footnoted every lost battle in this tale of class warfare.

Winning the debate, of course, isn’t enough. Until more U.S. political and business leaders decide they’ve had enough, this nation will become less of a democracy governed by the people and more of a plutocracy ruled by the rich.

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, a non-profit national editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies. OtherWords columnist William A. Collins is a former  Connecticut state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn. This piece originated at OtherWords.org.

William A. Collins: State banks are a good idea

By WILLIAM A. COLLINS NORWALK,  Conn.

Vermonters aren’t like the rest of us: They live in a small state with a flinty history and a legendary suspicion of outsiders.

That independent streak gained luster when 15 Vermont towns voted earlier this year to reinforce this independent tradition by approving a proposal to create a state bank.

The Vermont Economic Development Authority would get a license to do what private banks normally do — only with a mandate to serve the public interest no matter what.

This isn’t unprecedented. North Dakota has enjoyed a flourishing state banking system for nearly a century.

Costa Rica set another good precedent. Its public banking dates back to 1949. As of a decade ago, its four state banks held 75 percent or more of all individual deposits.

All this is quite vexing to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As elsewhere, they have muscled Costa Rica to privatize its government-owned businesses. Costa Rica has largely done this, but it won’t let go of its state-owned banks. For some reason, Costa Ricans don’t trust the commercial ones.

No, Americans don’t trust our banks either. But only North Dakota’s state bank remains under public control.

Everywhere else, banking laws have made it very profitable for old-fashioned mutual (non-profit) savings banks, once popular, to sell out their depositors and turn commercial. The executives who accomplish this switch all do very nicely for themselves.

Luckily, credit unions carry on from bygone times as a thorn in the side of the industry, but Wall Street is working hard to extinguish them too. Credit unions depend heavily on their non-profit status to protect them against taxes, so conservative outfits like the Tax Foundation are trying mightily to squash that exemption.

Theoretically, the government is our protector from the avaricious cartel of private banks. Both state and federal laws ostensibly provide us with banking watchdogs which safeguard the honesty and fairness of our saving and borrowing.

That’s really just in theory. Unfortunately, a cynical revolving door regularly sends regulators wheeling into bank jobs and bankers hot-footing it over to regulation. At the same time, lobbyists sap the rectitude of those lawmakers and oversight agencies who you might have thought had our best interests at heart.

Hence, banks feel unrestricted to manipulate credit cards, student loans, mortgages, securitizations, hedge funds, credit default swaps, currency exchanges, and all manner of rigged financial transactions. Our regulators rein them in sometimes, but in many cases not until after the damage is done.

As a result, when mortgages default, neighborhoods collapse, families are ruined, and the economy tanks, the banks go right on — perhaps with their wrists slapped.

One other savings alternative does exist: the U.S. Postal Service. In years gone by, the Postal Service doubled as a bank that had lots of branches and no securitized mortgages.

But given the general lack of trust that  most people have in commercial banks, some lawmakers are looking to bring the Post Office back into banking. That would be a new American Revolution.

 William A. Collins is a former Connecticut state representative, a former mayor of Norwalk, Conn., and a columnist for OtherWords.org, where this column originated.