Marissa Mayer and the Continued Idea of the False Choice

Marissa Mayer is a powerful and successful woman who worked at Google – one of the original Googleheads, in fact – and accepted the opportunity to fix and run Yahoo! and is having a child.

The media has gone crazy over this. Forbes. The Washington Post. The Sun-Times...and...et al. As is typical, it is all the same focus when they realize a woman has attained some sort of position of power. They did it with Carly Fiorena and Hillary Clinton, and even Sarah Palin. (Mind you, I wouldn’t put Sarah with these other women in any other list. There’s no contest there.) More on Fiorena, below.

Can she do the job? Is she a bad example for "our children?" Should women hate her? Why isn’t she taking a full maternity leave? If she can have it all, why can't you? Is she a bad mother-to-be? Should parents hate her? Blah, blah, blah.

I’m waiting for TMZ to start asking questions about the size of her breasts, how much she craves chocolate, and her favorite movie. 

There is really only one thing worth thinking about in regard to her maternity leave decision: Due to her economic position, she can do it all, because she has the opportunity to do it all.

It is true that the educationally and economically disadvantaged do not have the choice to go right back to work. Hell, not merely just the disadvantaged, but most of the advantaged as well: white-middle class people. In most cases, a mother has no choice but to go back to work. Someone has to work to keep the lights on and given that wages have stagnated for 20-plus years, that someone is often BOTH parents. (Not mentioned in most of the news articles, mind you.)

Mayer gets to choose to be a new parent and be Yahoo!’s new CEO. She gets both. Why? Because she gets to choose. In the terms of capability economics she has the freedom to realize her well-being, the kind of life she is effectually able to lead, who can decide what she is able to be and able to do. She gets to choose what is her “functioning.”

Don’t lose me here; this is actually quite simple.

This capability approach to economics deals directly with the situation and the reactions to the Mayer case. To quote directly from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Take the following functionings: (1) to hold a job, which will require me to spend many hours on working and commuting, but will generate the income needed to properly feed myself and my family; (2) to care for my children at home and give them all the attention, care and supervision they need. In a piecemeal analysis, both (1) and (2) are opportunities open to me, but they are not both together open to me. The point about the capability approach is precisely that we must take a comprehensive or holistic approach, and ask which sets of capabilities are open to me, that is: can I simultaneously provide for my family and properly care for and supervise my children? Or am I rather forced to make some hard, perhaps even tragic choices between two functionings which both reflect basic needs and basic moral duties?"

In 99% of the cases wherein people are in this situation, they are stuck. Why? Option 2 – for most people is not available. They truly do not have a choice. Not limited choice. No choice. From a holistic viewpoint, they have only one possible functioning. (Which is why when looked at separately, it appears there is a choice, even if there isn’t one.)

Ms. Mayer is not stuck in an either/or situation. She has a both/and situation. She has more ability, more freedom, more possibilities for the realization of her potentiality than the average person because of her economic status. Why does she have this advantage?

That’s called having good health insurance and health care and child care through having excellent employment and educational opportunities in her life - and taking those opportunities and making the most of them – and succeeding economically. That is the kind of opportunity making our country should provide every one. This is how a society opens up and creates and allows for its citizens to become more capable, to be more free, to have more functionings.

Whether or not others’ think she is being a bad parent and horrible mother-to-be by not taking a full maternity leave, or continuing at work - and all that other nonsense - is a sideshow to the real issue. The media is making it appear that every woman and every family has this work-maternity choice. And in this debate one simple fact is overlooked: most do NOT have this choice at all. Period. (And of course none of this would be an issue if she had a penis! Gender bias? You bet!)

She’s getting a lot of snuff for the facticity of being a woman. This media barrage very much reminds me of what happened to Carly Fiorena at Hewlett-Packard. They lambasted her in the media. It was brutal. Every move she made was under heightened scrutiny. She was heartily dissed for buying Compaq and making a number of other moves people thought were short-sighted and bad for business. Then they ousted her in 2005. In fact, they still are giving her hell, years later. 

Of course everyone discounts the historical fact that she took over just as the internet bubble was going to pop – and she got HP through that period – and the economic turmoil that followed the 9-11 attacks, as well. Turns out her moves were the right ones, but she got no credit for them. Rather, the guy who succeeded her got all the credit.

Perspective is everything and here too the media is not doing due diligence. There’s a misconception that Yahoo! is failing, but in reality it is still growing, despite all the missteps by its former management teams. It just hasn't been growing fast enough for Wall Street and much of the financial media, especially when compared to Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, with whom it is always compared. Then again, compared to those, everyone looks like a laggard. Yahoo! has $2B in cash on hand, with only $130M in debt, with a profit margin of 22%. Pretty good baseline numbers for any company. 

I expect to see Mayer dump a bunch of unprofitable stuff and go on a buying spree to acquire new technologies. Most importantly, I expect to see her shake the Yahoo management tree and watch the rotten fruit fall off the limbs. I think she has the chops to change the organizational culture - not an easy task, of course - and get Yahoo! out of its doldrums.

If a man was hired the focus would be only on the finances of Yahoo! and the moves that he would make. Bias? You bet.

I wish Ms. Mayer good luck as both a CEO and a parent.

Your Bank Hates You: From Banks to Credit Unions

My First Experience with a Big Bank

What’s going on with the big banks today reminds me of what happened in the early 1990s. When I went to work for Leadership Directories, Inc. (Back then it was called Monitor Publishing, but eventually changed its name because Monitor is the name of the paper the Christian Scientists publish – which we had nothing to do with)… oh that was a heck of a digression.

Anywho, when I went to work in NYC in 1991, I opened an account at Manufacturer’s Hanover. “Manny Hanny” was a pretty big bank, but it was regional to New York City. Plus, being based in NYC as it was, I could get money out of a MAC anywhere in the city. 

For those who don’t know MAC stands for “Money Access Center,” the old northeast version of ATM. By the way, never call an ATM an “ATM Machine.” ATM stands for Automated Teller Machine, so if you say ATM Machine you are really saying Automated Teller Machine Machine. And that’s idiodic. Like saying PDF File. PDF stands for Portable Document File, so really you are saying Portable Document File File. You are using an RAS. Please stop. Try not to sound like a mentally-challenged platypus. But again, I digress…

So I could get money once I got to the city via the PATH train, or on the way home via a MAC machine. (“MAC machine” is, by the way, allowable since there is no redundancy.) Checking was free as long as there was a direct deposit from my place of work. Not a problem at all and I had that Manny Hanny account for about a year. I actually used to walk through this door to do my banking.

The Manny Hanny Golden Door on 34th St.

Then they merged with Chemical bank. Chemical was having trouble with bad real estate loans (sound familiar?) and Manny Hanny was having problems with international loans (Argentina and Mexico, in particular), so they decided to join forces. At the time it was the largest bank merger in American History.

At first it was no big deal. Until Chemical – as the new bank was called – decided to close 70 locations. That put a damper on where I could get money, when I could get money, and how I could get money. No big deal, just a little bit more planning and walking and waiting in lines. Until…

Chemical decided that they did not want to deal with piss ants like myself. They decided to up the amount you had to have in your account to about $1,500 or they were going to start charging. People who were living paycheck to paycheck, people just starting out, or just starting over, or just making ends meet…people like my friends and I, didn’t have that money just laying in a bank. And they wanted rid of us. We were a PITA to them. They didn’t make any money off our piddly little checking account balances. We cost them money, so they put up barriers that basically forced us all to move. I went to Pamrapo Savings & Loan in Hoboken. Right across from the PATH, so again easy to get money going in or out of the city. My friends also changed banks. 

My 2nd Experience with a Big Bank

Eventually, however, I found my way back to a big bank. The big bank: Bank of America. I was fairly happy with them. Until... first they wanted to charge me $40 just to have one of their credit cards. Say what? A $40 fee on a $2K card. Please. Then they started to take away the free checking. That was that. Buh-bye.

Does this sound familiar? It should.  Bank of America is jacking up debit card rates and Citi is changing all sorts of requirements for depositors. Its not just the nationals. Regions, First Tennessee, and Suntrust all jerking around their customers with fees. It appears that the banks have decided that we aren’t worth it. They don’t want to deal with the “loser” working class anymore. Fine. Or they want us to move to credit cards so they can make even more money off of us. Fine. Piss on them.

Take your money out. Find a credit union. You can start here. And here. And here too. Forget the big banks. We bailed them out. They took our money. Now they are using the money that we saved them with to charge us to use our own money. Eastman Credit Union is my new financial institution.


And the colonists thought King George was a nonrepresentative taxer! If Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, etc. could see what was going on now, they’d be right in the thick of #occupywallstreet, in their white powdered wigs, getting ready to burn down some buildings and start another revolution!

What ever happened to my old Manny Hanny? Chemical....


was bought by Chase...

...which merged with JPMorgan...

...and is now JPMorganChase. 

JPMorganChase is one of the biggest banks in the world, like BoA, Wells Fargo, and Citi. We bailed them all out. They are all  charging people to use their own money. Leave them. They don't love you. In fact, they are abusive, not only to you as a customer, but to our country as well. Leave them. GTFO.