Women find no cause to cheer as Trump celebrates first 100 days

The week that culminated in a “celebration” of Donald Trump’s 100^th day in office brought lots of news for American women – none of it good.

While concerned women were busy with other political issues – marching for science, calling Congress to protest the administration’s proposed tax reform, and demanding an independent investigation into the connections between the Trump administration and Russia – Trump and his misogynistic bunch were busy dismantling decades of progress for American women.

Medical benefits under attack

As Paul Ryan scrambled in vain to bring the latest version of Trumpcare to the House floor for a vote in time to give Trump a 100-day “win” to boast about, word spread that Trumpcare 3.0 was no better for women than the first two attempts.

All three versions would defund Planned Parenthood by blocking Medicaid reimbursements to the organization’s health clinics, causing millions of American women to lose access to reproductive and women’s health care (while stopping not a single abortion – the purported goal – since federal funds aren’t used to pay for abortion services).  

Trumpcare would make it virtually impossible to purchase insurance, whether private or federally funded, that would cover abortion by prohibiting tax credits to be spent on any plan that covers the procedure.

Depending on state-by-state decisions, maternity coverage could become unavailable or unaffordable to all but the wealthiest Americans – who could easily pony up for maternity costs anyway.

The GOP plan also calls for the essential health benefits requirement in the Affordable Care Act – which identifies 10 benefits that must be included in all health plans – to sunset at the end of 2019 for Medicaid recipients. No longer would they have coverage for such basic medical services as outpatient and emergency care, hospitalization, laboratory services, prescription drugs, and dozens of preventive care services, such as vaccinations, blood pressure and cholesterol screenings, and cancer-screening colonoscopies.

Included in those 10 essential benefits are three that help women in particular: maternity, newborn and pediatric services. Those, too, would be sunset.

Working women lose in court

On the job front, American women lost out in a decision by the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals – ironically the same court Trump wants to split up because of its decisions against his Muslim ban. The April 27 decision overturned a lower-court ruling that said employers cannot pay women less than men simply because the women earned less in their prior jobs. Since women’s salaries are likely to be lower than men due to existing gender bias, that inequity can now carry over when women compete for a new job with men possessing equal qualifications.

Attorneys for the plaintiff, a California school employee, may appeal the decision to the Supreme Court since other appeals courts have decided such cases differently. But for now, American women, who currently earn 80 cents for each dollar that an equally educated, skilled and experienced man earns, may have that pay inequity locked in to their salaries.

Ivanka serves up pie-in-the-sky

Boasting of her father’s supposed support for working women at the W20 summit in Germany early in the week, Ivanka Trump succeeded only in drawing attention to the nigh-unto-useless proposals she has advanced on his behalf for working families who struggle with maternity leave and childcare expenses.

Trump’s maternity leave proposal – on which Ivanka has been partnering with Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN – would allow up to six weeks of leave for new parents. But its $500 billion ten-year price tag isn’t likely to find many buyers in a GOP-controlled Congress, so the plan is already considered by many to be DOA.

And his childcare plan has been widely panned as a gift to the rich. It offers a tax deduction for childcare costs for anyone earning less than $250,000 ($500,000 for married couples). But getting a tax deduction requires families to pay income taxes to use the deduction – eliminating millions of working families that pay nothing in federal taxes because they earn too little.

It’s different for high earners. Experts at the Tax Policy Center project that 70% of the benefits would go to families that earn $100,000 or more, and 25% to those earning $200,000 or more – leaving just 5% to be divvied up among millions of lower-income American families that do qualify.

Even his proposed dependent care savings account would be useless to many. It would allow families to save up to $2,000 per year tax-free in a DCSA to pay for child or elder care. But lower-income families looking for help with these costs would find it just about impossible to put any money into such an account.

Nikki gets the good-ole-boy treatment

And the highest-ranking woman in Trump’s administration was not so subtly put in her place on two occasions during the week.

After press reports noted the significantly higher public profile of Nikki Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, than that of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the president seemed intent on reining her in.

His first poke: a “joking” comment when Haley brought 14 colleagues from the U.N. Security Council to a White House lunch meeting with Trump.

“Now, does everybody like Nikki?” he asked. “Because if you don’t, otherwise, she can easily be replaced.”

Working women recognize that behavior as a weakly veiled demonstration of male power over women in an organization – as well as a reminder that women are expected to be “nice” if they hope to succeed. Nikki had better be “liked” by her U.N. colleagues – she’d better not be too assertive – or she’s out.

The second rejoinder came late in the week, when the State Department – Tillerson’s turf – announced that Haley is now expected to have any remarks she makes to be cleared by State before she utters them. Her comments should be cleared with Washington, the announcement declared, “if they are substantively different from the [State-written] building blocks, or if they are on a high-profile issue such as Syria, Iran, Israel-Palestine, or the D.P.R.K. [North Korea].”

While that prior approval certainly makes sense on a policy level, it is strikingly obvious that Haley is the only person being ordered – and publicly – to request State’s okay to speak her mind.

If the Trump administration is concerned about its representatives speaking in concert, that’s fine.  But if its objective truly were consistent messaging, Tillerson’s State Department would demand the same review process of every administration official, not just the one forceful, outspoken woman on the team. And it would include Trump himself – to ensure that his words, including his notorious 3 a.m. tweets, are consistent with his own administration’s policy pronouncements.

If it wasn’t already crystal clear before Trump’s 100^th day dawned, it is now: America’s missed opportunity to elect its first woman president is having significant, lasting, and negative impacts on American women, their lives, their families and their careers. 

A year in the life of a feminist

What a difference a year makes.

Before I retired from my post as a corporate communications director with a Fortune 500 company in mid-2016, I’d given up discussing feminism with the younger women with whom I worked. The few times the topic arose, I’d come away from conversations convinced that my comments had been dismissed as quaint recollections of experiences that were utterly irrelevant to young women’s 21^st Century lives.

Younger women would react with bemused tolerance when I shared how, in the mid-1970s, as an entry-level communications staffer with another major U.S. corporation, I’d been ordered away from the front door of the Jonathan Club in downtown Los Angeles, where a meeting I was covering was scheduled, and sent to the freight elevator at the back of the building. They’d smile pleasantly when I told them how I’d refused to use the rear elevator when the meeting ended, and instead marched defiantly down the elegant main stairway with my (all) male colleagues to leave through the front door.

They’d express surprise when I shared how, on trips to the Dallas office of that same company, I’d work all day with the guys, only to be left behind when they headed out for lunch or dinner. The message was clear: good ole Texas boys might have to work with a girl, but they weren’t going to let her into their private club.

But these young women seemed to find no parallels between my career experiences and theirs.

To them, it seemed, equal opportunity was a given. No one had ever told them, as I’d been chided when I tried to sign up for an architectural drafting class in high school, that “you can’t take this -- only boys go into architecture.” None of them had suffered through an undergraduate pre-law core course taught by a retired Army JAG officer who, determined to keep women out of the legal profession, would belittle female students when they spoke up and change any A’s his TAs had given their essay exams to B’s or C’s. (My TA, a male Ph.D. candidate, told me every time it happened.)

My younger female colleagues had grown up assuming that the only limitations on their career trajectory would be self-determined: choosing a traditionally “female friendly” major in college, taking a career break or switching to part-time status to raise their children, moving for their spouse’s career and giving up a great job in the process. If a promotion went to a male colleague instead of them, they seemingly assigned little credence to the notion that the hiring manager had chosen “in his own image” and instead concluded that they just needed to do more to prove themselves.

And none of them ever publicly identified themselves as feminists or used the Ms. abbreviation before their names. To them, both were relics of the days when hippie chicks burned their bras and spouted wildly anti-male rhetoric.

As the November presidential election approached, I began to think that younger women would deem feminism an utter anachronism once the nation’s first female president was elected. Seeing that “biggest glass ceiling” shattered, they would blithely assume the existence of a post-feminist career utopia. That the election of America’s first African-American president eight years earlier hadn’t come close to creating a post-racial America suggested otherwise, but younger career women seemed blissfully self-confident that the world was theirs for the taking.

Today, everything has changed.

The person elected to the American presidency is a self-declared sexist and misogynist. His Cabinet and team of advisors are heavily skewed to the older, white male demographic.

When a woman, Betsy DeVos, does get named to head a Cabinet department, her first major policy recommendation, concerning transgender student use of school bathrooms, is opposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The President sides with him, and she is overruled. DeVos may never admit it publicly, but she’s been put in her place by the boys who really run the show.

Trump’s appointed counselor, Kellyanne Conway, makes sure to explain to attendees of the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference why she refuses to identify as a feminist, and incorrectly declares feminism to be “anti-male” and “pro-abortion” in the process.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren dares to quote a letter from Coretta Scott King to explain her opposition to the appointment of Sessions as Attorney General, and is ordered by her Senate “colleagues” to sit down and shut up. Then, four Democratic male Senators are allowed to share Mrs. King’s statement with the body.

During a legislative debate on abortion, Justin Humphrey, an Oklahoma state representative, makes his anti-choice argument by declaring that women make abortion decisions “with the mistaken belief that their bodies are their own…I understand that they feel like that is their body. I feel like it is a separate – what I call them is, is you’re a ‘host.’”

And among the key changes advocated in the GOP’s destructive (and now defeated) American Health Care Act was the defunding of Planned Parenthood, which provides health care services to millions of American women every year. Just 3% of its budget is allocated to abortion services, and none of that 3% comes from government funds, but Planned Parenthood was targeted nonetheless. As were one in five American women, who will turn to a local Planned Parenthood health center for essential health services at least once in their lifetimes.

America’s young women are taking notice.

At the “Day Without a Woman” rally in Los Angeles on March 8 – attended by women and men of all ages, races, faiths and gender identities – the words “choice” and “feminism” prompted enthusiastic cheers. Women whose faith communities teach them to refuse abortion stood side by side with women who advocate for the right to make that choice. Teenage girls held signs that would have fit right in at an ERA rally in the 1970s. I told several of them how happy this aging feminist was to see their generation taking up the battle cry for equal rights.

Then, as my husband and I strolled through Grand Park afterward, heading back to where we’d parked our car, we were stopped by two young women who asked to take our picture. “Seeing you two here together – we want to post your picture as a ‘Relationship Goals’ statement,” one of them explained.

My words of advice, pointing to my husband as they shot the photo: “If you marry, marry a feminist!”

And BE one.

Liberal activist? Yes! Paid protester? Nope.

Sean Spicer is half right. Lots of liberal activists are, indeed, showing up at rallies and marches and protests and Congressional Town Hall meetings these days. But we're not being paid to be there.

Case in point: when my husband, some of our fellow activists from SFV Indivisible (a grassroots progressive advocacy group that formed after the January 20 inauguration and now numbers more than 7,000 local groups nationwide) and I showed up, in response to open invitations on Facebook and Twitter, at Monday's "Not My President" rally at L.A. City Hall, one thing became crystal clear: no one was in charge.

There were no staffers with clipboards and sign-up sheets. No microphones. No stage. No agenda. No donation bucket. Just people, with hand-drawn signs.

As the crowd began to grow, uncertainty abounded: Where should we stand? What should we do? What should we say? Who would lead us?

The press -- representing all of the national TV networks, L.A.'s local channels, Spanish language networks and CNN, along with a wide swath of local, regional and national print and radio outlets -- seemed equally nonplussed. They watched. And waited.

And then, it happened. WE led us. The crowd assembled en masse on the steps of City Hall facing Main Street, and began shouting out the concerns that had brought us there, while city bus drivers and ordinary people heading to work drove by, waving and honking their horns in support.

Someone would initiate a chant -- "Not my president!" for starters -- and the crowd would pick it up. A group of young women with drums and other musical instruments arrived, lending melody and pulse to the chants that ensued.

"Love, not hate, makes America great!"

"You'll build a wall. We'll tear it down!"

"No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA."

"Stand up! Fight back!"

"My body, my choice!" -- which quickly transformed itself into a women's and men's call and response: "My body, my choice! Her body, her choice!"

"Dump Trump!"

"Don't lie!"

"Lock him up!"

"Black lives matter!"

"Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go!"

"Investigate! Impeach!"

Another call-and-response: "What does democracy look like? THIS is what democracy looks like!"

And then one that brought grins to more than a few reporters' faces: "Free press!"

As the chants continued, the group of a thousand or so, who had braved a rainy Southern California morning to attend, spontaneously began to march around to the Spring Street entrance to City Hall, where we filled the lawn and hillside steps leading up to the building and continued to speak our minds.

A jovial, peaceful march through downtown followed.

Throughout the day, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department stood on the sidelines, chuckling at one chant or another, and politely reminding stragglers to stay on the sidewalks and out of traffic. They were there to do their jobs: to protect and to serve those of us who had come to do our duty as citizens.

No one signed us up to join a group or receive any emails. No one exhorted us to donate to an organization -- although some enterprising individuals did set up tables along a sidewalk, where they sold political buttons and T-shirts. Several vendors cooked up sausages and vegetables, filling the air with savory aromas.

And no one paid us or offered us gifts to be there -- unlike the Trump "reelection" rally in Florida the prior Saturday, which had offered people cash or gifts on CraigsList in exchange for their attendance. There were no buses chartered by a left-wing version of the Koch brothers, as there were at Tea Party events in 2009 and 2010. There were no pre-printed signs handed out by a political organization.

No, Mr. Spicer, we are not paid protesters. We are not mercenary agitators. We are Americans, exercising our First Amendment rights, and demanding a hearing with the public servants we elected to represent us.

You, and your boss, would be well served to recognize those facts -- and to start listening to us as we speak up and speak out about your legislative proposals and your harmful unilateral actions.

Because we will keep rallying. We will keep speaking out. And we will be heard.

Nothing new, New York Times: Shopping has always been political...for people of conscience

Two business writers at the New York Times alerted America just the other day that shopping has, in the age of POTUS #45 and his self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, emoluments clause-violating ways, suddenly "become" political.

Julie Creswell and Rachel Abrams, authors of a Feb. 10 piece, "Shopping becomes a political act in the Trump era," did a solid job of reporting on the current boycott-don't boycott battle being waged between opponents and supporters of the new administration. But they ignored history.

If you grew up in a family like mine, politics and social causes regularly played into the purchase decisions that my mom and dad made. I knew from an early age that we'd never find Sugar Daddies in our kitchen candy drawer: they were made by the Welch family, whose patriarch was a founder of the John Birch Society. There would never be a Ford in the garage: Henry Ford may have been a master of mass production, but he was an anti-Semite, and my dad was Jewish. We drove Chevys.

Heck, even the house I grew up in was a social justice-inspired purchase. My dad -- an Army officer in World War II -- left the military after the war's end, disillusioned by the racial segregation he'd seen in the armed forces. He and my mom could have bought a home in one of the "better" post-war suburban tracts of 3-bedroom, 2-bath stucco ranch homes popping up across the San Fernando Valley in the early 1950s. But they bought in the less desirable northeast corner of the Valley because deeds to the homes there didn't include racial covenants. I came of age believing that everyone was equal, and could live wherever they wanted -- and that everyone else in America thought so, too.

While I eventually was disabused of that idealistic notion, my appreciation of purchase choices as political power continued to grow. We added Carl's Jr. to the don't-go-there list after Carl Karcher's extreme right-wing positions became known. Ditto for Olive Garden when its owners took an anti-gay-rights stand. And Wal-Mart has always been on the family boycott list, given its habit of undercutting Mom & Pop businesses to make it the only place left to shop in small towns, its push to limit employee work hours to avoid having to provide health benefits (and instead directing its employees to apply for public-funded Medicaid), and its resistance to unionization and a living wage.

Today, Whole Foods and Papa John's Pizza have been added to my own family's no-go list -- their owners having fought the Affordable Care Act, and Papa John slashing employees' work hours to keep them off his health insurance plan. Chick-fil-A is there too, thanks to its we'd-rather-hire-Christians religious bigotry and its anti-gay stance.

So, no, New York Times, you're wrong: shopping politically has always been a "thing." It's just more noticeable today. In the days before the Internet, people in Hoboken had no idea that folks in Hollywood were also driving past their local Carl's Jr. and eating at Wendy's instead. Clevelanders didn't know that California table grapes were being boycotted until wire services ran photos of Bobby Kennedy marching in California with Cesar Chavez and striking United Farm Workers union members.

While boycotts didn't come with a hashtag -- like the impactful #GrabYourWallet effort Creswell and Abrams wrote about -- and didn't grow as big or as quickly as they do today, they've always been a weapon in the political and social justice arsenal. They grow out of the same age-old effort by people who want to fight injustice, hatred and discrimination by using the most powerful weapon we possess: our hard-earned dollars.