Crisis in US women's leadership

John met someone promoting equality for the new EU cabinet but as I mentioned earlier, we need to do much better with promoting women. The current numbers are rightly called a crisis, whether you are looking at business or government. Shouldn't we expect more?

The majority of Americans are comfortable with women leading in all sectors, but the reality is women hold only 18% of leadership positions across the 10 sectors we examined, including politics, business, law, sports, academia, journalism, religion, film/TV, nonprofit, and military.

In politics, for example, women have lost ground in the last decade as elected statewide executive officials and have made only incremental gains in Congress, where they currently comprise 17% of leadership. On a global scale, the U.S. ranks a dismal 71st out of 189 countries, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, in terms of women in legislatures, trailing behind nations such as Pakistan, Cuba, and United Arab Emirates.

At Fortune 500 companies, women hold only 15% of board seats, 16% of corporate officer positions, and a mere 3% of CEO positions, while women of color make up only 3% of board officers and 1.7% of corporate officer positions.

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Dallas Fed President: stop 'coddling' and break up 'too big to fail'

Hallelujah.

Fisher suggested the only way of ensuring that such financial giants do not pose recurrent problems is by making them smaller.

"This means finding ways not to live with 'em and getting on with developing the least disruptive way to have them divest those parts of the 'franchise,' such as proprietary trading, that place the deposit and lending function at risk and otherwise present conflicts of interest," Fisher said in prepared remarks to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

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Friday Afternoon Open Thread

It's a crazy day and John is having some internet connection challenges so pitch in and let everyone know what's happening. Read More......

South Carolina discussing impeachment for Sanford

Couldn't happen to a nicer person. AP:

South Carolina lawmakers plan to formally consider impeaching Gov. Mark Sanford for the first time next week, the chairman of the committee beginning that work said Friday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Harrison told The Associated Press he is appointing an ad-hoc committee of four Republicans and three Democrats who will begin meeting Tuesday. He said he expects to have a resolution to impeach ready before Christmas for the full Judiciary Committee to consider.

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Teabagger infighting leading to chaos

Splintered and infighting? Who could have imagined? Even more surprising is the claim that there is little management experience within the fractured group. It all sounded so dreamy a few short months ago.

Disagreements over those issues have spawned personal and institutional rivalries, at least one highly contentious lawsuit and — perhaps most significantly — resulted in the splintering of local, regional and national groups into a patchwork of hundreds of smaller groups that occasionally seem to be working at cross-purposes.

“These groups don’t play as well together as they should,” said Kevin Jackson, a St. Louis-based conservative author and activist who has spoken at dozens of tea party-type rallies and is traveling across the South with a convoy sponsored by the national Tea Party Patriots group.

“They’re fractured at the organization level, I think mainly because there are a lot of people who have not had managerial experience who all of a sudden are thrust into the limelight and become intoxicated with it. And when a potential rift comes up, instead of handling it and maybe agreeing to disagree, they splinter and go off on their own.”

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Democrats call for review of Federal Reserve

Absolutely. Clearly there is a danger in politicizing Federal Reserve decisions but looking at how the Fed handled the bailout of AIG and Wall Street, it's difficult to see how much worse it could have been. To date, Congress or the White House (either the current or the former) have hardly been impressive with taking control of the issue though the Federal Reserve does look like a black hole, accountable to no one. When billions are handed out with no strings, it's fair to ask questions and demand answers.

The group, led by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., wants a congressional review of the Federal Reserve system. They want to allow congressional audits of the Fed as part of financial rules being debated by the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, according to a letter Wednesday to the committees' chairmen.

"Real financial regulatory reform cannot occur without an examination into the structure" of the Federal Reserve system, the letter says.

Details on which banks benefited from AIG's bailout never would have become known without demands from Congress, and a recent report shows flaws in the Fed's structure as a regulator, the lawmakers wrote.

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Friday Morning Open Thread

John is in BCN and Joe has probably reached beautiful South Africa by now where they are heading into summer. Joelle and I arrived in Jo'burg around this time of the year back in 2002. After six months in and out of the country we hated to leave and only did so because our tickets were expiring. The blue skies in southern Africa are amazing and star gazing at night is spectacular. From small villages to big cities, we found the people there to be very warm and kind. And then there's the wild life that is so enjoyable and so present throughout the country. One of the toughest parts of visiting for us was to see the impact of HIV/AIDS. Statistics don't tell the full story and were highly questioned by many. It was impossible to travel the countryside without seeing fresh graves in every cemetery. The contrasts there are everywhere.

John's post below about gender equality will hopefully be a hot issue over this way. Northern Europe is so progressive on the issue and Zapatero's Spanish government has been quite good but elsewhere in Europe it's embarrassing. Then again, look at the numbers in the US either for Congress or the work world. We all need to do a lot better.

So what's happening out there? Start threading... Read More......

Online campaign takes on gender inequities in EU government

I'm sitting in the hotel lobby in Barcelona talking to an interesting English guy, Jon Worth, who, along with a small group of friends, just launched a campaign to push for more women on the European Commission. As Jon tells it, the European Commission is kind of like the Cabinet for the European Union (it's all a bit confusing).

Here's Jon's explanation on the Web site, it pretty much tells the story:

The idea of this website is simple. Every 5 years a new team of European Commissioners is chosen, normally as a result of a messy behind the scenes deal between the Member States. Last time this happened in 2004 we were lucky to end up with 8 female Commissioners. This time around it looks like the gender balance will be even worse.

We believe in gender balance. Neither men nor women should be under-represented in political bodies. Especially not in one of the most important political bodies of the European Union, the European Commission, representing half a billion European citizens. To challenge this we are proposing a Commission of 26 competent women!

This is one of the reasons I travel - you can really meet some fascinating people who are very much like yourself, in terms of working on the same issues and via the same vehicles (in this case, getting a small group of friends together to do online advocacy on an issue they care about). But it's not simply about meeting like minds. Hopefully we can share best practices, what works, what doesn't, and serve as a resource in the future for progressives around the world. It really is incredibly cool (to me). It's why I react so strongly against people who treat foreign travel as something snobby. It's a gift, being able to travel abroad, for sure. But it shouldn't be looked down on, ever.

We limit ourselves as a country, sometimes, with our small-mindedness. But that discussion is for another day. Read More......

EU chooses Belgian as president

Maybe invading a country and partnering with George Bush wasn't such a great idea for Tony Blair after all. If he bring peace to the Middle East, maybe he deserves a second look but for now he's going to have to work a little harder at solving problems instead of creating them. The new EU president will be Herman Van Rompuy who is not exactly a household name.

Originally an economist, he has been a career politician though without any great claim to fame and a one year stint as Belgian PM. Previous comments about Christianity being an important principle in Europe is sure to worry many. The Guardian:

Europe's eight-year quest to establish a simpler and more democratic regime came to a dramatic climax tonight when the Belgian prime minister, Herman Van Rompuy, and Britain's Cathy Ashton, were appointed as the two top officials embodying the new system.

In a surprise move that saw Gordon Brown abandon his campaign to have Tony Blair made first president of the European Council, Lady Ashton, the current European commissioner for trade, became Europe's foreign minister or high representative for foreign and security policy.

Rompuy, a Flemish Christian Democrat, who had been Belgium's prime minister for less than a year, became president of the European Council, the first permanent leader who will chair EU summits and represent the EU abroad.

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More Franken-food on the way

Sorry, but no thanks. If the question is really about feeding more people, vegetarian is a much better option. Somehow this sounds like something the meat industry is more interested in than anyone else. I don't care how much marketing you throw at it, there's little to like about this.

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.

Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

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Democrats pushing for food safety overhaul in 2010

Amazingly enough, everyone is on board with the biggest change in decades. The Republicans pushed the country to its limit with problem after problem and so now, even industry is calling for more regulation. If only Wall Street learned as quickly. Reuters:

A U.S. Senate committee voted unanimously on Wednesday to increase government oversight of food safety but the first significant overhaul in 50 years may not happen until 2010.

Pressure to overhaul the food safety system has grown following several high-profile outbreaks involving lettuce, peppers, peanuts and spinach since 2006 that have sickened thousands and killed several.

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The Postal service is, or isn't, shutting down its Santa letter program

One of the worst stories ever written by AP. Depending what paragraph of the story you read, the US Postal Service either is, or isn't, shutting down the "write a letter to Santa" program, and letters to Santa either will, or won't, be shredded. I've just re-read this article ten times. It makes absolutely no sense. But the program is important, to me at least, and if it's being shut down, people have the right to know (apparently, they found a - read that again, "a" - sex offender volunteering to answer letters, so they panicked). It's an important enough story - it'd be nice if an editor at AP could re-read and re-write it in proper English. Read More......