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Good afternoon, XX-ers! I am Moe, and I come to you today from my couch in New York's Lower East Side, where I am watching CNBC as usual, because nothing is more uplifting to the recently downsized employee than frenetic up-to-the-minute coverage of the collapse of the American economy! The big story today is the Treasury Department's massive bailout of Citigroup, about which I don't have much of an opinion, other than it seems more specific and tailored toward protecting the taxpayer than previous massive bailouts. This is no thanks, I presume, to our lame-duck president (who just actually managed to fail, during his brief statement on the matter, to correctly identify the bank whose $300 billion worth of assets his administration just guaranteed, stumbling over the word "Citigroup" and finally, lamely, sputtering "Citicorp.") But it most assuredly did involve the one unimpeachably capable Bush appointee that has been involved in this disaster: FDIC chairman Sheila Bair. Sheila Bair was Barney Frank's recommendation for the role of Obama's treasury secretary, and if nothing else we can be fairly assured she didn't get to be his favorite regulator by flirting with him, which is to get to the point I'm trying to get to: Sheila Bair is a woman! So, as it happens, is the newly appointed chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Berkeley prof Christina Roma, and the (superpretty) Princeton labor economist pictured here, Cecilia Rouse, reportedly a shoe-in for a CEA spot, along with alleged solicitor general shoe-in Preeta Bansal. Not to mention hedge fund manager Sandra Manske, who just wrote an angry e-mail excoriating the greed of her peers in the industry, many of whom have closed down their funds or suspended redemptions altogether while pocketing huge fees and passing the losses on to their investors.
Women, in other words, are a lot more visible in the job of cleaning up the disasters of the past 10 years than they were perpetuating and profiting from it. Certain women are outraged that this appears to be by design. This woman is not. But this week I'll shine my Google search field on the careers and personalities of some of the women likely to play major roles restoring our capitalism/democracy to working order and try to assess there gender has been a help/hindrance to their missions.