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Mnuchin Stumble Over Harriet Tubman Is A Missed Opportunity

Mnuchin Stumble Over Harriet Tubman Is A Missed Opportunity

It would have been so easy, a way for the Trump administration to honor an American icon and reach out to some of those Americans who believe the Republican Party has no use for them. But did anyone honestly think any member of the team leading the country under the direction of Donald J. Trump was going to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill?

Instead Trump and company’s song-and-dance about why a plan put in place before they moved into the White House would be delayed until well after they leave just confirms that they care little for the wishes of Americans who probably did not vote for them, but who are Americans nonetheless, and that they have no knowledge of or interest in the history that has shaped this country.

The move to again force Tubman to the back was a clarion call to Trump’s base, a signal of who is important and who is not.

That the woman tossed aside as the embodiment of “pure political correctness,” as the move was described by the president, deserving of, in his view, maybe a place on the $2 bill, was a Civil War spy, scout and nurse, an abolitionist, a suffragist and a hero called “Moses” for her strength and her grit, is just more proof of how far the Republican Party’s relationship with people of color and women has fallen.

According to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the move on the “Tubman” would be postponed until at least 2026, with the bill not likely to be in circulation until 2028 (and it has been reported that the tactic was to head off Trump canceling the Obama administration action altogether). So much for the plan to unveil the redesigned bill in 2020 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

At a congressional hearing, Mnuchin’s figuratively foot-shuffling, downward-gazing performance was in response to questioning by Massachusetts Democrat Ayanna S. Pressley, an African-American House freshman. The delay is needed to focus on addressing security and counterfeiting concerns, he said, though who doubts fast-tracking would be in order if the action were more to the administration’s liking? But when your slogan is “Make America Great Again,” you are always stuck in reverse.

Besides the president’s obvious displeasure with the choice of Tubman, there is his professed admiration of the man she would replace, the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson. Trump has seen Jackson as a kindred spirit, as someone who has defied the “arrogant elite,” and has laid a wreath at Jackson’s tomb at the Hermitage, his plantation in Nashville.

Who can forget the White House ceremony honoring Native American “code-talkers,”when he turned the focus from their World War II sacrifice into an offensive attack on  Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, all while a portrait of Jackson looked on?

Trump always glides past the unsavory portions of Jackson’s character, including his status and wealth built on the buying and selling of men, women and children and their labor, and his signing of the Indian Removal Act, which resulted in the deaths and forced relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans.

Mnuchin’s misdirection did not hide a thing.

In reality, Trump should admire Tubman. She was a perfect example of a strong leader, a quality he admires, at least in dictators. After escaping her own brutal enslavement, she returned time and again, as conductor and driver of the Underground Railroad, to free others, despite the dangers, and with the law, shamefully on the side of the morally lawless, against her.

Trump professes to love the military. Tubman, Civil War hero, was buried with military honors in 1913. And as supporters of the Second Amendment, Trump and Republicans should recognize Tubman, who carried a gun on her missions, as one of their own.

Some Republicans have stepped up to support bipartisan legislation to speed up action on printing the “Tubman.” There is the Harriet Tubman Tribute Act of 2019, introduced in the Senate by New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, and its companion bill in the House, with New York Republican John Katko as lead sponsor. Pressley, a co-sponsor, has said, “People other than white men built this county.”

Who would think that sentiment would be controversial in 2019? But with a president whose campaign was based in part on grievance and “white identity” politics, it is where we are.

Tubman’s attributes and achievements are mind-boggling, especially considering her status as a woman born into enslavement, almost fatally injured by brutal mistreatment, illiterate, who still never let anything stop her from her life’s and the country’s work.

Perhaps Trump feels insecure when he compares that record to what he, with all his wealth and privilege, has done for his fellow man.

He is not alone, though. This latest action is, with a few exceptions, the culmination of the Republican Party’s decades-long mere lip service to inclusiveness, since its Southern strategy of appealing to whites after civil rights laws were passed and its voter suppression tactics that have sought to nullify those gains ever since.

Increasingly, it is the party of Lincoln in name only.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as a national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

IMAGE: The Harriet Tubman Memorial in Cambridge, MD.

Learn The Ins And Outs Of The Foreign Exchange Market For $25

Learn The Ins And Outs Of The Foreign Exchange Market For $25

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Surprise Brexit Vote Unleashes Scramble For Dollars

Surprise Brexit Vote Unleashes Scramble For Dollars

Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union sparked traders on Friday to scramble for dollars in an effort to buy U.S. bonds and to exit dollar-based bets based on U.K. voters favoring to stay in the bloc.

The dash for greenbacks drove up the cost for Wall Street to fund its dollar-based trades to the highest in nearly three months.

The stunning outcome in Thursday’s Brexit referendum increased reluctance among money market funds and other cash investors to lend as global stock markets plunged.

“The front end of the market had been illiquid,” Tom Simons, money market strategist at Jefferies & Co in New York said of reduced lending with the looming end of the second quarter. “Now it’s a lot worse.”

The U.S. Federal Reserve and other major central banks on Friday sought to assure investors by saying they are prepared to provide dollars through existing liquidity arrangements.

The interest rate in the $3.8 trillion repurchase agreement market, where traders raise short-term cash from investors by pledging securities as collateral, was last bid at 0.80 percent, which was the highest since 0.85 percent on March 31, according to ICAP.

The overnight repo rate was quoted above 1 percent earlier Friday before retreating.

On Thursday, before the surprise outcome of the U.K. referendum, the repo rate ended at 0.60 percent.

“The funding pressure today was a panic in the repo market – the perception of a lack of liquidity,” Wedbush Securities managing director Scott Skrym wrote in a research note.

The scramble for traders to borrow dollars was also seen in the currency market.

The cost premium on three-month cross-currency swap contracts, measured by the three-month London interbank offered rate on dollars over the three-month rate on euros , was quoted about minus 46 basis points on Friday, ICAP data showed.

This was the steepest premium for players to exchange euro-denominated payments for dollar-pegged payments since early December.

Banks and hedge funds use these swaps for currency bets, while U.S. companies use them to hedge their non-dollar denominated bonds.

Three-month dollar Libor fell 1.65 basis points to 0.6236 percent, its lowest since March 17, while its euro counterpart slipped to minus 0.29500 percent, a record low.

Friday’s spike in dollar funding costs in the aftermath of the Brexit vote raised eyebrows but was not yet alarming, analysts said.

On Friday, investors trimmed their holdings of the Fed’s fixed-rate reverse repos, which have been used as a safe-haven asset in times of market turbulence.

 

Reporting by Richard Leong in New York and Anirban Nag in London; Editing by Chris Reese and Alan Crosby.

Photo: United States one dollar bills are seen on a light table at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington November 14, 2014. REUTERS/Gary Cameron/File Photo

Woman’s Face On U.S. Currency Shouldn’t Be A Politician’s Face

Woman’s Face On U.S. Currency Shouldn’t Be A Politician’s Face

Whoever the woman is on the next $10 bill, here’s who it shouldn’t be:

A politician. A Cabinet member. A First Lady.

Put a poet there. A scientist. A musician with a social cause. A social worker. A teacher. A suffragette. An abolitionist.

But, please, not someone primarily associated with politics.

Since Wednesday, when the U.S. Treasury Department announced that a woman will finally star on our paper money, opinions have heated up over who that woman should be.

The excitement is fun to watch, even if this is hardly an advance on par with the first moon landing.

In fact, it’s a bit of a letdown to some people. The honoree will be on a $10 bill instead of on a $20, a disappointment to those who wanted to oust Andrew Jackson.

The lucky winner won’t have the whole bill to herself either. She’ll have to cohabit with its current occupant, Alexander Hamilton.

And the redesign won’t arrive until 2020.

Still, it’s a breakthrough. As others have cracked, a woman is about to shatter the cash ceiling, at least for the first time since Martha Washington, wife of George, appeared on a silver certificate in the late 1800s.

But which woman?

A few women in the political realm are strong contenders.

One is Frances Perkins.

Perkins was U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She fought for child-abor laws. She established the country’s first minimum-wage and overtime laws. I’ve heard her referred to as kickass, and she was.

If she became the face on the next $10 bill, I’d be proud to carry that cash.

But the new currency is the perfect opportunity to think beyond Washington, D.C., to consider the fact that people with power and courage exist beyond the narrow political realm.

That’s why First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, grand as she was, wouldn’t get my vote.

When I was thinking about this topic, someone asked me why we put people’s faces on our money at all.

Why not put an excerpt of the Constitution instead?

Why not birds or butterflies, the way the Costa Ricans do?

Why not pizza?

The best answer, I think, is that people contain stories. Through individual stories we get to tell our bigger, collective ones.

As Jacob Lew, the Treasury Secretary, put it, “America’s currency is a way for our nation to make a statement about who we are and what we stand for.”

Who we are extends into art and culture, the environment and education, social work, and while all of those overlap with politics, they’re different too.

Other countries have acknowledged that fact on their money for a long time.

The women on the Swedish krona include an opera singer and a Nobel Prize-winning writer. Turkey, Mexico, New Zealand and Australia all have women on their paper money. England plans to put the 19th-century writer Jane Austen on its 10-pound note.

Regardless of which woman winds up on our money, the discussion about it is useful.

Thinking and talking about it is a way to review history and learn it.

I was entertained by the names that popped into my mind when I pondered candidates.

What about Louisa May Alcott?

She was a feminist, abolitionist and the author of Little Women, a book that has inspired generations of plucky girls. I wouldn’t mind carrying her around in my wallet.

How about Jane Addams?

That woman did everything. She was a writer and philosopher. She campaigned for women’s right to vote. As the co-founder of Hull House in Chicago, she helped immigrants and the poor. She won the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize.

Handing Jane Addams to a cashier would make me stand up taller.

Rosa Parks, who bravely rode that segregated bus in Alabama? She’s high on my list too.

But when the argument is over, I hope the winner is the apparent frontrunner, Harriet Tubman.

I hadn’t thought of Tubman in years, frankly, but reminded of her life — an abolitionist born to slaves — I can’t imagine anyone better to represent who we’ve been and who we hope to be.

Whoever it is, it’s good to be reminded that the cash we carry represents the stories we tell ourselves.

(Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at mschmich@tribune.com. You can follow her on twitter.com/maryschmich or contact her on facebook.com/maryschmich)

Photo: Elii Christman via Flickr