Reclaiming Joy in Our Bodies, Our Banks, Our Homes

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Dear friends,

March is Women’s History Month, and you’ve probably been enjoying a flurry of stories about courageous women who have pioneered changes. And yet, seen alongside a renewed and mean onslaught against people with wombs, it can feel crazy-making.

The SCOTUS Dobbs decision in June of 2022 brought us a red wave of uterus-policing laws. Abortion, now banned in 13 states, exists in Texas without exception for rape, incest, or a fatal fetal diagnosis. Which led to this week’s headlines about five Texan women, suing the state of Texas for endangering their lives and future reproductive health. They say doctors did the best they could in the face of murky laws that threaten them with jail and huge fines.

via Center for Reproductive Rights

This news was quickly followed by a Texan woman’s ex-husband suing her three friends for “wrongful death,” and more than $1 million in damages, by helping her get pills to end a pregnancy. That new Texas statute refers to “murder,” and enables someone to sue if a “person” dies due to an accident or an intentional act. Importantly, it equates a fetus with “a person.”

In Georgia, abortion is banned after six weeks, when few women can even be sure they are pregnant. Georgia also calls the unborn a “person.” There, Republican lawmakers have even enabled Georgians to claim an embryo as a dependent on their state income taxes and get a $3000 deduction. All they need do is get an ultrasound with a heartbeat.

Such laws aren’t just “nutty.” They are willfully misinformed. OB-GYNs say an embryo becomes a fetus after ten weeks of gestation, and even then, a heart doesn’t exist until 17 to 20 weeks. How is there a “heart beat”? A fetus’s viability outside the womb is impossible until 24 weeks, or 6 months of pregnancy.

Forcing pregnancies and counting fertilized eggs as “persons” hides a craven political motive. How? Population impacts Congressional districts and representation, as well as the Electoral College. In 2021, the Census Bureau reported that the “white” population from 2010 to 2020 was “the lowest on record,” falling from 63.7 percent to 57.8 percent. While a majority aren’t worried, one in four white citizens thought this “bad” or “very bad,” found a Pew Research Center study. By then the “replacement theory” had come out from under its White Supremacist rock.

Isabel Wilkerson’s recent great book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, clarifies how Republicans tweeted and posted demographics as destiny. Justice Alito referred in Dobbs footnotes to the limited “domestic,” translate “white,” supply of infants. Justice Thomas went further in support of the reversal of Roe v Wade, citing the court’s duty to correct more of its errors. He named two decisions to protect same-sex marriage and intimacy — not big baby-producers — and an old 1965 decision granting married couples the right to use birth control. Yes, you read that right.

So we had better be real and be “woke” and resist like mad, when a minority of so-called “white” “conservatives” tell us who they are and how they intend to win a fake power with more pussy-grabbing. Women’s subjugation is no win for democracy.

In solidarity,

Rickey Gard Diamond
AEOO Founder

It’s Past Time for Public Banking!

Breaking Down the Bank Runs. The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) likes to keep this quiet, but between 2011 and 2020, about two US banks a month collapsed, reports The Washington Post. But the recent triple SSS-play of bank runs, involving the huge Silicon Valley Bank, along with Silvergate and Signature Bank, both involved in cryptocurrencies, have made Congress sit up and pay attention. Investigations are promised.

We bet you haven’t heard that Moody’s, which advises investors, has just downgraded the US Banking System from “stable” to “negative.” It’s enough to make public banking seem a much wiser proposition.

What’s Next in the Struggle. For more hopeful news, check out Public Banking Institute’s article updating what’s happening with the public bank movement nationwide in 2023.

The People’s Economic Forum also sponsored a great event to consider how Philadelphia’s efforts to create public banking can help finance a Cooperative Economy. Imagine an economy to meet people’s real needs, not one that plays with our lives at a money casino — funding food and housing coops, land trusts, and other shared common needs. Check out their recording of Philadelphia’s gathering — and lively conversation!

And if you are worried about the debt ceiling and what Republicans threaten to do, AEOO Board member Ellen Brown’s latest article shows another more democratic solution.

Explaining the Solidarity Economy. PS: If you’ve heard the phrase “Solidarity Economy” and wondered what it was about, here’s a simple image (from Solidarity Economy Principles) that shows common tools used in our communities to even out the playing field.

Any of these can help build an economy that meets the needs of people and the planet. Even better, imagine several at work together. Would it make a difference? Are some of these tools already at work in your community?

Updates from the AEOO Community

Meet the Mavens. AEOO Advisory Board Member Jhumpa Bhattacharya, formerly with the Insight Center for Community and Economic Development, resigned in solidarity with former Insight president Anne Price in December. Now, they have come together to launch a new organization, the Maven Collaborative, with their former colleagues — an organization “centering race, gender and joy
in the pursuit of economic justice.” Read more in Philanthropy.

At Home with Joy. If watching too much news is getting you down, AEOO Board member Jamila Medley has begun an important project, Black Women at Home. You can read her reflective essays there, rescuing “home” from a vapid consumerism and its quest for status and profit, by instead reclaiming black homes from violence, stigma, and imposed “property values” that banks and governments have redlined, doing systemic damage.

Jamila often reminds us that “Joy is an act of resistance.” Her posts on Medium share a purposeful practice of joy, the importance of rest and ritual, and describes ways to instill our homes with a sense of the sacred. Her experience as a black woman transcends racial lines to benefit all of us with a similar longing for peace and home.

On a similar note, AEOO conversationalist Katonya Hart recently shared a beautiful video with us of Jewel Pearson’s Tiny Home in Charlotte, NC. Jewel’s story of building her own space and how she made it a personal and beautiful expression of spiritual values here is so inspiring.

The Economics of Caring. You can now tune into conversations with Dr. Riane Eisler — founder of the Center for Partnership Systems, AEOO board member, and radically practical visionary — on a series of podcasts!

Ever wonder why so many say the GDP is wrong-headed? Riane talked with Ariane Sommer at Superhumanize about The Social Wealth Index vs. GDP and why what we measure matters. Riane was also recently on the Soul Seed Gathering podcast about “Our Past and Our Future,” in light of her most recent book, Nurturing Our Humanity.

“There’s more to our story,” she says — and what’s left out by patriarchal media and government too often works against us. If these topics sound big, they are… but Riane’s podcasts will help make it easier to learn about.

What We’re Watching This Month

Don’t miss the PBS Frontline Special “The Age of Easy Money.”

This is a great explanation of the Federal Reserve’s policy, begun to counteract the 2008 banking system meltdown. Remember “quantitative easing?” Unfortunately, the Fed’s “easing” kept on for Wall Street through other less well known crises, sweeping money upward to keep billionaires happy. It’s clarifying, but leaves out the misery we felt down on the ground, and the role that taxes can play, and should play, in government’s investing in the public good.

Expect a battle over this in the coming months. To balance out the picture, see Popular Information’s piece on “Who Gets bailed out? Who Gets Left Out?”

From the AEOO Resource Library

What if your community owned its own banks and corporations? Learn how the collective approach of cooperative business models and banking in the public interest work together, and how they can make a difference for women?

Our first-ever Zoom of Our Own was a conversation about building shared economies between Jamila Medley, a solidarity economy practitioner consultant; Jhumpa Bhattacharya, Co-President of the Maven Collaborative; the late, great Emma Chappell of the Public Banking Institute; and Susan Harman, a public banking activist in Oakland.

You can tune in to the replay on our website — and access our reader for further learning.