We’re worried about our kids — and our moms
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Dear neighbors, teachers, parents,
I’m worried about our kids — aren’t you?
Some say my boomer generation really screwed things up, and I answer, yeah, you’re right — I had it easier! But then I remember Vietnam, the sexism that normalized rape and wife-beating, the police that sicced dogs on Black Americans who wanted to vote, and my gay brother who hid being a “homo” to avoid getting beat up.
Maybe it seemed easier because generally people wanted you to pursue an affordable degree or a union job and be better off. It wasn’t a crazy dream. A woman could become a nurse or doctor or teacher in neighborhoods with neighbors we knew. Most of us, whatever our race or religion or lack of it, joined in parents’ night at school, or cheered for good sports at ball games, whoever won. We brought flowers to our relatives in the hospital, or at the graveyard.
Drugs and guns were not yet ubiquitous. Television’s three channels signed off at midnight. But then our bedrock factory jobs got undone by anti-unionism and robotics. Higher education became more essential, and more expensive, no longer subsidized. Government was the problem, we were told — and too many of us didn’t ask, how so? What’s so bad about being liberal? What’s so great about angry politicians who won’t compromise?
Now middle-class jobs are being lost, and artificial intelligence is on the rise. Who got us here? Our democratic republic? The corporate donors who buy it? Or we the people, busy tweeting?
My generation’s anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly looks liberal next to today’s Moms for Liberty. They’re behind outraged censorship in schools and attacks on school boards and teachers. Their “liberty” attacks liberalism without questioning a morning in America that dawns on a majority worse-off from raining money on billionaires — 243 new ones in 2022, says Forbes.
One angry such Floridian Mom wants her child’s teacher prosecuted for showing Strange World, a PG-13 Disney film about climate, though that wasn’t her crime, says Judd Legum at Popular Information. The film’s male hero hadn’t said “gay,” either, but he’d openly expressed caring for another male. Apparently perverse to her mind, Mom claimed this “had opened the door” for children’s questions.
What’s bad about men caring? Why are questions to be avoided? I went to Moms for Liberty’s website and discovered — a liberty-mom? Nope. Their news page featured OAN’s (One America News) Ron Ball on Real America, who said, with a straight face: “Straight white Christians are the ones most oppressed today.” A camo-clad man tried to sell me R.A.T. Fight, a book on dirty combat. Ads for num-chuks and brass knuckles center a nostalgic 40s’ poster: a bare-legged woman bent over to touch her high-heeled toes, selling Greased Lightning Lubricant. Yuck.
So, here’s my question: who funds this hate-mongering disinformation? The 74, a source for educational news, identifies a donation from the Florida heiress of Publix, whose husband’s company, Microtargeted Media, got paid back half of her gift. Their company motto: “We do digital and go after people on their phones.”
Join us in stopping robo-stalking of real moms and real teachers by calling for social media law and regulation and revitalizing an economy and government mothers can love — one that works for them and our 74 million US kids!
In solidarity,
Rickey Gard Diamond
Because Every Day is Mother’s Day…
We believe Mother’s Day is EVERY DAY, if you’re breathing and alive on Mother Earth. All mothers deserve equal pay, full and equal liberty, and care when she needs it for herself and for all our children.
We work to bring you radical love that really counts, already reshaping cruel policies and an economy waged as war. Help us to raise up and amplify caring, intelligent women’s voices. Become a motherly sustainer and join us lovers in creating An Economy of Our Own.
Updates from AEOO
Resisting a Patriarchal Economy with Joy. AEOO is headed to NOW’s 2023 Conference this summer, June 30 to July 2, for a session on the ways women are organizing to redefine banking, business and corporate structure, and old definitions of “workers.” A growing number of diverse women offer more democratic economic paths and patterns. Learn more at NOW’s convening, themed WE WON’T STOP!
Support a Community Economist! This September, Praxis Peace Institute (founded by AEOO Advisory Board Member Georgia Kelly!) is planning an in-depth study of the Mondragon Cooperative businesses, the Basque culture that supports this enlightened economic model, and the Basque government and NGOs that teach and practice the ethics that are the basis of this society. And we’re pooling resources with Praxis to help get Adrionna Fike there!
Adrionna is the Marketing Strategist with Black Farmers in the East Bay and has been a worker-owner at the Mandela Grocery Cooperative in Oakland. She is a Board Member of the Bay Area Worker Cooperative Network and the Agroecology Commons. She has a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College and an MA in Public Administration from USF — and is exactly the type of candidate that will be able to make good use of what she learns at Mondragon. Donate here to support a scholarship for Adrionna.
Welcome, Katonya Hart! We have long admired Katonya Hart, an amazing artist and organizer in West Virginia, a co-founder of Black Policy Day at the WV Statehouse, a leader in the state NAACP, national NOW, and much more. We’re thrilled she’s joined AEOO’s board and is now serving on our steering committee. Click here to learn more about Katonya.
Decolonizing Economics. Economist and Education Director of Post Growth Institute, Crystal Arnold, is also part of AEOO’s Advisory Board — and we look forward every month to Post Growth’s newsletter! (Judge for yourself and sign up here to receive future issues.)
This month, PGI highlighted a conference that AEOO alliance board member Marybeth Gardam of WILPF has also been praising. “Decolonizing Economics” celebrated indigenous wisdom, contrasted with a ruthless capitalism.
If you missed the conference, here’s a link to Crystal’s Money-Wise Women podcast featuring Se-Ah-Dom Edmo, who shares Tribal Communities: Living for a Living, a stark difference from Wall Street’s constant striving to make a killing.
The Banker Ladies. AEOO conversationist Caroline Shenaz Hossein was featured in Radical Love in Business & Society, appearing on May 4th at Harvard’s Gender & Work Symposium. Professor Hossein’s studies and books bring us the wisdom of African women’s mutual credit societies, which you can learn more about in AEOO’s Zoom of Our Own, We Are the Economy.
PS: AEOO will have the honor of sharing Dr. Hossein’s The Banker Ladies film, and much more at the NOW conference this year!
Banking in the Public Interest. In the face of recent bank failures, AEOO founder Rickey Gard Diamond interviewed Taifa Smith Butler of Demos about Silicon Valley Bank, Signature and Silvergate. “The government has not asked questions of the banks for this latest bailout — protecting the priorities of banks and shareholders,” she said. “But for the rest of us, not so much.” Rickey’s most recent column at Ms. Magazine, Why Banking in the Public Interest is No Pipe Dream, explains what happened, why Wall Street goes by rules different from those applied to you and me, and also promising research of New York’s effort to create a public bank and California’s hard-won successes for banking with public accountability.
What We’re Reading
Decolonizing Wealth has been described as “a provocative analysis of the dysfunctional colonial dynamics at play in philanthropy and finance.” Edgar Villanueva spent 14 years in philanthropy. Behind the field’s altruistic facade, he discovered old boy networks, savior complexes, and house slaves. But his book also offers Indigenous wisdom meant to bring oppressors into the Circle of Healing so that mutually assured liberation and interconnection can heal this warring economy’s systemic injustice.
From the AEOO Resource Library
The work women do is mostly underpaid, always undervalued, and frequently invisible. That won’t change till we change the way we value women’s contributions, paid or unpaid. Our society values what we count and measure. Advocates for a Caring Economy insist we count and value how caring makes the world go around.
In one of our first Zoom of Our Own conversations, Riane Eisler — feminist ROCK STAR and author of The Chalice and the Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations — connected the dots between the invisibility of care work, women’s discounted paychecks for care work, and all our work at home we’re expected to do for free. Khara Jabola-Carolus, of Hawaii’s Commission on Women, walked us through her state’s Feminist Post-Covid Economic Recovery Plan. Artist Patti Maciecz, who created an invoice for invisible work as part of “Bill the Patriarchy,” and her Invisible Labor Union, opened up about how motherhood radicalized her. Martha Collins, from the Milwaukee area food bank, brought the perspective of single moms who are doing it all, and often facing poverty, to this critical conversation.
You can tune in to the replay on our website — and access our reader for further learning.
