Insider Update: Against Financialization — and Toward an Economy of Our Own
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It’s hard to believe January of 2024 is almost over already.
We owe thanks to our several new AEOO Giving Circle monthly supporters of feminist voices and values — and to all of you who helped with a donation or social media posts or volunteering your time and expertise in 2023.
Lately, each week carries a year’s worth of headlines. Because politics often hides economic interests, it’s hard to keep up and even harder to feel good. Weapons sales are yielding more profits while more children die. Equity firms are buying trailer parks, holding tenants “hostage” to rent raises or eviction. The Supremes are now weighing the Chevron standard, a 40-year-old legal doctrine upholding federal regulations. Reversing it would sweep away precedent as badly as Dobbs did. Will we have to do without the EPA and consumer protection next?
Focusing on solutions has been the quest for An Economy of Our Own. There are good signs that Biden’s public stand against “trickle down” economics is yielding more jobs and better wages, leading to our theme for the coming year. In 2024, we will focus on productive bodies, from microbes and plankton to our own flesh-and-blood. By de-mystifying the so-called “financialized” global economy, we’ll point to ways feminist social economics is reclaiming productivity for healthy, dignified lives.
What exactly makes it profitable to poison the planet? To shut down needed hospitals? To ship food globally with inflated prices and put US farms out of business? How does finance make housing too expensive? Who profits from growing numbers without homes and security?
Our bodies need a healthy planet, reliable health care, healthy food, and a roof overhead. War is designed to destroy all that. But who is the enemy when this disruption happens so widely? We’ve long argued that this present economy, waged as war, rewards essentially violent money-kings with punishing rules we didn’t create — and that we can change.
Educating ourselves is a good defense. Yet far more importantly, what actions can we demand together to newly value Earth’s living bodies and all that maintains livable lives of all shapes, colors, and sizes? What principles should guide us in future to include life at the economy’s center?
This year is a crucial one. Throughout it, we will articulate what an economy that wages life looks like, and how we get there. And in October, we plan to invite you to help us collectively articulate new standards for a livable future — a third Money Matters conference!
One pretty basic transition is argued by Dr. Judith Hand, a sociologist with an interest in evolutionary biology at WIlliam and Mary. I recently watched her YouTube discussion of sexual dimorphism. We humans traditionally have named two reproductive forms, different in size and in the shape of sexual organs: male and female. It’s not quite as simple as that, we’ve since learned, but without reproduction, a species can’t survive.
Dr. Hand points out that human female investments in reproduction are far more costly and risky than males. And this has results linked to peace. The gentlemen involved needn’t face nine vulnerable months of pregnancy, or eating for two, or risking death by giving bloody birth, or caring for helpless children should she find herself alone. Consequently, over our long 100,000-year-plus existence, human females have evolved to seek out stable environments to meet her needs. Generally, she’s invested in keeping the peace.
The males of her tribe have evolved and been socialized to compete for dominance, accepting violence as part of human nature. Is it inevitable?
Isolated violence of individuals is different from organized and well-financed war. Consider Roman Emperors and Kings of Europe and how they spent their national fortunes on conquest and ruin. Now consider our founding fathers’ distrust of a standing army and Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. Compare so-called “strong men” with the families of Israel, Palestine, and Ukraine, scrambling to find shelter, a meal, a lost loved one, a doctor. What is most truly our human nature?
“Financialization,” that vague and harmless sounding word, is convenient sheep’s clothing for the greediest wolves of global capitalism.
In 2024, we’ll examine bodily needs for safe water and climate, for health, food, and housing and show how financialization’s economic weapons hurt our productivity and our reproductivity — and what actions can make change.
Dr. Hand thinks any route to peace must first include women’s more equal sharing of leadership. She’s not alone. AEOO’s Riane Eisler says this in The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, and also with anthropologist Douglas Frye in Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Likewise anthropologist and researcher of primate groups, Christopher Boehm, wrote Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, all brilliant books as serious as Hand’s Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace.
Just this month Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security issued its third Index showing that nations with more women’s leadership score higher on peace and justice — the baseline for any productive economy. Mind you, I just said “productive,” not “profitable.” Profit without productivity becomes possible — for the short term, for a few — when an economy is waged as financialized war. But profit without “reproductivity” built into an economy is literally suicidal.
Georgetown’s Index ranked the world’s countries for women’s inclusion and security — and placed our so-called “greatest democracy” at #37! Raising awareness of productive and reproductive economic interests could even help to raise US women’s legislative representation and with it, our hopes for peace.
In solidarity,
Rickey Gard Diamond, AEOO Founder
Welcome To Our New Advisory Board Members!
Photo by Wade Hudson.
We’re thrilled Caroline Shenaz Hossein will join us this year as an AEOO advisor. Her work is rooted in economic stories too often left out of our accounts and ignored by institutions still male and white.
Author of the award-winning Politicized Microfinance: Money, Power and Violence in the Black Americas and editor of The Black Social Economy in the Americas, Community Economies in the Global South and Beyond Racial Capitalism, Caroline is the founding member of the international Diverse Solidarity Economies Collective (DISE). Its feminist economists highlight the need to amplify culturally diverse community economies to counter the systemic economic exclusion of marginalized people. Caroline is also Assoc. Professor of Global Development Studies and Political Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada. She holds a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Africana Development & Feminist Political Economy and an Ontario Early Researcher Award.
In Rickey’s recent Ms. column, Caroline said: “We’re thinking about social profitability — not just pure profit and shareholder models. I have trouble with people who are not actually talking about transformation…. We all believe in democracy. So why not democracy for the economic system?”
You can follow Caroline @CarolineHossein and learn more about her work at AfricanaEconomics.com.
We also welcome another wonderful ally, Shanda Williams, to AEOO’s steering committee, helping AEOO plan for the year ahead. Shanda has been a professional in the insurance and banking industry for almost 20 years. Her interpersonal experience with people from all over the world has given her expertise in interacting and connecting with people of various diverse cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. (You also may recognize her from our Zoom of Our Own on Overcoming Financial Trauma!)
Shanda is currently a committed changemaker, reparations activist, equity strategist, and BIPOC community advocate. She facilitates BIPOC groups for My Grandmother’s Hands: Unraveling Racialized Trauma and is creator of the Money Matters: Financial Liberation and Wellness series, for which she was recently awarded 2023’s “Innovator of the Year” by Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation. Her intent is to increase equity opportunities for BIPOC homeownership while helping others to heal financial trauma.
Shanda is also a practicing Small Business Consultant, and was an organizer of Vermont’s two Money Matters conferences. Her primary goal is to bring people together through the power of love, song, word, and healing. She hopes and aims to build bridges while embracing change through the power of healing racialized trauma, one person at a time.
AEOO on the Babblery
Let’s Talk Screwnomics. AEOO founder Rickey Gard Diamond talked to The Babblery, a podcast about women in the 21st century produced by Suki Wessling with support from KSQD, about the origin of the disconnect between economic indicators and our household realities.
“If you’re not doing well, it must be because you’re not managing your money very well,” Rickey remembers thinking earlier in her life, when she was on line for welfare. “There’s something wrong with you! That kind of thinking affected me when I was a divorced mom with three kids. I had $50 a month in child support and I still could not make my budget add up.”
Women operate in an economy that was designed to ignore and devalue much of the work we provide. Rickey describes our economic system not as an inevitable fact, but instead as a story to be retold with all people in mind. Tune in here.
Fuel Our Work in 2024
Like you, we’re looking at our budget and building a future — and we’ll only be able to expand our woman-friendly resources with your help.
Most of our alliance work is done by professionals providing pro-bono services, as advisors and including those experts who join our Zoom of Our Own conversations. We value their generosity, stretching our tiny budget. But this isn’t a sustainable model, and changing the economy’s purpose is a long-term project.
While times are tough, especially for those of us who most need a change in economic purpose, building for the future isn’t as impossible as it may first appear. To support feminist solutions, join our Giving Circle today. You can be sure penny-wise women will use it for the long-term!
