The Girls' Guide To The Economy--Part 2

As we noted last week, while women and children surely bear the brunt of corporate centric economics, their voices, to the detriment of us all, are routinely excluded from policy level discussions about economics. There is nothing new about this. In a recent piece in The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes,

“(M)ore than a decade ago, a woman you’re likely never to have heard of, Brooksley Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission– a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading–was the oracle whose warnings about the dangerous boom in derivatives trading just might have averted the calamitous bust now engulfing the US and global markets. Instead she was met with scorn, condescension and outright anger by former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers.”

“Born’s wise warnings “incited fierce opposition” from Greenspan and Rubin who “concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market.” Greenspan deployed condescension and told Born she didn’t know what she doing and she’d cause a financial crisis.”

Born continued to try to sound the warning and in retaliation, her Commission was stripped of it’s power and Born left her position as its head. Imagine if we had only listened.

Fast forward to the the result of our deafness and the many women who are working to analyze what is happening and to point us toward workable solutions. In what you might call Wheel Of Fortune: The Bailout Edition, Jennifer LaFleur, Dan Nguyen and Lisa Schwartz have put together an amazing, interactive wheel that shows the connections between Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson and the very male and very white world of finance.

Another woman that we should be listening to right now  is Naomi Wolf who in this interview makes the urgent connection between the economic meltdown and creating the conditions for declaring martial law. Much as we would all devoutly like that to sound like a left wing fruitcake conspiracy theory, with laws like the Patriot Act already in place and as we noted in Part 1, an Army Bridgade now serving in the U.S., it is entirely doable. And with Dick Cheney staying almost entirely out of sight and Karl Rove looking botox calm, never mind that Obama is way ahead in the polls, these guys just don’t look like they are planning their retirement. Not to mention that all evidence points to the theft of the last 2 presidential elections. Have I got your attention yet? Here’s the video:

Others like Starhawk, remind us that we cannot address economic issues without examining the connection between economic policy and the environment:

“While the financial markets have been melting down around us, another sort of meltdown has been occurring, one even more frightening and dangerous. Climate change has been progressing, more quickly than anticipated, fueled even more rapidly by methane bubbles released from a warming Arctic sea, in just one of the self-reinforcing cycles that will trigger unstoppable cascades of devastation unless we act now.”

“The environment is not an afterthought: it’s the ground of economy, security and survival. Environmental protection, environmental justice and regeneration must be our top priorities, because they are the only sound foundation for every other endeavor.”

She also offers an outstanding list of “Things we can do right away in a lousy economy.” You can read them here.

As we said at the top, women bear a disproportionate share of economic hardship throughout the world, and a recent report by the Center for American Progress documents what that means for women in the U.S.:

• More than half of the 37 million Americans living in poverty are women.
• Women are poorer than men in all racial and ethnic groups.
• Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty.
• Poverty rates for males and females are the same throughout childhood, but increase for women during their childbearing years and again in old age.

The report also looks at why women are more impoverished than men:

• Women are paid less than men, even when they have the same qualifications and work the same hours.
• Women spend more time providing unpaid caregiving than men.
• Women are more likely to bear the costs of raising children.
• Pregnancy affects women’s work and educational opportunities more than men’s.
• Domestic and sexual violence can push women into a cycle of poverty.

As is all too clear to thinking people everywhere, the criminal leadership of the U.S. has created and continues to enable a disaster of epic proportions. There is an urgent need to reframe the national discussion and most especially to listen to and address the needs of those who feel the worst brunt of what is happening and to develop an economic policy that is both compassionate and sustainable. The Feminist Network will continue to address these issues and to highlight the wise voices of women who need to be heard.