Screwnomics – for Reaching NOT the Usual Suspects

By the Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee

A new partnership between WILPF’s Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee and the author of Screwnomics can provide new avenues for education, empowerment, and recruitment among hard-to-reach populations.

We all recognize that many women we talk to about WILPF and peace are just not connecting with this message. Their eyes glaze over.

They think peace is important. But they don’t see how it relates to their own daily struggles. And they are too overwhelmed by those economic and survival issues to be able to focus on meetings, actions, and reading that they don’t think relates to them.  

Rickey Gard Diamond’s Screwnomics: How Our Economy Works Against Women and Real Ways to Make Lasting Change appeals to their interests and the need to understand how some people seem to get ahead in the world while others do not. It does so by teaching many of the lessons we taught in our Corporate Study Course, “Challenge Corporate Power: Assert the People’s Rights,” but in a totally new way. It uses humor, short accessible chapters, and cartoons so that this complicated material is both approachable and made easily open for discussion in small women’s discussion circles. And it includes a downloadable workbook. Soon a “leader’s guide” will be added.

Rickey Gard Diamond gives WILPF credit for our long effort to link economic injustice and the causes of war. Diamond has given WILPF space on her website and blog and is committed to helping promote WILPF as a strong potential catalyst for the system changes we all want to see. Moreover, the book offers branches and at-large members a way to organize among new groups of women. That’s important because growing WILPF will make us sustainable.   

Several WILPF US branches are already preparing to launch Screwnomics women’s circles that will meet regularly (once a week for 6 weeks is a suggested schedule, though it could be done in fewer segments) to discuss the book, the economic realities it describes, and which of its solutions might be actionable locally. St. Louis WILPF, Des Moines WILPF. Burlington VT WILPF, and Palo Alto WILPF are all considering it. Rickey Gard Diamond made a presentation at the California Cluster meeting in September.

Corporations v Democracy hopes that branches and at-large members will consider Screwnomics as a way to do continued outreach. Once this new segment of women understand how unregulated ruthless capitalism, profits at any cost, predatory Wall Street banksters, and our tax dollars diverted from essential services to a bloated Pentagon budget and endless war impact them pretty darn directly, they will begin to see themselves as system change activists. And WILPF will be right there to help them learn to organize.

Find out more at www.Screwnomics.org.

This suggested action is aimed at informing and empowering women and offers ways to reach otherwise hard-to-reach women. They don’t know yet that they are peace activists….but this book can change the way they look at the world, the economy, and themselves.