Operating since the 1990s, the Women, Money & Democracy (W$D) Issue Committee educates and activates on issues of economic justice.  We focus especially on the needs and resources of women and families. We work to put a check on corporate power and privately created money as mortal threats to our historic goals of true self-governance.

WHO WE ARE

The W$D Committee includes WILPF members from across the US who are united in our commitment to the goals of this committee and the larger goals of WILPF US.  We envision a vibrant participatory democracy where the common good of the people is prioritized above profiteering and consolidation of power.

Our work engages women in creating a democracy that works for all Americans and an economy based on the values women hold but are constantly told we can’t afford.  (Funny how there’s always money for more war!)

In W$D you’ll find:

• Women like you, who want system change and are willing to work for it.
• A path to leadership for introducing projects and strategies.
• Organizing tools and the chance to use and add to them.
• Strategies to engage the public.
• Short- and long-term projects that invite your participation and leadership.

HOW WE WORK

Using an informal feminist model of democratic leadership, we meet monthly on the 3^rd Tuesday of each month at 8pm ET/7pm CT/5pm PT, for 1.5-2 hours.  To learn more about how we work or to join us, contact W$D Chair Marybeth Gardam at mbgardam[at]gmail[dot]com. 

W$D COMMITTEE PRIORITIES

• Raise awareness and educate about the threat to democracy from run-away inequality, the consolidation of money and power and system changes that can lead to a better more equitable future.
• Support practical solutions that can protect a vibrant democracy and ensure that the voice and values of the people guide our government, not the oligarchs.  Our US solutions must be determined without the influence of huge US donors, PACs, and dark money from foreign countries.  
• Create awareness among women about our central roles in our economy.
• Lift up feminist solutions for system change from the bottom up, in informal but serious ways, and work to put pressure on our federal representatives.
• Prioritize leadership and training among WILPF members, through a feminist model of democratic leadership.

CURRENT PROJECTS 

Jump right in!
 

Feminist ECONOMIC LITERACY

We advocate for women-led systems change to unrig the economy.

Money traditionally talks in a male voice, but all along it’s been women who keep the economy going.  It’s time we understand the moving parts that are intentionally complicated – and how women like you are creating solutions that work in communities across America. 

We’ll help you organize a women’s group in your community to read and discuss SCREWNOMICS: How Our Economy Works Against Women and Real Ways to Make Lasting Change by WILPF member and W$D partner Rickey Gard Diamond.  For discussion questions and facilitator tips to make your group successful and organize locally for real change, contact mbgardamATgmail.com.

Through An Economy Of Our Own (AEOO), an online community Rickey helped to found, you can connect with dynamic women making real change and finding solutions.  Sign up for upcoming webinars, and find illuminating recordings of prior webinars, conversations, blog posts and articles.

Check out AEOO’s “Women Unscrewing Screwnomics” columns at Ms. magazine online too.

MONEY Created FOR THE COMMON GOOD

W$D partners with the Alliance For Just Money to “change the money, change the world.”

The power to create our money is a hidden key to creating a caring economy – instead of our current economy that’s controlled by oligarchs abusing human-made systems that can be transformed by humans.  

Our existing debt-based money system steals our voices and labor power, making us little more than wage slaves.  Learning how it all works is step 1 to organize peaceful and effective change.

In 1913 an ignorant and corrupt Congress created the Federal Reserve System and gave away their authority and responsibility to control the money supply.  Since then, this ‘pseudo money’ – created by digital keystrokes, bond issues, our promissory notes and credit card debt, is all we have for groceries and rent.  The money itself is “rented” and we can only use it by accepting an ever growing debt burden – both individually and nationally.    We are caught in an extractive, usurious, parasitic system that will destroy us if we don’t escape.  Fortunately we have the tools to break free.  

We peace women need to know about the myth:  Banks do not lend out their depositors’ money.  Instead they issue digital ‘account money’ as debt. That debt gets allocated purposely to enhance the lender’s competitive position in the big monopoly game.  They use savings to invest in weapons tech, fossil fuels, water futures, vulture real estate deals lobbyists who work against the common good.  This money system is destroying habitat and deepening inequality every day.

W$D works with our ally the Alliance For Just Money (AFJM) to normalize this knowledge, so that we can hack at the root of our economic problems, not merely at their many branches.  To open space for the healing and caring futures our grandkids need, AFJM and W$D work to return the money creation power from the financiers to an accountable government.

Check out these resources:  

• How We Can Pay for a Better World: Change the Money System (4 min. video)
• The Future in Our Pockets – How publicly controlled money could enable us to provide housing, end our forever wars, and heal the planet (80 min.)
• Breaking The Debt Chains: Exposing The Myths of Tax, Spent and Borrow

   

System Change through PUBLIC BANKING
W$D works with the Public Banking Institute and its many state initiatives to form public banks.   

Creating an economy that works for ALL Americans starts with breaking ties with transnational too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks and the gamblers who run them.  Public banking offers communities a chance to keep local money invested in local projects, sheltering ordinary Americans from economic collapse and the financial disasters that follow.  Learn more and organize a public bank in your own community with the PUBLIC BANKING TOOLKIT, an anthology of articles, information, resources and organizing tools. Download it here.

OPPOSITION to ‘Corporate Personhood’

W$D works to overturn the legal fiction that corporations are people. 

‘Corporate personhood’ is the legal fiction that a corporation, separately from its associated human beings, has the legal rights and responsibilities enjoyed by natural persons.  This is a myth created and instituted via Constitutional case law by corporate elites and oligarchs.  How do we untangle the knot of special interests, corruption and laws?

Since the early 2000s WILPF has informed and organized the public about the illegitimacy and threats to democracy of rising corporate power, and the dangerous influence of the SCOTUS decision that money (political donations) is ‘free speech’ and cannot be much regulated.

Here are some tools we put together to make a strong case against corporate theft of our individual Constitutional rights and the Supreme Court decisions that sold off our democracy:

• Challenge Corporate Power / Assert The People’s Rights. A 10-session study course designed for use in small discussion groups. Rich with resources and exercises to elicit engagement.  A history lesson and much more.
• Timeline of (illegitimate) Corporate Constitutional Rights. This timeline documents by date and subject each Supreme Court case that sold off the Constitutional rights of individuals.  It reveals the intentional pattern, hidden in plain view, over many decades. See also this summary of that history.
• Using Art to Entertain & Educate: Dramas You Can Mount in your community. These plays by WILPF member Jim Allison are illuminating, entertaining, and easy to perform as dramas or public readings.  They make their points through humor as well as carefully researched facts.  The history of corporate power comes alive, along with the conspiracy to steal Constitutional rights.   
• The Prosecution of Judge Waite
• Powell Writes a Memo
• What Corporations Do
• Marshall v Madison
• The Powell Manifesto. Corporate attorney (later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis Powell wrote this “roadmap” in 1971 on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce.  It blatantly lays out the plan for all the corporate capture tactics that corporations have pursued in the years since its publication. These strategies have affected every level of US society and culture, and we continue to see the damage from this stunning corporate assault on democracy.  The Powell Manifesto was the precursor to Project 2025 and provided a roadmap the neocons followed for 60 years to get where we are now.

W$D is in solidarity with allies working on these issues:

• Move to Amend does vital work promoting the We The People Amendment. See the progress they’ve made!  In Feb 2025 Move To Amend got its joint resolution reintroduced in Congress to amend the Constitution to affirm that corporations are not people, money is not speech, and campaign finance can be regulated on federal, state and local levels.  By May there were 51 cosponsors. Engage in their citizen advocacy in your local community.
• Represent.us works on state-by-state citizen lobbying for a government accountable to the people. Their powerful shareable videos explain the ways our Democracy is broken.  Join their state-by-state citizen work in local communities across the US.
• Ultimate Civics creates curricula that bring civics classes to life with the truth about democracy. 
• Alliance for Democracy working on voter protections, gerrymandering, globalization, trade policy inequities and voter education. Check out back issues of their wonderful online magazine “Justice Rising”.
• Center for Media & Democracy/PR Watch champions investigative media watchdogs spotting and reporting on corruption in US media and politics.
• Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD) our ‘grandparent’ organization for challenging abuse of corporate power. Led in the early days by Richard S. Grossman and Ward Morehouse, giants in the field of corporate accountability.

CONFRONT Corruption
W$D calls out corruption and organizes with allies to disrupt collusion and graft.

Host a community watch party to view the film The Laundromat, an entertaining dramatization of the corporate fraud and tax evasion that victimizes ordinary Americans and enriches criminals.  Get all the tools you’ll need to schedule the virtual film viewing, and organize a community Zoom call to discuss the film.  Discussion questions enrich the dialogue, and educational resources help you learn more about the underbelly of this transnational corruption that threatens our democracy.  

Download discussion questions here. 

Sign up here for anti-corruption organizing right from your own desktop.  It’s unlikely that either political party will be able to separate itself from ‘the swamp’, so our ally Represent.US offers recommendations for a state-by-state solution to corruption and ideas for monitoring corruption in your community.  

Learn more with these and other short videos: 

• UnBreaking America: Solving the Corruption Crisis
• How to FIX American’s Corrupt Political System
• This is How We Fix Our Rigged Political System
• OCCRP – Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of investigative centers, media and journalists operating in Eastern Europe, The Caucasus, Central Asia and Central America — with MANY connections to US politics, including budgeting and dark money interests.

2025-2026 Priorities

Our committee is presently engaging with issues of:

• Moving the money’ from war to green jobs, local investment and funding essential public services, working collaboratively with WILPF’s DISARM Committee on this.
• Funding What Matters: Analyzing the CAFRA/ACFR Reports of cities or states on local spending, and organizing ‘town meeting REPORT OUTS’ to familiarize neighbors with where public money is being spent and how it is being prioritized, in a model of democratic process and how participatory budgeting could work.
• Measuring What Matters: Examining alternatives to the GDP and learning how to advocate for systems that measure more than productivity and describe more accurately a nation’s success.
• Working for Tax Reform: so everyone(including the billionaires) pays their fair share.
• Looking at housing and the money system by asking ‘homes as assets for whom?’, how people in our communities are being priced out of owning or renting, and solutions to change the story.
• Understanding the ‘Money Bedfellows’: how the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the IRS and Congress interact to support projects the wealthy anoint (including funding wars). 
• Defending First Amendment Free Speech, NOT ‘Money as Free Speech’.
• Advocacy for National Healthcare as a Human Right