In “Unscrewing Economics” host Cherri Jacobs Pruitt interviews award winning author and journalist Rickey Gard Diamond on money, politics, and how Partnership-based economic systems are spreading throughout the world. Included in this episode is the importance of understanding our personal economic stories, a summary of how economics has driven politics in the United States, and how its roots in the domination configuration ensure that those at the top of the economic pyramid keep all profits but trickle all costs to those beneath them. The show notes for “Unscrewing Economics” include links to resources to learn more and connect to the Partnership economic movement!
The Real Wealth of Nation, Riane Eisler
Screwnomics, Rickey Gard Diamond
Ms. Magazine’s Women Unscrewing Economics series with Rickey Gard Diamond
Riane Eisler’s Social Wealth Economic Indicators (Social Wealth Index)
Invest in Better (Values Aligned Investing)
If Women Counted, A New Feminist Economists, Marilyn Waring
International Association of Feminist Economists (IAFFE)
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler
The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that will Change Your Life, Riane Eisler
Center for Partnership Systems
Resilience, Rising Appalachia
In “Unscrewing Economics” host Cherri Jacobs Pruitt interviews award winning author and journalist Rickey Gard Diamond on money, politics, and how Partnership-based economic systems are spreading throughout the world. Included in this episode is the importance of understanding our personal economic stories, a summary of how economics has driven politics in the United States, and how its roots in the domination configuration ensure that those at the top of the economic pyramid keep all profits but trickle all costs to those beneath them. The show notes for “Unscrewing Economics” include links to resources to learn more and connect to the Partnership economic movement!
The Real Wealth of Nation, Riane Eisler
Screwnomics, Rickey Gard Diamond
Ms. Magazine’s Women Unscrewing Economics series with Rickey Gard Diamond
Riane Eisler’s Social Wealth Economic Indicators (Social Wealth Index)
Invest in Better (Values Aligned Investing)
If Women Counted, A New Feminist Economists, Marilyn Waring
International Association of Feminist Economists (IAFFE)
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler
The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that will Change Your Life, Riane Eisler
Center for Partnership Systems
Resilience, Rising Appalachia
Welcome to the Power of Partnership podcast. I'm Rihanna Eisler, president of the Center for Partnership Systems. This podcast brings you voices from the partnership movement. We are all using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs Pruitt, a health policy and partnership scholar. Today, cherry interviews award-winning journalist and writer, ricky Gard Diamond, on money politics and partnership-based cultural change. Now onto the POP podcast, showing how we can create an economic system and structure that values caring for each other and the planet.
Speaker 2:Welcome, ricky, and thank you so much for joining us for the Power of Partnership podcast.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:As you know, rihanna describes economics as being one of the four cornerstones. That's really critical in how every society is formed. So you know economics, along with childhood and family relations, the way we look at gender, issues of gender and then, of course, the narratives and stories that are inherent within a society. So why do you think that lack of accessibility related to economics exists?
Speaker 3:Well, I think I'm a good example, because when you talk about the importance of narrative, my own story discovering my own story was actually. It was right under my nose and yet I never dared even think about it to myself. I had begun my radical education in economics began as a single mother with three kids. I was also going to school. I don't know how I did it all, but a lot of women do and I was doing it. And yet I couldn't make my budget work. And here I had an extra check. I was working full time. I had an extra check of child support of $25 a week for my three kids and I couldn't make my budget work and I thought there was something wrong with me. And I was so ashamed when I had to go to the welfare office to try to get some government help. And I did get government help. But I also met other women there who were mostly women of color who were, I could see in you know worse shape than I was. And yet and then that inspired me to go into the war on poverty I became an editor of a statewide paper here covering all kinds of government policy issues and related to poverty. And yet if you had asked me about economic issues, if you had used that word the economy I wouldn't have been able to speak about it. I never saw the connection between my own story and that larger story that mostly gets reported in terms of what Wall Street says is happening. I never connected the two, and I think that's true for so many people, because that conversation has been dominated very much by a particular class of a particular gender, of a particular race, which has dominated that realm of money, and for a long time. So they're not. Wall Street continues to be a place that is not open to, terribly open to women and to people of color. Its purpose, the overall strategy for their narrative, is winning Winning requires a good many losers, and that's exactly what we see happening with growing inequality in our country.
Speaker 2:And can you talk about how the story of the economy translates into our politics?
Speaker 3:I guess I began to think about this when I saw the Nobel lecture of Milton Friedman. All of a sudden, what had been called voodoo economics by the first George Bush was suddenly Reaganomics and was very, very popular. And all of a sudden this free market economy was the only choice you had and I wondered how that came about. And I noticed that Milton Friedman, who had just gotten the Nobel Prize which, by the way, is not the original Nobel part of the original Nobel Prize, it was added by as a kind of memorial by the Bank of Sweden, so it's kind of an insider award that lifted economics up to this high level of physics. And Milton Friedman, who was Reaganomics' most favorite economist from the Chicago School, presented economics as if it were a force of nature, as if it were physics, and wanted to remove any kind of humane qualities other than it was numbers and graphs and physics and just a matter of momentum and force rather than of humans making certain decisions. That disqualified some people and made others winners. When I saw that I wondered why did he do that? Why, because the previous economists were Keynesian economists and were more humane and considered Mr Keynes decided that if there was a conflict between renters and landlords that it was better for the government to favor the renters because they were the real engine of the productive economy. And all of that was reversed when the free marketers came into power. So I wonder, why was that? Why did they kind of put themselves up on a pedestal like that and exalt themselves to the being a force of nature and not accountable to anyone? And I learned that there was a lot of action happening at the Chicago School, the University of Chicago, having to do with women saying wait a minute, all the books you're showing us, all of the stories you're telling us, have been created by a particular class, of a particular gender, of a particular race, and maybe there are wider realms that we could be looking at. And so I think it was kind of a reaction to people demanding in the 60s and 70s, demanding some answers, some accountability from their government. And so physics came out of the closet and became economics.
Speaker 2:What is working? What are you seeing in terms of models of an economic system that is truly partnership-based, or moving a partnership-based economic system?
Speaker 3:Yes, I would say that I'll point to some other women authors that I know of who are talking about some of these big changes Marjorie McKelley and talking about Cooperative Worker ownership. Georgia Kelly talking about taking seminars at Mondragone, which is a cooperative corporation that is an umbrella for something like 93 cooperatives that, when the 2008 crash happened, did not lay off all kinds of workers because they were the owners and they were involved in making their own decisions, and so they survived the crash without all the human misery that we experienced here in the United States. I can talk about Ellen Brown and her work in exposing the nature of currency as a creation of debt and public banking and public money being another alternative that is more partnership-based than an exchange-based rather than debt-based. So talking about new ways of doing business and new ways of thinking about currency and debt, new ways of thinking about caring for the environment and making that part of the measurements I mean Rianne's work with Nancy Fulbre at UMass the social wealth economic indicators, which also measures the caring of community and the caring in the environment that happens all around us, and including that and also showing how caring about those things, including that in your measurements, also revealed the good outcome that comes from that caring. You actually have a healthier economic results when you invest in those things. I just did an interview with a woman named Janine Furpo who, along with another woman named Ellen Remmer, has an organization called Invest for Better. And because women often have money, inherit money, have generational wealth, and yet they hand it over to other money managers, jeanine is encouraging women. Jeanine and Ellen are encouraging women to study up and to become familiar, and they've even created what they call investment learning circles for women, to kind of create peer learning circles to educate one another when we learn well that way. And really talking about something called ESG, esg investments are environmental. People look at the environmental policies of a company, the sustainability of that company and its context, the effect that it has on the communities they serve and the manner in which they govern their organization. And this is she calls it values aligned investing. There are more people talking about this now and in fact, it's become something of a political hot button issue, because there are those oil and gas industries that see this as very, very dangerous, and so you'll hear a lot about something called woke capitalism, which Texas and Florida have actually legislated against so that pension plans in Texas are not allowed to invest in these ESG approved kinds of funds, which is interesting to think about. So it's a really important movement and it has its limits. Investment has its limits, but it could make a huge difference in what sorts of companies are deemed reliable for investments and where we want our economy to go.
Speaker 2:Let's start talking a bit about your work directly, specifically an economy of our own and the other coalition building work you're doing, and writings on economic issues. Yes, yes.
Speaker 3:Well, when I wrote screwnomics, I proposed a column to Ms Magazine and I now have a series at Ms Magazine called Women Unscrewing Screwnomics. Now, screwnomics was my name for something I saw all around me. That never seemed to be said out loud, but it's the economic theory that women should always work for less or even better, for free right. So I named it screwnomics, which my mother would not have been very pleased by that name, but that is an expression that you hear people use. Well, I've just been screwed. Well, when you look at that as a person interested in language, which is me very much, it's not a pleasant allegory at all. What it's saying is to be female is to be less than and to be taken to be used, whether you give permission or not, and that is not pleasant and in fact it's traumatic for women to think about. I should give a trigger warning when I talk about this. But the wonderful thing about language is that by changing it to women, unscrewing screwnomics. All of a sudden you see carpenters at work, right, building things, and I think that is what women are doing. They're transforming what has been a disadvantage into an advantage, because women's values tend to be aligned with collaboration, with networking, with connection. So screwnomics. My book was really encouraging women to talk to other women about their own economic story, which is often traumatic, often very difficult. There's a lot of shame connected to talking about money and yet if we begin to do that, we learn we're not alone. We're not alone. They're more of us who are debtors than those who are money landlords, let's call them and women together can co-create wonderful new solutions, which is part of what an economy of our own is about. It's an organization, a coalition, which is based on Virginia Woolf's famous essay about what a woman needs. She needs two things, virginia Woolf said. She wrote this in 1920. She needs an income and she needs a room of her own. And an economy of our own changes the pronoun because when women are in a room of her own and talking about things, they always are more inclusive, and we are too. So an economy of our own is about an economy that serves all of us better and it engages women. It gives women a safe place to talk together about economic issues. Rianne has been a wonderful conversationalist in a couple of our zooms of our own. We call them, but Rianne has talked about what we call the invisible woman, the woman who just doesn't show up anywhere in the GDP. None of our caring shows up anywhere in the GDP and also in creating a safe digital world that is more inclusive for all of us. So we have about a dozen zooms of our own conversations and each of those conversations has an accompanying for further learning resource and they're all free because we want to make all of our information freely available and we're beginning to develop something that we're calling. We're stealing Ellen Remer and Janine Furpo's ideas of that investment learning circle, which we will host on our website. I hope we have a survey on our website and we'd love to know what women say they most wanna learn about. Because we've kind of got two things on our agenda. On the one hand, we want women to know how to do well in the economy that we have. How can you survive in this present economy, how can you thrive in this present economy? And but also, how can we transform this economy so that it isn't traumatic for so many, so that it isn't so unequal and so that our environment is not destroyed and our families are not torn apart by economic issues and political issues? That the whole phenomenon of scarcity too little for too many is puts all of us at odds with one another. That's the way it operates. We don't have to operate that way.
Speaker 2:Wonderful, and as we move, hopefully, towards a more partnership-oriented society related to gender and we start seeing more single-headed households by men or by non-binary individuals, I assume all of those resources are going to be just as valuable for them as well as for women. Is that fair?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely, and they are often the sources of the most exciting ideas, because they see the economy much more fully than do Wall Street traders, who only see a small portion, and they're only thinking about a narrow realm of ideas. But people in the communities that have been the most marginalized? Those are the ones who probably know more than anybody. They have to pay attention right To survive.
Speaker 2:Ricky, are there any models that we're seeing from other countries around shifting economics to value well-being of their nations?
Speaker 3:Yes, in fact there are many, and New Zealand being one, canada being another, france having new measures that look at the value of the social wealth that we create with caring. And I have to also credit the wonderful economist from New Zealand, marilyn Waring, who talked about this with her book If Women Counted, which kind of brought up that whole subject. She became a New Zealand parliamentarian when she was just a young musician, starting out one of the first women to be elected to parliament, and learned about how budgets were done and how the GDP was done. And she said, well, that's ridiculous. And they said, oh well, we know it is kind of goofy, but it's the way it's always been done. Nobody was questioning it. But she did a great job of doing that and actually bringing it to the public conversation, what Canada has been doing, which the first step in any of this is measuring what isn't now measured, and then you've got more pieces to the puzzle to put together and to connect and see various trends, which is the value of these new measurements. Having to do with some experiments, for instance, being done with grants that come to families, which was an experiment in Canada, and then looking at what effect did it have on the families. Did they stop going to work, did they? How did they do when they went to school? And then connecting those dots and seeing that, well, having some what do I want to say some regularity, some relaxation of financial terror with a reliable income is actually a helpful thing, and you can see it. When you look at the school grades, when you look at the work participation, when you look at education levels being raised as a result of this, you can see the good outcomes. That isn't possible unless you measure it, and I have to say that the United States has been particularly successful in resisting that effort. It just has never happened here and it needs to. There is an international association of feminist economists that I just met in South Africa that Nancy Folgrey was actually part of founding and gaining more influence, although I have to say that in my latest column, I noted that we talk about STEM education, which is science, technology, engineering and math male dominated fields that women have made a concerted effort to enter, and I said that really it should be STEAM, not STEM. Economics should be that second E in there, because, in fact, women are making more inroads in engineering than they are in economics, and so, even though more women economists are being listened to, we have a need for more younger, millennial economists who are taking a new look at the economy and helping us to change the story to one that wages life.
Speaker 2:So, Ricky, thank you again so much for sharing all your wonderful words of wisdom and resources with us. I wonder if you have any closing remarks that you'd like to share with our listeners about how to create an economy that I love the way you put it an economy that's waged as life, not as war.
Speaker 3:Yes, that word wage is really an economic word, isn't it? So a lot of the way this current economy we're living with is waged as war winning, being victors, being money kings if possible. So how do we wage life? And I think that we're only just now beginning to think about that. So I think it's an ongoing conversation that we're just going to have to keep on talking and talking, and talking about and having brilliant ideas about. I mean, you know, the idea of cooperative money, for instance, is often accredited to the English weavers who created the co-op movement that we all know. But in fact there are organizations that African women call SUSUs, for instance, mutual aid organizations, which are very casual, which are part of the informal economy that is dismissed by so many. It's been around for a long time. So I think that going back to look at ways people have thrived in civilizations outside of European and North American civilizations is really an important part of that research of how you wage life, how you make life possible and enable it to thrive Happily. Wouldn't that be lovely?
Speaker 2:Thank you so much again, ricky, for being with us today. It's really been a pleasure interviewing you and for our listeners. You can find links to all of the resources we've talked about during today's interview, as well as a link to Rion's Real Wealth of Nations book that was published in 2007, as well as a link to the Center for Partnership Systems, where you can find courses and resources to help you dig deeper into an understanding of Rion's domination, partnership continuum and the four cornerstones of childhood and family relations, gender narratives in stories and, of course, economics. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:Thank you, it's been my pleasure all the way.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We're grateful to Rising Appalachia for the use of resilience as our power of partnership theme music. If you would like us to feature your partnership story or if you would like to be a proud sponsor of the Power of Partnership podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. We hope you enjoyed this episode and will leave us a review on your favorite podcast channel. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when new episodes are released every other Tuesday. I'm Cherry Jacobs Pruitt. See you next time on the Power of Partnership podcast.
Speaker 4:I am resilience. I trust the movement. I negate the chaos, uplift the negative. I'll show up at the table again and again and again. I'll close my mouth and learn to listen.