Think Pink!

Class War, Gender War and War

"It's just so frustrating," she said. "People see these things happening and they just feel powerless. They think it's going to happen and there's nothing they can do."

That's Lindsay McClernan, a single mom and full-time worker, discussing the Republican proposal for the Wisconsin state budget, as quoted in a recent Capital Times story.

Ms. McClernan - who, by the way, won this year's YMCA Women of Distinction award - is particularly concerned at the Republicans' proposal to raise the co-pay for child care by an average of $40 per month, or nearly $500 per year. She told the Cap Times:

"If I can't afford the co-pay, I can't go to work, I can't go to school, I'll lose my financial aid for at least a year, and I'll feel like a bad mother."

If politicians were ethically and logically consistent - a big "if," regardless of the major party being discussed - you might expect state Republicans to go out of their way to support child care and education. After all, they voted to deny access to emergency contraception on UW campuses and to place pharmacists' personal beliefs above Wisconsin women's right to reproductive health care.

Why are these votes inconsistent with Republicans' budget priorities? The harder it is for women to get contraceptives, the more likely they are to have children. (Or abortions... is that a Republican goal?) Anyhow, more children means an increased need for child care and education. Yet Republicans want to slash state funding for child care, K through 12 and university-level education.

What happens, then - even without the potential increase in unplanned, unwanted children - is that the state budget is balanced on the backs of the working poor, like Ms. McClernan. Lest we forget, Wisconsin's Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, also shares some blame for declaring tax increases - or even moves to close loopholes that allow corporations to pay less than their fair share of state taxes - off the negotiating table.

Then again, maybe these Republican stances are consistent, if the goal is to ensure that there are enough underprivileged, undereducated young people to serve in tomorrow's military.

Leave My Child Alone campaign

This Wednesday, June 1st from 7:00 a.m. to noon, join a CodePink mom in Madison at Indie Coffee (1225 Regent St.) to take part in a nationwide action to maintain the privacy of our children.

We'll be taking on a letter writing campaign on "Leave My Child Alone," a project put together by Mainstreet Moms Opposition Blue, Working Assets, and ACORN. You'll find out about No Child Left Behind's sneaky military recruitment requirement, take some bite-size actions to help our children get opted out, and find out how everyday citizens can lobby our schools to better protect family privacy.

Who should come? Absolutely anyone who thinks No Child Left Behind is a problem. Anyone who thinks families should be making their own decisions about military service. Anyone who needs help "opting out" or would like to learn more about conscientious objector status. You'll meet other moms moving from concern to action.

Bring your kids! Indie Coffee has generously offered specials like $1 waffles for kids 12 and under ($1.95 for those of you older than 12) - their waffles are great and come in buttermilk, multigrain and chocolate! We will also have giveaways for the kids, balloons and great indie music. There will be other moms already active in creating a better world for our kids who will be on hand to answer any questions. Hope you can come, and please do help spread the word!

If you need more information, go to the Leave My Child Alone website.

Mother's Day Just Got Better

There are now several more reasons why you should join us this Saturday, to reclaim Mother's Day as a women's call for peace. Check out our press release for more information...

Mother's Day (and Semi-Random Thoughts)

If you're in the Madison area, don't miss our annual Mother's Day event this Saturday, May 7, from 10 am to 1 pm at the top of State Street (near Capitol Square, outside the Children's Museum).

We'll have information and fun activities for the whole peace-loving family, including:

Postcards to Condoleezza Rice, linking the increase in U.S. military spending to decreasing support for child survival programs worldwide
An informational, all-ages coloring activity: How would you divvy up the U.S. federal budget?
Face painting, courtesy of the Madison Children's Museum, from 11 am to 12 noon.

Join us and reclaim the proud tradition of Julia Ward Howe, who famously urged in her Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870:

Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

And Now, the Semi-Random Part

I attended two excellent lectures on campus this past week. On Wednesday night, Brazilian academic, activist and policymaker Mary Helena Allegretti spoke. A truly amazing woman, Allegretti studied social movements in the Amazon region for her graduate work - and then joined them - a tremendous act of bravery during Brazil's military dictatorship.

Allegretti succeeded in developing novel policies that created Amazonian reserves for sustainable natural resource harvesting. Her work is credited with ending Brazil's repressive debt peonage system, as well as resolving conflicting claims to natural resources in the Amazon - a serious problem before her system of "extractive reserves" was established. As I left the talk, I wondered how different U.S. policies would be if intelligent, committed and truly compassionate people like Mary Allegretti were well represented in our federal government.

The following evening, Mother Jones magazine founder Adam Hochschild presented a slide show on his most recent book, Bury The Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. In explaining the contemporary relevance of British activists' fight to end slavery, Hochschild pointed out that the abolitionists were fighting the world's most powerful empire - a government with much blood on its hands - at a time when "war fever" made progressive social change very difficult.

Of special interest to women and feminist activists was British housewives' role in establishing and supporting boycotts of slave-produced sugar. (That made me think of Laura Schenone's research on women's importance to the social, political and economic dimensions of food.) I also didn't realize that the slaves working in the West Indies sugar fields were mostly women - the men did what was considered to be more highly skilled work in the sugar refineries.

There is no shortage of inspiring historical and contemporary activist successes. Get active and add to the noble tradition!

UW anti-war "lip-service"

On Thursday, April 14th students and community members at the University of Wisconsin-Madison participated in an organized speak-out and rally that was part of a nationwide student walkout against the ongoing U.S. Iraqi occupation. The rally was also held to address the aggressive military recruiting in our schools. Several thoughtful speakers were brought together by the campus anti-war group, Stop the War, to deliver their messages at the top of Bascom Hill.

Despite that the event was well-organized, and that there was prior approval for the event, the campus police aggressively shut it down within 20 minutes of its commencement. After the first speaker (Wil Williams from Vets for Peace) spoke, a campus police officer motioned to the event organizer and informed him that there were complaints from staff in surrounding campus buildings that we were being too loud. The crowd responded with assertions regarding free speech and affirmation for the speakers to continue. We were, after all, gathered at a public institution that had granted prior approval for a speak-out.

As the second speaker, Jane Jensen from Military Families Speak Out, was somewhat timidly addressing the crowd, four additional police officers arrived - for what one can only assume was "back-up." It is of note that Ms. Jensen's voice was so soft that the relatively small crowd of approximately 150 people had to ask her to speak up and move in closer o hear what she had to say. Nevertheless, the newly formed police crew belligerently unplugged the sound system with no advance warning. The troubling short-term aspect was, of course, that those of us gathered could no longer hear the speakers.

But, the more troubling aspect of this occurrence is the institutional support from the University for the deliberate silencing and marginalizing of voices on campus. The outrage is that the University is able to govern in the manner displayed Thursday under a false image that it is a liberal, public sphere that not only supports, but encourages dialogue on controversial issues. In fact, on the "today at UW-Madison" web page, the event was posted with the following quote: "UW-Madison has a longstanding tradition of critical discourse concerning issues that affect not only our campus but the greater community. Generate a dialogue on the current war through a series of anti-war events on campus including a march, rally and a series of speakers."

The manner in which the campus dealt with the event on Thursday highlights what may more properly be called a longstanding tradition of "lip-service" to marginalized and oppressed groups and a greater interest in serving the majority and that which is economically fruitful.

Dr. Shelly Grabe, UW-Madison

April 8 Movie Night, and What to Call the War

What are you doing next Friday, April 8?

If you want to see two inspiring movies, you should join us at the Electric Earth Cafe at 7:30 pm. (That's at 546 West Washington Ave in Madison; a $5 donation at the door is suggested.)

We'll be screening Women Against Wars,Wars Against Women, a Z Video production filmed at the 2004 World Social Forum in India. The excerpt we'll show features talks by Saher Saba, a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, and Irene Khan, an amazing Bangladeshi activist who became the first woman, first Muslim and first Asian to head Amnesty International.

The other film of the evening is Standing On My Sisters' Shoulders, an award-winning documentary, directed by Laura J. Lipson, that tells the history of the Mississippi women who played a crucial role in the U.S. civil rights movement. The movie website has information about the amazing grassroots leaders profiled, including Unita Blackwell, a sharecropper who became Mississippi's first Black woman mayor.

If you've seen the emails, posters or other announcements for our movie night, you know that we're calling it Women for Peace: From Civil Rights to the "War on Terror", with a disclaimer that "Women for Peace does not endorse war on nouns... or any war, in fact."

In a recent planning meeting for our movie night, Women for Peace members discussed what phraseology we should use for the ill-defined, multi-country, seemingly irrational and open-ended state of U.S. international aggression we find ourselves in (and, as women for peace, work to end). We went with the "war on terror," to avoid confusion, but agreed that -- much like the "war on drugs" -- the "war on terror" is more a slick marketing phrase than an accurate description.

As Tom Engelhardt wrote recently in Mother Jones magazine, "Since WWIV ["World War IV"] and GWOT [the "Global War on Terror"] are the allied rubrics under which our world is being reorganized, it's worth taking a look at them and how well or poorly they describe the world." Both phrases "implicitly advance political programs," making them "remarkably useful" to the political right and suggesting that the correct response to September 11, 2001 is "cataclysmic, singular and even apocalyptic."

Engelhardt's close study of post-9/11 U.S. aggressions and their impact on global terrorism -- "one small proxy war (very low-level guerilla attacks still ongoing); one colonial-style war and occupation (ongoing); scattered terror attacks (ongoing)" -- suggests that the WWIV / GWOT rhetoric is overblown. Worse, that framing denies the complicated nature of the real world, including terrorist actions. It silences much-needed thoughtful analysis and deligitimizes creative, nonviolent responses to terrorist groups, to turn U.S. foreign policy into "the Schwarzenegger movie from Hell."

Rest assured, our April 8 movie night is Schwarzenegger-free, literally and figuratively.

IWD and Two Years Since Invading Iraq

Whether or not you were able to join us for our International Women's Day celebration last weekend, you can see pictures from the event here. Enjoy!

If you're interested in the history behind International Women's Day and Women's History Month, read this essay. As we often point out, women have long been leaders in the peace movement:

Over the years and around the world, March 8th took on different meanings. In some years, it was an occasion for organizing against militarism and war. In the late 1950s, it was often the date of female-led anti-nuclear protests. At the same time, March 8th was a rallying point for the demands of workers. By the late 1960s, as women's liberation was spreading in the United States, many radical feminist discovered, re-discovered or decided to honor the revolutionary women and called for an American revival of International Women's Day.

And columnist Sheryl McCarthy (at the radical publication Newsday) reminds us:

In a week that celebrated International Women's Day, it's worth pointing out that the United States is one of the few countries in the world that hasn't ratified the United Nations Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, which was adopted by the UN in 1979. A kind of international bill of rights for women that set up a committee to monitor how well countries are complying, the convention was signed by President Jimmy Carter, but it never has been ratified by the Senate. Supporting broad principles like women's right to vote, to run for office, to have equal access to jobs and to get equal pay, the convention doesn't even mention anything as controversial as abortion.

Eliminating gender discrimination! Hey, it's not like the United States pretends to be the world authority on democracy. Oh, wait...

Speaking of "spreading democracy," this coming weekend is the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. We encourage you to mark the sad milestone on Saturday at 11:30 am, at the Army Recruiting Center and Reindahl Park, a rally organized by the Madison Area Peace Coalition (see link for more info).

Journalist Naomi Klein looks at Iraq and notes, "The problem is not that Iraqis have lost faith in the democracy for which they risked their lives on Jan. 30 - it's that the electoral system imposed on them by Washington is profoundly undemocratic."

Moreover, writes Klein, the U.S. history of heavy-handed foreign relations, its current wars and occupations, and its tendency to define "democracy" for other countries as "what the U.S. ruling powers want" has realconsequences:

By all accounts, most Lebanese would like to see Syria withdraw from their country. But as the hundreds of thousands who participated in the March 8 pro-Hezbollah demonstration made clear, they are unwilling to have their desire for independence hijacked by the interests of Washington and Tel Aviv. By linking Lebanon's independence movements to American designs for the region, the Bush administration is weakening Lebanon's secularists and religious moderates and increasing the power of Hezbollah. Which is precisely what Bremer did in Iraq: Whenever he needed a good news hit, he had his picture taken at a newly opened women's center, a trick that set the feminist movement back decades. (The centers are now mostly closed and hundreds of secular Iraqis who worked with the coalition in local councils have been murdered.)

With apologies to Michael Franti, you can bomb women and children to pieces, but you can't bomb them into peace.