Today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that was started in Germany by European socialists in 1911, before the Soviets tried to co-opt it. And today Germany has the world's healthiest economy with Union representatives sitting on corporate boards as a matter of law (imagine that in Wisconsin). Also German women get free healthcare, pregnancy leave, childcare and six weeks paid vacations, along with everyone else in most of the other advanced democracies, except the United States.
As our money-driven Game Show democracy rapidly become a corporate plutonomy, ruled by oligarchs, we could learn a lot from the social democracies. But let’s take a timeout today and look at the state of our women and, by extension, our children in America today.
Last Sunday “60 Minutes” ran a heartbreaking piece that showed families crammed into cheap motels, living hand to mouth trying to survive the recession. The grim statistic that 25% of America’s children now live in poverty struck me hard to the point I could barely watch the report.
Since a lot of our children don’t have fathers, I suppose we should be grateful they have mothers. But who takes care of the mothers? Perhaps we could learn from the Native American Cherokee tribe. Before the white man conquered this continent, they practiced their own unique form of democracy. While women were not able to vote, they were the ones who chose the candidates.
As for the white tribe, it is often said that women were only able to run for political office when they got the vote in 1920. But that misconception ignores the historical precedent of Victoria Woodhall. She ran for president in the eighteen hundreds, and later Janet Rankin and other women in the western states ran for office. They were politically active before being able to vote for women.
Interestingly Rankin was a Republican and back then it would seem that the party had a conscience and a soul. Today the grand old party is dominated by righteous white men from the Red States, and after extending the tax breaks for their wealthy patrons, their main legislative priority appears to be to ban abortion.
Forget the separation of Church and State laid down by the founding fathers they purport to revere. The parliament and the pulpit are one for these hirelings who appear to hide behind the sacred texts of social conservatism to obscure their real agenda that they faithfully execute as whores for the rich and powerful.
As much as they want to keep women in their place, their main victims are children. One quarter of our children are now growing up in poverty and God knows how many more will do so in the future. When John Boehner weeps about the crappy jobs he had to take as a young man, he omits the fact that he grew up with a roof over his head and food on the table.
But let’s not let an uncomfortable statistic get in the way of a sentimental homage to the greatest country on earth. A patriotic flourish feels so much better than the bleating of the bleeding hearts, spreading gloom over the shining city on the hill with their irritating facts.
To understand the Republican assault on women you just have to look at the fine print in the Wisconsin governors budget. He has zeroed out funding for Planned Parenthood. Apparently Union busting and women bashing go hand in hand.
So on this International Women's Day, as the Republican House moves to eliminate funds for child nutrition and prenatal care for poor women, get ready for the new America. An America where desperate young women in the Red States have to slip past a cordon of “Christian” vigilantes checking their papers at bus stations, to escape to Blue States to end pregnancies caused by the lack of contraception and the absence of sex education.
But of course these pious white men want to force the young women to have the babies they are cutting the funds for. Enraptured in insulated zeal, these right-to-life crusaders are enjoying a moral free ride. They can be against killing babies before they are born. But once they are, they’re someone else’s problem.