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practices (once one of the most progressive of the very progressive tech companies)--doesn't have to worry about affording an abortion or birth control, or getting screened for breast cancer, or any aspect of her own health care. Her "golden parachute" from H-P will take care of her, and hers, in grand style. It's interesting--and a very important subject--how the women's equality issue is used to divide women into the haves and the have-nots, just as our male-dominated political and economic establishment has divided the society as a whole, and other sub-groups within it, into the privileged few, who are very well off, and the poor, unprivileged and excluded majority. (We have the Colin Powells, and the Condi Rices, and the Kenneth Blackwells, and then we have all other African-Americans, the great majority of whom remain at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, and are particularly targeted, disenfranchised and excluded from their rightful influence in government.)
I find it kind of pathetic the way some women who have "made it"--who have a decent life, or a luxurious life, and who have achieved power in ways that their mothers could only dream of--can't see through the strategies of the corporate rulers and warmongers in oppressing us all, including all women, by means of status and income and class warfare of the rich few against the poor majority. Instead, some women who have "made it" in this heinously criminal, murderous, torturing, thieving, corporate-run society, identify with the oppressors and seek to oppress. And some women in the lower rungs of power--who make heroines of women like Carly Fiori and Hillary Clinton--seek upward mobility into the realms of heinous power. I actually don't think there are a lot of them, but these are the ones--the "angry Clinton supporters"--whom Fiori and the McCain campaign are seeking to exploit--women who are infected with patriarchal disease of entitlement to power.
What is best, of course, for democracy, for human progress and for the very survival of our species and our planet, is no one being "entitled" to power--all sharing in collective power, as well as collective responsibility and collective wisdom. Leaders are overrated--and we have, in living memory, the traumatic experience of truly great leaders being assassinated. We need democracy for our very survival, because it is only by this means--citizen-run democracy--that both the disaster of leadership gone bad (the fascist Bush Junta), and the easy removal of good leaders--by murder, or other means--can be averted. Women who want power like Bush has, or power like the CEO of Exxon Mobil has, are missing the point. That is not a triumph of women's equality--any more than Colin Powell's or Condi Rice's rise to power is a triumph of the civil rights movement. These are failures, not triumphs. The election of a pro-war, pro-corporate woman--Hillary Clinton--as President of the United States would have been a failure of the women's movement--an ugly, corporate-drawn caricature of what women's equality means: women's equal opportunity to murder, torture, loot and oppress other people.
I say this as an older woman whose life has straddled the transition from no opportunity for women, when I was a child and teenager, to open-ended opportunity for women--in an astonishing social revolution. Perhaps only someone my age can really understand how amazing this revolution has been. But I lament what it has been turned into by our corporate rulers--the opportunity for a few women to become mass murderers and cruel exploiters of workers and the poor. Or, I should say, what they have tried to turn it into. For I think that most women don't want that kind of power, and do understand what's really going on in our culture--corporate ruler oppression of the poor majority. It has been the hope of the feminist movement, from its inception, that women would be a mighty force for peace, for equality and fairness, and for creating a progressive and compassionate society. Women, for instance, led the anti-slavery movement. The two causes were one. We need to return to those revolutionary roots in the women's movement, and turn away from notions of equaling men at being jerks, criminals, warmongers and oppressors.
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