March 17, 2013

New Reader Alert – this blog is a sequential release of a longer written piece. Each segment works hard to ‘stand alone,’ but inevitably, they make more sense in context, which means reading from the beginning post through to the latest post, which is actually the current ‘end.’ Thank you for stopping by – please leave a comment; it would be great to hear what you think about these ideas.  With appreciation, Laurie

Serfdom in Modern America:

Forging Our Own Chains

In only fifty years, the United States has gone from being one of the healthiest countries in the world to one that is raising children who are currently projected to have shorter life expectancies than their parents, courtesy of a raging first world epidemic of obesity.  It is no coincidence that the explosion in the size of the snack and convenience food industry, including the ‘drive-thru’ restaurant, occurred precisely as women entered the labor market. The resultant obesity epidemic shows how poorly (and lethally) that attempt filled the vacuum. And if that weren’t dire enough, over a third of the people who live in the United States now exhibit clinical symptoms of diabetes and heart disease, another ticking bomb that will soon blow up in our faces, much the same as the financial crisis did in 2008.

Women’s health is declining rapidly in the United States, too, with women in some regions of the country losing an unprecedented two and a half years of life expectancy between 1997 and 2007, alone. For life expectancy to decline in a developed nation is rare, and setbacks on this scale have not been seen in the U.S. since the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.[1] It is also no coincidence that kindness, trustworthiness, empathy, civility, and the other attributes which make up the oeuvre of moral and civic behavior are missing in generations of increasingly impoverished children who ‘do time’ in stranger daycare, where every day begins with parental abandonment. These children exhibit more violent and antisocial behavior than children who are raised in the home setting, and are the weak links in our society, prone to violence and dangerous attention-seeking behavior which puts us all at risk.

Families lost an estimated 40% of their wealth in the financial meltdown of 2008 - and, it is not alarmist thinking to fear that another financial crisis may occur in the near future, possibly on an even larger and more devastating scale than we have seen to date, in which we could lose even more of our diminished resources.  The structural problems which led to the financial meltdown have not been corrected; no titans of Wall Street have been imprisoned to send even the faintest of messages to the rest that we will not tolerate their excess and thievery. This loss of wealth and uncertainty about the future is a calamity which we will show is attributable to a massive failing in our family and educational systems - both of which turn out citizens too ignorant to protect their interests from government and corporate theft, welfare and abuses. We are not educated enough to protect ourselves at the ballot box anymore, and we are turning out citizens who are too ignorant and credulous to understand the subtle ways that we are tricked into doing harm to ourselves when in that box. When they even make it to the box, that is.
 

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The two-earner employment game is rigged against families and women, and the average non-professional family is in fact going into debt by having a second wage-earner. The steady loss of income American families have experienced since the 1960’s, combined with the gender pay disparity between male and female wages (It takes until April 20 of the year for a woman to catch up to the earnings an equally qualified man in the same job had earned by the previous December 31^st), has resulted in a fundamentally unsustainable economic system for the family with two wage earners, unless both are highly paid professionals who can purchase services to replace the absent homekeeper (but this is certainly not the norm among American workers). This system has large hidden costs beyond discounted or lost earnings, including the very real loss to the family of needed services, services which are either not provided, or are provided at a non-discounted cost to the family by contracted service providers, and paid for with post-tax wages which can completely consume the discounted dollars a homekeeper can earn in the marketplace.

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/15/nation/la-na-womens-health-20110615

http://livingwage.mit.edu/