April 25, 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

There are more reasons I will develop further for why we need women to stay home (or men, if their wives earn more - there is no gender angle here except for the absolute fact that women earn less money than men and families should plan accordingly to maximize their efforts), and why there needs to be a revival movement for homekeeping in the United States. One incredibly important reason is the economy, and I will lay out my arguments and suggestions for reversing the two income earner per family trend to the single living wage model, in a conscious, volunteer, social policy implementation at a grass-roots' level. This grass-roots effort would help to stabilize the financial crises that we have suffered through for so many years now by strengthening individual family finances with the end goal being to achieve true sustainability, which cannot be achieved when it actually costs women to more to work than they truthfully bring back to their families.

For the last several years, as we moved further and further into the Second Great Depression which has gripped our economy, the talking heads have assured us that more jobs and more employment are the answers to all problems – the more people we can get earning paychecks, the better! Then we can keep the ball rolling by spending! Higher employment and consumption will save us! I say: nonsense. We need fewer workers, who make more pay and consume fewer things. We need as many people to leave the workforce as possible, leaving more opportunities for those who stay to be able to earn the lost, illusive, living wage that once existed, courtesy of our old friends, Supply and Demand. As mentioned before, this would decrease the amount of taxes available to government agencies, which would have the additional benefit of shrinking government.

What the United States needs is not more jobs, but fewer people competing for those jobs in the labor market. It is time for the country that is famous for “rugged individualism” to quit being so sheepishly obedient to their corporate masters, to reject the philosophy of consumerism, and to carve their own good life out of the morass that the politicians and the businessmen have created.

My final thought for this introduction is to remind my reader that in the United States, the number one predictor that a woman will have to declare bankruptcy at some point in her life is that she has children, so what does that say? This kind of degrading poverty was unknown prior to women entering the work force, and is one of the primary reasons they should reject it for the evil, soul-sucking trap that it is. In short, I disagree with, or would at least amend what Dostoyevsky said about judging a civilization: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” I think the degree of our civilization can be judged by our female and child poverty rates, by our broken families, by our 41% illegitimacy rate and by our abandoned elders.

In the following pages I will outline and prove how the loss of our homekeepers is crippling us, and then I will present my plans for a strategic female withdrawal from the workforce. This manifesto is a call to families and communities to return to the lifestyle and the quality of life that lifestyle afforded when we had designated homekeepers. That lifestyle has been taken from us to enrich others at our great expense, and it is time to stand up for ourselves by refusing to participate in our own enslavement any longer.

April 20, 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

There is another very real social tension over the worth of a supported woman who doesn’t “work,” whether or not she must to survive, as seen in the recent case of Anne Romney being called out for ‘never working a day in her life.’ That tension is part and parcel of the social culture of gender-feminist-driven “choice,” and “individualism” that has permeated society for the last fifty-plus years. Its propaganda clouds our thinking when it comes to homekeepers, casting them in the roll of an almost willful parasite - unemployable at best, weak or stereotypically self-indulgent or lazy,  at worst - rather than as some of society’s toughest and most valuable human capital.

In short, we have confused the value of women’s actual contributions to their families and communities with the act of earning income, mistakenly assigning value in direct proportion to earnings, somehow managing the mental acrobatics necessary to ignore the numerous services the homekeeper provides when we assign ‘worth.’ Because of this we value women who do not earn income less than we value those who do, which is not exactly an incentive package for these women to jump into the unpaid avocation of homekeeping. At a time when we need to woo women across all economic and educational sectors back into the home we need to do better by them in terms of respect, at the very least.

And while we are examining our values and beliefs, how did it become an accepted part of who we are and how we live that we farm the majority of our children out to so-called “child care,” rather than pay ourselves to raise them at home? Although I make the case that child-caring is only one facet of homekeeping, it is nonetheless one of the most important jobs a homekeeper performs, and the results of how that job is done resonates through our culture. Therefore, I ask:  How can we thrive as a democracy when the lowest paid members of society are the main care-givers during infancy and early childhood for our future voters and decision makers? Why do we allow our children’s values to potentially be shaped and formed by the least educated, lowest paid and most transient members of the workforce? Why do we accept the “inevitability” and consequences of stranger childcare as if there were not a perfectly good alternate solution to raising children – a model that worked very well for millennia?

I also want to ponder our actual quality of life in the United States in 2013.To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, are you better off now than you were fifty years ago? Is life better now by measurable indicators? I would argue not. We have 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 expectancy's than their parents, courtesy of a raging epidemic of self-induced obesity.  

We are now a country where appointed Supreme Court justices uphold the rights of corporations, whose lawfully mandated goal is to create profit, to spend without limit in elections (predicated on the farce that corporations are people, fully imbued with 1^st Amendment rights), thereby allowing elections to be sold to the highest bidder, regardless of whether or not that will result in policies that will make life better or worse for families. 

Women and children are poorer now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country. I want to repeat that: Women and Children are poorer now than they have been in the last 90 years in this country, with 22% of children living under the laughably defined Federal Poverty Level. In short, we have lost ground in every way that matters. We are poorer, sicker and less protected than ever from instability in our home and national life. We did not do what we needed to as a society to retain our homekeepers, and we are suffering the consequences. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/