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 22, 2013 Special Edition - Why you should buy American made products whenever possible

The overall message of Slave Nation is that we had something (freedom to live reasonably comfortable lives with time for family, learning, hobbies and general well-being because most people in society had one wage earner who could earn an amount that would sustain their family) and we lost it in exchange for massive losses of good American jobs and we exchanged it for the right to be permanently enslaved by the debt that comes from working for less than a living wage, the new 'normal' in Americans' earnings, especially for women. That choice by American corporations to sell out their labor force, and by the American people to buy low-priced goods from their own competitors eventually  has been one of the major factors leading to one of the  most obscene income and wealth gaps  known in any of the industrialized nations of the world. 

Therefore, it is more important now than ever for Americans to buy American. At a fair price. Not for a third-world, human-rights ignoring price, but for a living wage, for what it would cost to live here. It is not too much to ask. It is not too much to demand for our children as they grow and replace us in the labor force. 

In order to help promote this goal, and to be 'part of the solution,' I am going to begin listing great American-made products that I have found on a regular basis in this blog. I am not being reimbursed in any way for recommending these products; I am just sharing information. By buying American we can raise the living wage for all, and help toward the ultimate goal of Slave Nation, which is to help families be able to afford to have a homekeeper again. Buying American is an act of self-defense and should be a major priority in our purchasing decisions.

The first product I am recommending is "Up & Up Fresh Citrus Handwash" available at Target stores. 

Pros:   * very reasonably priced at or just under $1  * great product; works well, smells wonderful, attractive packaging, lasts quite a while   * Does not make skin itchy or dry * Made in the U.S.

Cons:   * There is no refill option making plastic use excessive         * Some of the components are made out of the U.S. * Target is a large multi-national, non-unionized, non-local company

On the whole, I still feel like it is a great product and do recommend it to anyone who is looking for a good American handsoap. 

April 21, 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

Homekeepers bore the children that would support their generation as it aged. They kept their own houses, socialized their children, cooked their family’s meals, made certain the children went to school clean and fed, volunteered in their local communities, and watched out for problems in their neighborhoods such as sick or elderly neighbors who might need help. By not hiring help, they were able to live on one income, raise their own children and be a benefit to their families and their communities.

One of the most valuable parts of this arrangement was that if something were to happen to the key income earner in the family the mom could work part time until the family situation stabilized before returning to the home that she had been able to help preserve through a lay-off or sickness. She was a blanket insurance policy for her family, in effect - she was a “card up the sleeve” during times of family adversity. Until the 1970’s there was no stigma attached to this sort of traditional lifestyle, and it was considered an honorable and sensible way for a woman to “support” herself, through her service to family and community, in addition to realizing the benefits of raising her progeny in the most supportive available construct. Contrary to the home being the site of oppression, home was the site of a small family business, with women managing and caring for family assets.

These women would typically marry men from their same social and economic class, and typically men who would be involved in some form of blue-collar factory work, or low-level service field such as mail carrier or bank teller. The men did not have college educations, but they had skills and increasingly well-paying jobs as America roared back from World War II.

Union membership strengthened the sector that worked for it and during the fifties and sixties the working class family was making more money than ever and was now realistically able to send their kids – boys and girls - to college for a very brief and fleeting moment in history. And then the ride ended. Manufacturing work in the U.S. declined abruptly and dramatically between 1960 and 1975, with the new practice of corporate “outsourcing,” which meant sending millions of jobs that had previously been performed by Americans to countries with more cheaply priced (and far less protected) labor pools.

At that point the scarcity of jobs put downward pressure on the family wage and the loss of buying power began to force these women, these providers of all things domestic and these insurance policies against disaster, out of their homes into low paid ‘pink collar’ jobs. Their budgets became pinched to the point that they no longer had a choice: they had to enter the labor market, increasingly on a full-time basis, as periods of under- or un-employment occurred in their husbands’ work lives.

As the economy worsened (ironically the flood of new workers could only have the effect of pushing down wages while raising prices for goods and services), as the inflation of the 1970’s stripped more and ever more buying power from the family budget these families had to send out their women to work and saw their quality of life seriously deteriorate as a result. 

http://livingwage.mit.edu/

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/