Category Archives: class warfare

Speaking of the work mothers do

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So the Kid and I have had a lot of time to talk since he was deprived of internet and television for a few days. It turns out he really does love his dear old mom, but not if there is manga to be read.

He’s studying American history this year and they are learning all about the constitution and the civil war, etc. He said “the Civil war wasn’t really fought over slavery, it was over state’s rights”.

And then I gave him the condensed for a 13 year old version of this post

You may have some romantic notion that the Civil War was fought for philosophical reasons over the enslavement of fellow humans. The truth is actually based in the functions of a capitalist society. As the north industrialized and started selling more finished goods that were more capital intensive than agricultural raw goods from the south, slavery became an impediment to the wage system.

Keeping a slave is a fixed cost. The only fluctuation is in the original buying price, after that there is no competition to keep costs down. You could keep your slaves near starvation but when they dropped dead you would have to buy another slave. Replacement was not cheap. So the price of raw goods stays relatively high because labor costs can’t be dropped. Paid workers, on the other hand, had no initial cost and since you were not responsible for their well being you could pay starvation wages without a replacement cost. As long as there was a surplus of labor, you could keep dropping the wages lower and lower making the cost of producing your goods cheaper and cheaper. Capitalism at it’s finest (oh sense the irony there or you people don’t know me well).

And so the very next day (oh providence!) the kid had a group exercise on the Civil war, slavery and economics.

And my darling child just went and rocked the brains of a group of 7th graders.

When I asked him if he understood what I explained to him – he did the typical teenage eyeroll “Of course, Moooooooom.” And he thinks the other kids understood it too.

So RQ is not only corrupting her own child with radical ideas, but the precious children of the creative class elites as well. Their parents may have drank the koolaid, but not all hope is lost.

The Obligatory Mother’s Day Post

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You all know by know that I hate Mother’s Day. I hate the schlock. I hate that instead of valuing the real work that women do (for free) we give flowers and cards one day of the year.

So I decided to figure out how much we really value mothers’ work. We’ve all seen the calculators that say if moms were paid for all they do they’d make the same salary as doctors. But we don’t actually pay moms like that. In fact, there is only one instance in this country where women are paid to stay home with their children. Welfare.

But welfare is temporary. Women with newborns have to start 40 hours a week of job searching when their child is just 12 weeks old. And Welfare doesn’t exactly pay minimum wage.

In WA state the monthly TANF (new term for welfare since welfare to work program started) grant is $440 in cash for two people. And from personal experience that amount has been the same for at least 13 years. If you include food stamps, it’s $607.

Let’s just assume a mom on welfare works just 40 hours a week caring for her child. 607/ 4.3 (weeks in a month)/40 (hours in a week) and she gets about $3.53 per hour.

(And if you happen to be one of the 30% of custodial parents who receives child support in a timely fashion and you also happen to be on TANF- your child support will go to the state first to pay back your grant money. You *may* receive an extra $50 on top of TANF from your child support but you will not get the whole amount of both child support and TANF)

And WA is in the high middle as far as grant amounts go. Tennessee, at the bottom of the heap gives a family of two $142 in cash and a total of $398 if you include food stamps or about $2.31 per hour.

That is what motherhood is worth in this country, less than minimum wage.

Let’s contrast that with the average monthly cost for infant daycare. In WA it’s about $754. That’s 20% more than the monthly TANF and food stamp grants combined. In TN it’s about $412 per month, close but still more than TANF and food stamps.

Why, if mothering is such an important job, do we pay poor mothers so very little to do it?

Because the ideal has been set of the two parent family with a mom who stays home and sacrifices herself for the good of the kids. And sacrifice isn’t really looked at as work. Sacrifice is religious term meaning to give up yourself for the good of others. But not just give up, but totally subvert any of your own desires.

And because the sacrificial mom is our ideal, we do not give poor mothers with no other resources as much money as someone who does their same job for fewer hours a day and fewer days per week. We don’t expect strangers to sacrifice themselves. Actually, the only people we expect to sacrifice themselves completely are mothers.

But children are work. And the work that a mother puts into her children is not for her benefit. It is partially for her child’s benefit, but it is mostly for societies benefit. We need children to grow up and be productive members of society. We need them to grow up to pay the taxes that will pay for social security. And now we need children to grow up and pay the taxes for our massive war debt. If we remove all the sentimentalism that has been attached to motherhood to make the sacrifice more palatable, then mothers are performing a vital function for society to continue. And they aren’t paid for it. They are financially punished for it with lower wages ($11,000 less on average than non-mothers), higher expenses and less job security.

Because we don’t value women, but we really don’t value mothers.

We’ve Got The Power!

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Well not exactly. But we will, either tomorrow or Saturday. And in just a very few minutes I will have to shut down my compy at work to install new compys in the whole lab. (New to us anyways, we are th bastard stepchild of the main campus and get their hand me downs).

So I will be computer-less for at least 24 hours. Think of this as an open thread and leave me something nice to read when SCL finally brings me back to the 21st century. I’ll take thoughts, musings, haiku, rants, jokes, you name it.

And enjoy this picture. Behind every great woman there isn’t necessarily a great man, but this is too cute not to post.

Seattle City Light Forces Me into Gay Marriage

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Not so much forces, but you all know my ongoing drama with the power company.

Well after going without power for nearly 2 weeks in January (you all remember hot water bottle babies) Seattle City Light dug up a seven year old bill and attached it to my current bill. It would have been illegal for them to try and collect it in just a few weeks, but since they have attached it to my current bill and told me to pay in 2 days or go (again) without power, they will get their fricken money.

In the meantime, Soopermouse tells me it is illegal to shut off someone’s power in England. And that every weekend in May is a 3 day weekend because of bank holidays.

And gay marriage is legal.

So I proposed.

That is the real threat to hetero marriage in this country- Seattle City Light. Now you know.

The coming collapse of the middle class

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Via Lambert at Corrente comes this hour long lecture that is required listening (though if you can just listen and not be riveted in front of the screen you are a stronger woman than I am. I was going to listen to this while I cleaned the kitchen. But the sink is still full of dishes)

Pay attention to the end where she talks about the rainbow. My favorite anthropology professor has been saying forever that the idea of a middle class is false. We are all at the bottom of the heap. But we keep this ideal as a way to separate and elevate ourselves into those that have nothing and those that have little. Humans like their hierarchies.

But we, the poor, are not so different from you. We are just luckless.

More on class warfare

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It’s just sheer dumb luck that I read this article after writing my post below.

This is to give you a taste of what I meant by “I know that poor people aren’t lazy (and because I know the other side- I know that despite their nice words the upper class thinks we are).”

So this article at Salon is about the greenwashing of a super lux, environmentally friendly (put air quotes on that) development in Montana. When the locals decided that there was something wrong in Denmark, Wade Dokken, the super wealthy DEMOCRAT who started the project threw a bit of a hissy fit about the lower class

For Dokken, this proved too much. When you cracked on the ultra-wealthy, you were cracking on his people, and he couldn’t let such a remark go unchallenged. He fired off a letter to Park County planner Mike Inman in which, among other things, he berated his critics for “class envy,” claiming remarks like Feigley’s were directed “at people who have had more success in life than the letter writers and blog writers … Perhaps they were smarter. Perhaps they worked harder. Perhaps they managed their money better …”

Really, the elites of our own party think we are poor because we are dumb and lazy. How does that make them Democrats exactly?

Class Warfare

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First, go read Anglachel’s incredible post on class divide that is splitting the Democratic party.

Anglachel brings up something that has been twisting in my head for a while. I am a horrible hybrid of the two halves of the Democratic party. On one side is my father’s family, who my mother called “San Francisco intellectuals”. They have always had money. They have always been part of the thinking class. They were abolitionists. They are the western version of the WASP, or what happens to white Anglo Saxon protestants when they get some sunshine and a shitload of wealth from good real estate investments.

Then there is my mother’s side. Sure, 500 years ago they were minor aristocracy, but they have become the embodiment of southern, working class whites. My mom grew up as a “Detroit street rat”, Detroit being a place where many poor southerners (both black and white) went to get decent jobs in the auto industry. My mother’s family fought on the side of the North in the civil war, but not for the esoteric idea of equality. They were too poor to own slaves to begin with. They fought for the North because many remembered the Revolutionary war and could not bring themselves to fight against a union that had cost them so much. They are hillfolk in North Carolina and Tennessee.My great uncles all live in trailers circling each other like wagons.

So I grew up with the intellectual values of my father’s family coupled with a sure knowledge of the poverty of my mother’s (especially since my father’s intellectual values didn’t extend to him paying child support). I know and treasure things that the working class isn’t supposed to, like travel and languages and grand theories of how people should think and act. I know which silverware to use in fancy restaurants and how to conduct myself with people who have a lot more money than I do. I know about the weird foods rich people eat with gusto and how to pretend to like them.

I also know how to pull together with my fellow poor neighbors and share burdens. I know how to navigate the horrible red tape of social services (if anything I could be considered a super-power, my understanding of bureaucrat-ese is it). I know how to juggle bill payments with an “oh but I mailed that check last week, didn’t you get it?” I know that you can work you ass off and never make it out of poverty. I know that poor people aren’t lazy (and because I know the other side- I know that despite their nice words the upper class thinks we are). I know that we are not dumb, but luckless.

And there, did you notice that. That I started saying “we”. I think it is only recently that I picked my side. I still cringe over the trappings of poor white culture. I will never be a lover of Nascar or football or cheap beer. I will still love art and literature and most gourmet foods. But in the basics, I am working class.

Someone once told me that I was a “good representative for poor people” (and then asked me to do an interview in order to get their organization donations). What they meant is that though I am poor, I speak like a member of the educated elite. I was grouchy about that at first. But if I can claim my class and use my vocabulary to better our lot, then so be it. Well spoken poor people have a long history of advancing society. Even Socrates was the son of a midwife and a stonemason.

In the ghetto

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So right across from my lab, about 10 minutes ago, there was a shooting. According to the 911 logs, it was an assault with a weapon. We all heard the gun shot then heard (and saw, cause my lab door is open) a bunch of girls go running into the bank for cover.

This is the 3rd shooting in 2 years. This neighborhood hasn’t always been quite so violent (despite it’s reputation). But the worse the economy gets, the more stressed out people get and the more trigger happy they become. And since this is a poor neighborhood, we are always close to the violence tipping point.

It’s not endemic to a certain race. Look at our oil wars. When resources get scarce, people fight and kill. It’s part of the anthropological idea of collapse (Jarred Diamond readers will be familiar with the term, so will anyone who has taken a class in anthropology or sociology or looked at the carrying capacity lately).Poor people are war fodder because it is easy to push us into reacting violently over scarce resources. In the shopping center where the shooting just happened is a recruitment office for the army, navy and marines. That is no accident.

UPDATE: The guy who got shot just got grazed (he’s the son of a friend of the school janitor) and the shooter got caught. But for the 2 hours of fuel for 5 helicopters and the costs of the 7 police cars, 3 fire engines and 2 ambulances that showed up, we could probably pay for an officer to patrol this neighborhood after school (when most of the trouble happens) and during the summer.