CSE: you do not understand it. when getting divorced you make arrangements for child care expenses and child custody and visitiation. everything else between a man and woman are separate. most people transfer the cash directly without state intervention. the data that those articles drew on is for those people for whom this arrangement doesn't work. child support enforcement was always typically only ever handled through the state when people were poor. so the data is screwed, more on that below.
CSE *does* work, as max said and as i said. clearly you didn't read anything i wrote. you missed that spot. i said it works. if it didn't my ex would have kept on not paying. just the threat of it made his shape up.
he is only messing around with the child care b/c he thinks he can. if that were automatically transferred to, he couldn't. (no duh, we should work on gov't provided child care. but we're not there yet. if we can't get parents to take care of their kids; how do you propose to get people to pay taxes to take care of others?)
CSE WILL, I REPEAT WILL will make sure that my ex pays what he his kid. it will act as a threat to make sure that he pays up. for most men, that's all it takes. as i said, i firmly believe that one of the biggest problems is the father's rights movement. confront that head on. those are things we can do--by exposing it and by exposing shite statistics. we can do it right here, right now by countering the negative publicity.
CSE has always been around. the reason why it's a problem now is that it is a bureaucracy and it moves slowly.
do you have any answers to help women out right now? what will it take to get this to move forward, these plans you have? huh?
individual responsibility is taking care of yourself. taking care of your kids IS a form of collective responsibility that is not much different than the collective houseing, cleaning and childcare that has been mentioned. it's only your lack of firing synapses that make you see it otherwise.
you will say, oh i mean collective responsiblity on a grander scale. all you're advocating kelley is small scale collectrive responsibility to one's family conceived a privated bourgeois family.
okey doke. tell me, how do you propose to explain to someone why they should support a socialist welfare system? what will you appeal to? why should they prefer that approach and not what we have already? what do you think will persuade the average joe sixpack and suzi winecooler? why should they join you? oh yeah, and what about racism. why is racism wrong? why should people be anti-racists? why, indeed, should they be communists? why is captalism wrong or, as charles would say, "incorrect"? why was the diallo trial outcome wrong? what would convince the average jack scotch 'n' cigar and helen pinot noir?
self-evident is not an answer. you've still not explained to me what the practical outcomes are that make it matter whether we support activities for moralistic or for not moralistic reasons. in other words, you have not explained why getting people on the socialist bandwagon is a bad idea if it plays on their moral sense that they should fight injustice. so what is it that makes the sense of fighting injustice so horribly fatal to the socialist future?
also: people cheat the welfare system because they were trying to survive.
so they didn't report fathers' incomes so the fathers could help them out.
as you must know, no one could survive on welfare bennies. the "data" your studies relied on relied on that research where they found that men weren't making enough to get by, but that's because they were underreporting income for a reason. so good i'm glad they cheated the government. but cheating your children is not the same thing as cheating the government. cheating the govt in order to get welfare bennies AND help from the father was to help your children have a better life. cheating your child by maintaining that you don't make enough money is doing it for your own selfish reasons.
i don't care about the history of welfare reform. it's done and over with.
i know all about what happened and i did what i could at the time to stop the nonsense: we organized teach ins and ralled people between 94 and 97 trying to fight the rollback of welfare. btw, the feminist push to get men to take care of their children was around long before welfare "reform". blaming it on anything other than the operations of capital is nonsense. you engage in nonsense when you criticize attempts to help people right here and now. as ehrenreich said, how convenient for you.
in the end, i cling fast to that old fashioned notion that men need to bear the responsibility for the consequences of sticking their dicks in places that might create a child. (right now, at a hacker list i'm subbed to, i'm listening in on a convo about macking hoes) women already know what that responsibility is. we need to create practices that reinforce for men that same responsiblity. and that means that they need to bear the burden of supporting that kid--practically first and foremost, but materially if circumstances (like abusiveness and complete inability to get along) mean that they cannot. poor and working class families are the leaders in building alternative collective family arrangements, please see judith stacey's _brave new families_. they really have some insights that the enlightenederati might try to learn from.
i absolutlely think that right here, right now men need to learn how to bear the very collective responsiblity associated with raising a child. that's not an individual responsbility, that's a collective one. and btw, if you're so big on collective then why the fuck are you living in an efficiency whining about your low income? move into or do the hard sweaty work of creating a collective where you help take care of other women's children and make it work and provide a real alternative that can be built on in the socialist future. i'll bet if you try real hard you can dig up some men and women that will be more than happy to work it out. there were such collectives in the backwoods hole i lived in, replete with war protestors who didn't pay their taxes. i'm sure you can find them in ohio.
if you want to get rid of the bourgeois privatized family, then you have to start working on developing alternative ways of having families and living together. why should only parents create collectives? single people should be involved too.
my part in this convo is over. i find your position morally repugnant as well. what shite. everything you stand for relies on moralizing about capitalism and racism and sexism, it's just that somehow or other you think it's not moralizing. well, sorry, bzzzt. wrong: it is.