Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Labor Dept. "Child Labor" Prohibitions on US Farming Families Being Dropped


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/agenda-21-update-labor-dept-withdraws-child-labor-restrictions-in-farm-bill/
One blow against the Agenda 21 Machine.

The Obama Administration’s Labor Dept, headed by Hilda Solis, recently released a statement stating that the proposed Orwellian regulations that would prohibit farming families from employing their children in farm-related tasks will no longer be pursued. The regulations allowed some exemptions for one's own family, but outlawed them from helping grandparents, Uncles and Aunts, and neighbors, all rights of passage and part of the traditions of farming families.

The regulations, that barred children under the age of sixteen from ghastly farming work such as that which would have them in any contact with animals or (Heaven forbid) manure, doing any grain processing work, or any number of tasks that provided valuable help to threatened US family-owned farms, caused a massive hue and cry that appears to have resulted in the policy change.

The proposed regulations seemed tailor-made to force small and middle-scale family farms out of business. While children all over the undeveloped world are subjected to years of backbreaking labor in harsh and extremely dangerous working conditions, those who run US Labor Dept. decided to pretend to be under the impression that American farming families, long known to be intelligent, rational, and plain common-sense types of people, needed to be told what their kids can and cannot do on the farm. The answer? Not much. The obvious labor shortages that would result would in turn leave the free, non-corporate farmers with no choice but to hire union labor and, in all probability, illegals. The consequential financial burden that these families would suffer would leave few if any free farmers left; the rest being gobbled up at (With family-owned farms then being sold in a panic) rock-bottom prices by Corporate giants.

Considering the intentions of those who advance UN Agenda 21**(At Bottom -very important), I would expect that these farmers, would, if they elected to or were allowed to remain in rural areas, be left with no choice but to labor as farmhands rather than farmers – either that or work at the local Wal-Mart.

The trend towards removing the individual from property ownership and any connection with food production is to me the most frightening aspect of UN Agenda 21. The free farmer is the backbone of Western Culture. In each era in which free farmers were liquidated or otherwise run out of business, the people lost a major part of their sense of identity, culture, work ethic, and almost all of their fierce independence. The paradigm is Rome; here, the Roman/Latin (and other Italic) free farmer, the individual who considered himself both independent and bound by obligation to participate in civil government and serve in a military capacity, was gradually forced out of existence. The massive importation of slave labor by wealthy landowners (On Latifundias) brought food prices down to a point to which the free farmers could not compete. If they did not lose the farm, they had to sell it. They then moved into the city, where they promptly added to the increasing demands for free and government-subsidized food.


The following article quoted below aptly describes the severing of Americans from the production of their and the nation's food. His call for civil  disobedience must be heeded. Both farmers, and those tasked with enforcing inherently wrong laws and regulations, must refuse to allow them to be enforced.


"As benign as such proposals may seem to some -- the government is only trying to protect the children, right? -- they truly represent just another nail in the coffin of individual liberty, particularly as it pertains to private agriculture. If you have been following the escalating trend of government tyranny against small farms and food freedom in recent years, it should be abundantly apparent that the government's primary goal in these new proposals is not to protect children from danger, but rather to further separate Americans from the food they eat.

Working hand-in-hand with Monsanto* and the drug companies to create a total monopoly on food and health, the federal government is working feverishly to remove Americans from their own land, and create a culture of complete ignorance about food, nutrition, and agriculture. If Americans have no idea how to farm, in other words, they will be at the mercy of a centralized agricultural system that dispenses only chemical-laced genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) and other toxic substances for consumption.

The only way to stop all this madness is to refuse, in the form of blatant civil disobedience, any and all provisions and restrictions that erode or destroy our freedom to grow, buy, sell, and eat the foods of our choice. And this includes continuing to teach each new generation, regardless of whatever laws may or may not be passed, how to independently produce safe food without interference by government tyrants."


* Corporate Giant Monsanto, which in mostly involved in seed production, has been killing farmers with unbelievable lawsuits and regularly employs their people to trespass on private property while searching for crop plants that may have been produced by their seeds or cross-pollinated, through no fault of the farmer, by wind. In many cases, seed purchased by farmers was not even marked as Monsanto seed, and, of course,  a farmer cannot help if pollination from an adjoining corn field affects his crops. The whole thing smacks of criminality.

So far though, I have not seen any changes to the new Department of Transporting regulations that will classify vehicle such as farm tractors (And other vehicles that are used to transport produce short distances within a farm, or to another farm or market or storage facility), as Commercial vehicles. This is just as bad. For generations, farmer's vehicles have been exempt for the limited purposes described above. Now, we are looking at a minimum age of 21, physical examinations and eye tests, and written and road tests. Even  Grandpa, if he wants to help with the tractor, will be required to obtain a CDL - and forget junior; he will not be able to drive the tractor, etc, until he is over halfway through college.

-From my first post on this subject. Italics are added:

"New rules that have been proposed by the Obama administration's Department of Labor will have appreciable effects on families who engage in operating one of our last bastions of true freedom in Western societies - the small to middle-scale farm.

Under the proposed rules, young people,who traditionally form a key component of the labor force on family-owned farms, will be prohibited in performing a number of tasks. This includes operating a tractor
Other regulations will require that farmers will be prohibited from employing young people in terribly dangerous tasks such as working in grain storage bins (silos), harvesting tobacco, working with timber or animals, or Heaven forbid, manure."

Between the dashed lines was the quote from Labor Secretary Solis:
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http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/whd/WHD20111250.htm

"Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America," said Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis. "Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach."


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I cannot but see this as part of a campaign to make the farming business too costly for families. We already have witnessed the rise of large corporate-owned farms that clearly are able to produce their products much more cheaply than can small and middle-scale farms. New regulations that keep young people out of the picture will in all probability require farmers to hire more of the immigrants that are being forced down our throats. This will stretch the financial resources of the already-strapped farms past the breaking point. The corporate farms, with their legions of non-property-owning employees, look eerily like the Latifundia of the Roman Republic and later Empire. Note the following paragraph (With an addition) that is taken from a previous post. It describes the options left to the small farmers when they are finally no longer able to work their farms as businesses and have no choice but to sell or to face foreclosure.

Those that leave the rural zones will do as they did in the Roman Empire when faced with competition from large farms owned by the wealthy that employed massive amounts of slaves (Read unchecked immigration). The independent farmer had been, without a doubt, the backbone of Roman and early Italic society, as it was, with the exception of the Middle-Ages, with Western Societies in general. The spread of slave-worked farms resulted in cutting the prices of food to the point where the smallholders, no longer able to earn a living, had to pack up and leave to the cities, where they promptly joined in with the demands for more cheap and free bread.(Read welfare, food stamps, housing etc.) Those that remain behind will likely no longer own the land but will work as employees on their former property. They will then commute to the farm from their new homes.

Along with what appears to me to be the obvious purpose of turning our yeomen-farmer heartland into vast swaths of farmland owned by corporate land barons, I see another, more insidious, purpose to these rules.
Most kids do not become adult farmers because they thought of it as one thinks of being a cop or a firefighter. They become farmers from the having a connection to that world. Performing the day-to-day tasks of the farm is the principle means by which a person winds up deciding that he or she will farm for a living. For most people, being a part of the farm is what results in having a connection to the land and the desire to carry on the family tradition.

Removing young people from feeding chicken, hogs or other animals, preventing them from the operation of the tractor - a rite of passage for many, or any of the other proposed restrictions, are sure-fire ways to ensure that fewer children of farmers will choose to be farmers. As the state takes over the role of the parent in deciding (In yet another area) what tasks are too dangerous for children on a farm, these kids, who were active, strong, and used to being outside, will retire to their rooms to play X Box and PS3. Gone also will be the tremendous bonding between father/uncle/grandfather and son/nephew/grandchild that regularly occurs during periods of work and carries on into family meals as what was done, and what more must be done, is discussed. As the state smugly gloats over another victory over the institution of the nuclear family, the now 18-year old, having been prohibtited from taking part in many traditional farm tasks, will probably be pretty used to having very little to do and very well may want to keep it that way. So the summer babies, who don't reach 18 until after their senior year of High School, will go to college, the military,or technical school with no real work experience on the farm. After four more years, are they going to want to jump in with the rigors of working on the farm? Some will, but there is a very good chance that many will not. Thus the state will have a means to slowly bleed the free farms out of existence for want of young, experienced, and motivated labor.

The state also seems to think that farming parents do not ensure that their children have enough time for studies. (That is in one of the links) That outlook can only be described as sickening as these people have had the reputation for, if anything, overly demanding that their kids do well in school. The state, as usual, picked the wrong place to look for parents who don't take an interest in their kid's education.

Shoveling horse manure is not some sort of health hazard. Even though I grew up in a more suburban town, my family had a horse and I cleaned the stable very day. I also moved the manure to the garden. The vast majority of people who live on farms in the US are descended from Europeans who have lived with horses, cattle, hogs, goats, and fowl, for thousands of years and have inherited resistance to a wide range of microbes commonly found in farm animals. American Blacks too have developed such resistance. Stock-breeding and the keeping of horses go back to the earliest of the Indo-Europeans, easily as far back as four thousand years ago.
Another ridiculous position is that the state has the authority to legislate or regulate anything that could possibly cause someone to be injured. Except for cases in which parents are clearly endangering or seriously neglecting their children, the state has no authority to decide what activities one's children may or may not do.

While pre-pubescent children in the third-world work on cacao farms, gold mines, and more under terrible conditions, the US starts in on the American farmer. We are being moved into the culture of a third-world nation, but one in which even the children of our farmers will be made to be enervated by a lack of labor, focus, and work ethic.

Note that the Labor Department, probably seeing an uproar coming, was generous enough to allow some exemptions (Not many) for children on their parent's farms. This leaves out the neighbors, Aunts and Uncles, and grandparents for whom young people traditionally also provided assistance.

I have to think that this is in line with the plans of Obama's White House Rural Council and the implementation of UN Agenda 21.

A friend of mine mentioned yesterday another likely reason for the Left to create a system that forces out small and middle-scale farmers and turns farmland over to large-scale corporate farms. Corporate and other factory-type farms are much more likely to be significant contributors of money to political campaigns.


** On Agenda 21, the worldwide plan to move people out of rural and suburban areas and place them in approved urban living zones.
http://thehotgates480bc.blogspot.com/2012/03/agenda-21-iclei-creation-and-purpose.html


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