Obama and the democrats continue their assault on American traditions, institutions and values. We have already seen the attacks on religion, the energy industry, small business, marriage, motherhood, and healthcare. The next target is the family farm. As with his previous attacks on American liberty, Obama will attempt his attack on the family farm by executive fiat via the Department of Labor (DOL). The DOL is currently proposing “updates” to child labor laws which will prohibit children under the age of 18 from doing farm chores which have been a part of the American family experience for as long as Americans have had farms on this continent.
Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”
“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”
The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.
Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government’s plan will do far more harm than good.
“The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they’re not at their parents’ house,” said Blinson.
“I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It’s been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid.”
…
In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis’s regulations are implemented, farming families’ labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.
“What would be more of a blow,” he said, “is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm.”
The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average age of the American farmer is now over 50
“Losing that work-ethic — it’s so hard to pick this up later in life,” Clark said. “There’s other ways to learn how to farm, but it’s so hard. You can learn so much more working on the farm when you’re 12, 13, and 14 years old.”
The proposal would strengthen current child labor regulations prohibiting agricultural work with animals and in pesticide handling, timber operations, manure pits and storage bins. It would prohibit farmworkers under age 16 from participating in the cultivation, harvesting and curing of tobacco. And it would prohibit youth in both agricultural and nonagricultural employment from using electronic, including communication, devices while operating power-driven equipment.
The department also is proposing to create a new nonagricultural hazardous occupations order that would prevent children under 18 from being employed in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials. Prohibited places of employment would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.
Additionally, the proposal would prohibit farmworkers under 16 from operating almost all power-driven equipment. A similar prohibition has existed as part of the nonagricultural child labor provisions for more than 50 years. A limited exemption would permit some student learners to operate certain farm implements and tractors, when equipped with proper rollover protection structures and seat belts, under specified conditions.
The notion that the federal government could reach into the family farm and tell parents what chores their kids could or could not do is abhorrent to the American experience and is one more example of the Regime and the democrats ruling against the people.
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden
Family Farms are not the Official State approved Farming Collectives Comrade, they must be eliminated so that the Official State Approved Farming Collectives may flourish.
@ doriangrey:
Get rid of the Kulaks so that Kulaktive Farming may flourish!
The idea of “idyllic childhoods” is a pretty recent development. Less than a century ago, children were not only the next generation, they were also a vital resource who were exploited as soon as possible. This isn’t to say that they weren’t loved and treasured, but they did have a very defined role to play and they were aware of that fact at a very early age. To consider a 17 year-old a “child”, fragile or otherwise, would be quite a foreign idea to people not that long ago. At that age, one would have been working on the family farm, in some capacity for 10 years and would just about be ready to take it over himself.
One of the best things that could happen to children these days is to be taught the nature of work at an early age; small jobs at first, with increasing responsibility over time. Even two or three hours a day spent in this type of activity would be a developmental boon.
After all, isn’t the purpose of childhood preparation for successful adulthood?
If they can’t do chores, how will farm kids learn good manures?
c’mon i am awaiting. Where is the Rodan for Romney post??? It’s a traffic driver!
MacDuff wrote:
That’s what the Administration is trying to do; successfully prepare children for a life of government dependency.
MacDuff wrote:
Have you ever met one single liberal who wasn’t resentful of having to grow up and become an adult?
Get a PHD in government interference. Sit in a distant office all day. Create rules to meet alien government goals without ever visiting a farm. Go drink expensive liquor. Repeat.
darkwords wrote:
You’re like only 2 weeks late dude…
doriangrey wrote:
“The Peter Pan Party”
Not even the Europeans are that stupid and this says a lot.
MacDuff wrote:
The American work ethic is, and has been under attack for 50 years. There are now 3rd and 4th generation welfare recipients. The work ethic has been totally bred out of them and this is the intent of the Regime.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
I can just imagine farm unionization, with the newly-organized farmworkers saying “SEIU-eeeeeeeeeee!” to the pigs…
@ huckfunn:
They vote Democrat. That is all anyone expects out of them ever again…
Iron Fist wrote:
They’ve traded their liberty for handouts and have been rewarded with squalor. Serves ‘em right.
You control the food you control the people, even to a larger extent than medical care.
It is much easier to control food if you greatly reduce the number of producers and limit what food the peasants can make for themselves.
I was what they call today a latch-key kid. When I was old enough to start school, my mother went back to work. This was the late 50s. early 60s and there wasn’t much of that going on. When I came home from school, I washed dishes, cleaned the house, scrubbed the bathroom and whatever else was on the list. If I was hungry, I made myself something to eat. The whole experience made me feel rather special as the other kids had no idea how to do things like running a vacuum cleaner or making a bed. It also gave me a sense of accomplishment at a very early age.
Today, my parents would be thrown in jail and I would had been raised by the state.
@ huckfunn:
Not in my family the work ethic wasn’t bred. I started working to make extra money at 12, babysat, cleaned houses with a friend and had a job at a pizza joint at 15. I carried this over to my sons. They were working before the age of 16. The legal age they could work was raised to 16. At 16 they were expected to get a job. If they wanted a car or any of the other frills they had to work for it. I hope my sons carry this tradition over to their children.
What the government is doing is over-reaching to the extreme. Children should be able to work on farms. Not only are they gaining some knowledge and skills that they could never receive at school it is a firm foundation at cemeting the family and their core values.
Lily wrote:
And that is exactly why the Obama Administration is attacking it.
huckfunn wrote:
To which I quote one of those most important and prominent of the founding fathers.
@ huckfunn:
But I do agree with your main point. Not just with people on welfare.
My son had a friend who’s mother never made him work, ever. By the time he was 19 he finally tried to get a job, because of his work ethic he could never keep a job for more than two weeks at the most he was fired. I hired him to do some chores around my house. It was the same things over and over again. At first he didn’t understand WHY I was making him do the same thing over and over again. He threw a hissy fit one day and quit. But the next job he got he kept for 2 years. After that he became a full-blown acholohic. Because his mother didn’t throw down the gauntlet. Everything according to her was he was just going through a ‘phase’. In my opinion they were dangerous phases and should have been nipped in the bud.
doriangrey wrote:
Gawd, the English language can be an elegant instrument! Alas, the government schools are producing a massive amount of people who, even if they could read the words, would have no idea what they meant.
Perhaps if it was prefaced by “OMG!” it would get some attention.
Lily wrote:
What you describe is pretty much the mainstream American experience for many of us in our 40′s 50′s and older. Obama has never experienced any of that. He understands little of the American experience and what little he understands, he hates. This new farm proposal is part of his “fundamental transformation of America”.
@ doriangrey:
Is that Jefferson?
Lily wrote:
There are people who’s first experience with work comes at 22 or later. These are the ones oft referred to as “the best and the brightest”.
@ MacDuff:
That is up to the parents to teach their children critical thinking.
So they do understand such words. Not only are teachers failing our children but a great deal of parents are failing their children too.
@ MacDuff:
Some maybe. But from my experience…no a lot of them aren’t.
It all depends on the parents in my opinion.
huckfunn wrote:
It is a very dangerous one too. That the government KNOWS better than the parents is hogwash.
Lily wrote:
The other day, I listened to FDR’s Declaration of War before Congress and was gobsmacked by the vocabulary that he used. I spent 7 years hiring Flight Attendants for an airline and the lack of basic spelling, vocabulary and communication skills was appalling.
@ huckfunn:
Patrick Henry…it’s from the “give me Liberty or give me death” speech.
This is from the newsletter our business sends every week dated Apr 20
DOL’s Pending Rules on Farm Labor Practices
Through a lengthy, wide-ranging list of prohibitions, the Department of Labor wants to stop children from hazardous duties. That would mean, for example, no work around silos, no driving 4-wheelers, no construction work, no corralling livestock, and no work more than six feet off the ground. It would also mean, say proponents of the
changes, a downturn in farm-related injuries for children, which are four times higher than work in other fields. However, critics of the DOL are now pointing to a new study published by the USDA’s National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) showing a downturn in farm accidents without the DOL changes. Looking at injuries to
youth in 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2009, NASS found that “agriculture-related injuries to youth under 20 years of age on United States farms have decreased from 13.5 injuries per 1,000 farms in 2001 to 7.2 injuries per 1,000 farms in 2009. An injury was defined as any condition occurring on the farm operation resulting in at least four hours of restricted activity or requiring professional medical attention.”
DOL responded that it received some 10,000 comments on the proposed rules. Currently in the process of “carefully” reviewing those comments, DOL has not set a deadline for drafting or publishing a final rule. When the new rules were first proposed last September, DOL said children of farmers would be exempt. However, confusion
remains about what exactly constitutes its parental exemption.
DOL stated that the proposed rule would “increase protections for children 15 years old and younger who are employed to work on a farm that isn’t owned or operated by a parent or person standing in the place of a parent” and provided the following bullet-points:
Hired farm workers 15 years old or younger could work on farms and would only be prohibited from doing work that has been determined to be particularly hazardous;
Hired farm workers 15 years old or younger may operate tractors if they are bona-fide student learners, and if the tractor is equipped with seatbelts and rollover protection structures; Hired workers under 18 years old could not work off a farm in silos, grain storage bins or manure pits, which present numerous hazards in many forms. Children 15 and younger could not do this work on or off a farm;
DOL said the proposed rules would not:
Eliminate 4-H, FFA or other agricultural education programs;
Prohibit children from doing their chores or from helping a neighbor in need, for example by rounding up livestock that have escaped;
Prohibit children from using wheelbarrows, flashlights or screwdrivers; Eliminate the statutory parental exemption, which Congress established in 1966. Under the exemption,
parents or persons standing in the place of a parent may employ their children to do any hazardous work on a farm that they own or operate. They are not required to comply with federal child labor regulations that prohibit children from performing hazardous work on a farm the parents own or operate; and By statute, children 16 years of age and older may be employed on any farm to perform any job. The
proposed rule would not change this. Most work on a farm is not hazardous, and kids as young as 12 may be employed to do it.
@ MacDuff:
Well my spelling can be off at times/I blame it on me hitting the submit button too quick!!! As soon as I hit it I see the errors and by then it is way too late.
Although at work I would make sure my spelling would be on par.
@ The Osprey:
Thanks.
The Osprey wrote:
No, it’s not. IIRC, it’s Sam Adams.
@ The Osprey:
@ Mike C.:
Mike’s right. I googled the first sentence and about 10 sites all tell me it’s Sam Adams.
Mike C. wrote:
It is Sam Adams.
Damn, I’m suddenly thirsty…….
@ Mike C.:
Yup…
“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” -- Speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776
Lily wrote:
I mean I received emails from prospective employees using words and phrases like 4U, Thanx, RU, etc. Many didn’t understand the difference between texting and actual writing. This is not to say there aren’t some bright going people out there. There are. It’s just that the base of knowledge one would take for granted…..shouldn’t be taken for granted any longer.
It’s the chains thing that trips folks up on that one, as Henry made use of such imagry in his speech at St. John’s Church in Richmond.
huckfunn wrote:
Nope, that would be the man who brewed all the beer that was used to pay Washington’s troops. Samuel Adams, older brother to President John Adams and uncle to President John Quincy Adams.
@ MacDuff:
That really is inexcusable to be writing like that. That is from all the texting they do now days.
@ Lily:
Which I need to add, I am very poor at doing. By the time texting came about my sons were grown up, so need in texting.
@ Lily:
PIMF *no need*
@ Lily:
I have text and data disabled on my cellphone service. If I want to surf the Internet, I use a computer. If I want to send a written message, I use e-mail, or (shudder) a letter in the snail mail.
Sometimes I wonder about all the lewd propositions texted to me by Brazilian supermodels that I never got to see, but I get over it.
@ Alberta Oil Peon:
/no Brazillian supermodels fawning all over you. But I understand sometimes you just got to take one for the team!
@ Lily:
Full disclosure here. I do have mine on…no one texts me…but I do get pic’s of my grandbaby girl…so that is the only reason I leave it on.
/AOP…so far I have NO supermodel guys text me.
Or any good looking guys for that matter. Oh well.
Eventually, this lawless administration will reach critical mass, and this is just what we know.
OBAMA’S FALLON APPEARANCE VIOLATED CAMPAIGN LAW
What don’t we know? The media may be in Obama’s pocket now, but there are fortunes to be made in destroying him and they’re hurting for cash.
@ Lily:
My stepson is extremely smart. At age 3 1/2 he was reading the newspaper (and comprehending). In fourth grade his reading/vocabulary was at college sophomore level. When texting starting being the “in” thing, I had a talk with him about it and to not get into the habit of doing the short cuts and to especially not start doing it in e-mails. I told him that it is very unprofessional and any employer would not look favorably on it.
My stepson is still extremely smart -- lol. None of us text in anything but “longhand”.
@ doriangrey:
Uh, I don’t think John Adams and Samuel Adams were brothers.
Ah -- they were second cousins.
Alberta Oil Peon wrote:
y dont u txt? r u a freek? omg! wtf?
@ MacDuff:
Obama Fallonated on live TV? How gross!
Dolphin wrote:
Thereby confirming what I have said in the past about the quality of today’s “college education.”
Not buzz here…but a try..
Where have all our posters gone?
Long time pasting
Where have all our posters gone?
Working hard everyone
Wise ones talking
When will they talk to us
Teaching us everyone
Where have all the posters gone?
We need them everyone
Where have all our posters gone?
Speaking their opinions everyone
Where have all the talkers gone?
Missing them everyone
@ Lily:
*lurking*
@ Mike C.:
You know I had this nagging feeling it was the brewer.
MacDuff wrote:
Ohhhh,oh, oh ooooo!
Not only that it violated the senses tool.
/jumped the shark on that one he did!
Lily wrote:
Yeah, there are some MIAs, aren’t there?
@ NoThreat2U:
I know it must have hurt buzz to read that {nt2u}!
Sorry buzz!
@ MacDuff:
Yep! We need them back!
Lily wrote:
I don’t think he has any tricks left, besides “jumping the shark”……
@ MacDuff:
You should the whole thing! Nothing but a campagin commerical!
Here is the long version…disgusting.
@ Dolphin:
If I do text it is in long hand…but I rarely text.
@ Lily:
Me too. I actually hate it. I am a keyboardist and type 100+ words/min. It is too slow!
@ Lily:
I have tried texting both of my kids. They usually end up calling me and asking “What the hell were you trying to say???” lol
@ NoThreat2U:
No kidding!!! Those are very little buttons!!! Not to mention it takes me longer to text my message than to just call and say what I need to say!
@ Dolphin:
Any news on your missing friend. I read that this morning.
MacDuff wrote:
I hope he jumps bigger and bigger sharks. Is this anyway a president is suppose to behave??? Good heavens.
@ Lily:
Nothing new. Just a really sad situation. He and his wife were truly sole mates.
http://www.click2houston.com/news/Family-searches-for-missing-husband-father/-/1735978/11810976/-/264742/-/index.html
@ Lily:
I couldn’t agree more. Stupid tiny little buttons!
@ Dolphin:
I hope your friend is found safe.
Oh that is terrible
@ NoThreat2U:
Thank you.
I don’t hold out much hope. We have heard stuff that is not being reported. His truck is also missing, so that is not a good sign either.
@ Dolphin:
Oh my. Until you know something one way or another, there is ALWAYS hope.
@ Dolphin:
Oh my goodness!!! That is just horrible and still no news on what happened. Prayers sent to the family. Horrible.
@ Dolphin:
Will say a prayer.
On topic, in our county everyone is really up in arms over what the DOL is trying to do. We basically lived off child labor on our ranch, including our own kids. It was very character building for me, I started working ten hour days when I was eleven, and for my sons. Ranch work was really the only job available in our small town and many of the kids who worked used the money for school clothes and other necessities. Now almost everything we did as kids would be outlawed and most ranchers will ignore the rules and become outlaws. The only other alternative is illegal aliens which many ranchers also use, again putting them at odds with the law. It’s that or go out of business.
@ Dolphin:
Usually there is a video rolling at ATM’s, have they been able to pull up the footage on that to see who withdrew the money?
/a man missing for a $100 and a truck. Dear Lord.
@ Rancher:
It is a disgrace what the government is trying to do.
It’s ironic that the Left has spent so many decades inveighing against “agribusiness” and supposedly in favor of “family farms”—when the proposed regulations would in effect mandate the destruction of family farms and the expansion of agribusiness.
More farm news: Dem Senator Says Save the US Postal Service with Wind Farms, Battery-Powered Delivery Trucks
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Romney’s merely the presumptive nominee, not the actual nominee.
Obama is running around making campaign and fundraising stops on the taxpayer’s dime and claiming he’s “not campaigning.”
So we have the non-nominee campaigning against the non-campaigning Campaigner-in-Chief.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
Once the family farm is gone they can hammer agriculture like every other business; drug companies, oil, coal, etc. Don’t forget meat production, especially cattle farts, causes
global warmingclimate change. Food prices are already rising, it will only get worse. This will be extremely destabilizing globally, the Arab spring grew out of food riots. Learn how to eat poor.obama’s plan. Illegal alien workers doing the farm jobs that the government won’t allow farm families to do.
@ buzzsawmonkey:
A quagmire indeed. But nothing will be done with obama using the taxpayers money on his campaign. Although he has enough money to support his campaign. Apparently he is above the law and by the way he has broken some laws and have had nothing done to him, I would say he has all the reason to think he is above the law.
Rancher wrote:
I’ve been broke most of my life; I know how to “eat poor,” and I do all right, thank you.
I’d point out for those who have a bit of yard that it is easy to salvage discarded windows in places like NYC, and that with those windows it is easy to build cucumber frames, i.e., small greenhouses which will enable one to grow vegetables year-round. The trick is not finding the materials, but finding the place to put the mini-greenhouse.
Getting back to the government, massive unionized collective farms—i.e., government-run agribusiness—appears to be the objective, which puts Obama in the Stalin category.
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Which also puts him in the famine category too. Oh my.
buzzsawmonkey wrote:
OT, more or less. Spain presents tough austerity
http://www.euronews.com/2012/04/24/spain-presents-toughest-austerity-budget-since-franco-era/
@ huckfunn:
@ Rancher:
I meant to comment on how well that worked. I remember a journalist asking some Soviet farm workers how come they weren’t working. Their reply was “We get paid the same if we don’t work than we do when we work.”
@ buzzsawmonkey:
Agribusiness plus Stalin = Corporate fascism?
They are proud of it! And Stalin would be too…
Mooch On Husband Forcing Catholic Church To Violate Its Religious Beliefs: “We Made History”…
http://weaselzippers.us/2012/04/25/mooch-on-husband-forcing-catholic-church-to-violate-its-religious-beliefs-we-made-history/
@ Rancher:
Not to mention everyone would have to stand in line for food.
@ huckfunn:
Wind farms? Plant Obama, and you will have one Hell of a crop of wind.
The site seems to be taking a long time to refresh. Anyone else having that problem or is it just me? I’m running Chrome.
Alberta Oil Peon wrote:
An ill wind for sure.
@ Guggi:
CNG is already viable as a vehicle fuel. Instead of dicking around with LNG, we should simply go for the gusto with CNG. Instead of making the fuel tank a permanent part of the vehicle, as it is now, why not simply have a standardized socket built into each vehicle, built to accept one of a range of cylinder sizes, complete with a quick-connect gas fitting.
Pull into a fuel station, and whether you drive a mini-car or an 18 wheeler, an electric forklift comes out, removes your present cylinder, weighs it, and credits you for the unused fuel contained therein. Then it pops in a new cylinder, charges you credit card, and you are on the road again, with scarcely enough time to take a leak.
So what if you have to fuel up twice as often, if the process is quick and easy? And cheap.
@ huckfunn:
I know! I know! (jumps up and down, waving arms in air)
There’s something screwy with generalwebapps.com. Page wasn’t loading at all for me until I blocked it using NoScript.
Rancher wrote:
Someone here, maybe CW, had a common Soviet worker saying: “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us”.
Site still creeping along.
huckfunn wrote:
Me too
@ Guggi:
I’m not running Chrome and to refresh it just doesn’t, the spinning wheel of madness and white space. I have to log out and come back in to even see any comments.
@ Lily:
I’m not having any problems at all. But my NoScript had already blocked generalwebaps and sitemeter. No idea if that helps, though.
Running Firefox Beta 12.0
Blog is slogging for me too….using Chrome here.