Squeezing the Family Farm

Revolutionaries in the Obama Administration want to get their hands on the American agricultural system

Timothy Birdnow
Sunday, April 29, 2012

CFP:

Recently the Obama Administration floated (and subsequently scrapped) a proposal to severely limit the types of labor that farm children could be asked to perform by their parents. These restrictions unleashed a flurry of criticisms from farm groups and conservatives, who complained that farm chores were a traditional part of American agriculture and that this imposed burden on the family farmer was unfair.


A few critics saw dark ulterior motives; an attempt to strengthen the illegal-alien lobby for political gain. While this criticism may be valid, it does not strike to the heart of darkness in this proposal, does not touch on the overarching purpose that was to be served by these restrictions; strengthening a weakening illegal immigrant community was merely a bonus here. I believe the real reason is far more sinister.

Opposition to the Labor Department regulations had this complaint, according to The Hill:

“The proposal drew heavy criticism from rural-state lawmakers and agricultural leaders, who cast the rule as government overreach that would erode the traditional American family.”

But that was the whole point of this! I direct your attention to the following;

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty!”

The Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2.

And while Americans farmers may not live like millionaires, they generally own their own land or rent until they can acquire their family property, and that property is a source of vast wealth. To the Marxist an American farmer is the ultimate Bourgoisie, exploiting his children for his personal avaricious benefits.

But there’s more to it!

Marx had this to say about property ownership:

“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.”

And who is better positioned to exploit than the family farmer? Large tracts of land privately owned for the benefit of a single family, a family that employes/exploits poor migrant workers.

At the end of the Russian Civil War V.I. Lenin was forced to allow small private agricultural holdings as part of his New Economic Policy. He did so because state-run farms were proving inadequate to produce enough food for the fledgling Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin reversed course, collectivizing the privately-owned farms, and in fact removed all the grain from Ukraine, purposely causing a famine because the Kulaks (small farmers) were politically opposed to him.

But the point is, Lenin himself saw a retreat from immediate imposition of socialist agricultural policy as necessary, but he set the stage for government to do so in the future.

Were this the first foray by the Obama Administration into undermining the integrity of the agricultural community, one could perhaps excuse this as overzealous efforts by do-gooders. But it fits a pattern.

Consider the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 which, among other things, changed the presumption of voluntary cooperation with Federal guidelines and asserted the right to regulate. As Tim Carney pointed out in the Examiner, this bill would strangle the family farm.

Consider Obamacare and the presumption that citizens do not own ther own bodies - and Michelle Obama’s subsequent use of Federal power to impose regulations on how American eat. Consider the battle over raw (unpasteurized) milk, in which the Obama Administration argued in court that Americans have no right to decide their own diets, or to promote their own good health. In point of fact, the Administration has declared milk to be a form of oil, and has forced dairy farmers to keep toxic waste spill equipment on hand in they should accidentally knock over a milk jug.

The Administration also created a rural council designed to set agricultural policy i.e. force permanent changes on the family farm. That council - in conformity with U.N. Agenda 21 - includes the CIA, DHS, and other agencies that have nothing to do with agriculture or rural life.


All of this imposes huge extra costs to modest profit businesses, businesses that are heavily dependent on loans and debt. Shrink the profit margin by too large a degree and the family farmer is forced into receivership.

In point of fact, the Communist Manifesto had the following plank as a necessary step in the formation of a Marxist state:

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country

It is interesting to note that in the Great Flood of 2011 the U.S. Army Corpse of Engineers failed to open floodgates until the water built up to an unmanageable size, then submerged large tracts of farmland - farmland that was then taken by FEMA and which George Soros scooped up for pennies on the dollar. http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/38392

And of course the Ethanol mandate has done a fine job of blurring agricultural and industrial lines.

There is the endgame; to promote the centralization of farmland into a few mega-corporations or into direct government ownership in accordance with plank 9 of the Manifesto. The Federal government owns30% of all American lands. it should be pointed out. This fits with plank 1 of the Manifesto;

1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.

In the end, it comes down to advancing an agenda designed to ultimately weaken farm families and erode their ability to remain on the land. The production of food is perhaps the most vital of all economic activities in any nation, and America has traditionally been the breadbasket of the world because of her small family farm system. The key to fundamentally transforming America is to transform her agricultural system into a more collectivist model. America will lose considerable political power in the process, helping to restore a multi-polar world as American hegemony retreats, and it increases the power of the central government as the populace becomes increasingly dependent on corporate farms that are firmly under the thumb of government bureacracy. The Obama Administration knows Rome was not built in a day, but restricting the rights of parents to assign farm chores to their children is step in the right direction.

If the statement “Any society is only three square meals away from revolution” is true, should we be surprised that the revolutionaries in the Obama Administration want to get their hands on the American agricultural system? This will come back as long as these people are in power.