Ben & Jerry's Called for Open Borders While Exploiting Migrant Children

Daniel GreenfieldFebruary 28, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

No company has been as vocal about fighting for migrants and exploiting them.

“We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: human beings can’t be illegal,” the ice cream maker declared. Its advocacy for illegal migrants even led to a clash with the British government which told it to “stick to ice cream”. In the United States, the leftist brand debuted a new flavor ‘Pecan Resist’, and bragged that it would “resist the Trump administration’s regressive and discriminatory policies” to build a future for “refugees and immigrants”.

The ugly truth behind the virtue signaling was that Ben & Jerry’s depended on migrant labor to make its overpriced ice cream. A year before Trump took office, the progressive company faced protests by migrant workers who spoke of having to live in barns without heat during the Vermont winter while milking cows at midnight and being injured by exploding glass milk bottles.

Ben & Jerry’s claimed that it supported open borders because of the company’s “social mission” and “values”. Those values were measured in the dollar and cents bottom line. The milk that went into the company’s ice cream depended on the cheap labor of those same migrants. Open borders wasn’t an abstraction, it was a steady source of labor to be churned into ice cream.

When the Biden administration rammed open the southern borders, flooding the country with millions of migrants, adult migrant workers were quickly supplemented by children.

A New York Times investigation found that Ben & Jerry’s was among the corporate brands benefiting from child labor. Of the various companies, Ben & Jerry’s was the most shameless about the use of child labor with Cheryl Pinto, its head of “values-led sourcing”, stating that “if migrant children needed to work full time, it was preferable for them to have jobs at a well-monitored workplace.” It’s an argument that sounds straight out of Oliver Twist.

Pinto, a former risk manager for its Unilever parent company, had been dubbed “Ben & Jerry’s sorceress” who focused on positive social impact. The sorcery turned out to be of the Hansel & Gretel variety with children being lured to the ovens of an ice cream gingerbread house.

Behind all the buzzwords about “equity” and “climate justice” are the children working so that Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield can get even richer while distracting us with virtue signaling.

Ben & Jerry’s has a lot of experience with “well-monitored workplaces” for child labor. The company, which has boasted of its support for Black Lives Matter, had been previously accused of benefiting from the slave labor of 8-year-olds on cocoa plantations in Africa, vanilla plantations in Madagascar, and palm oil on Indonesian plantations.

The open borders that Ben & Jerry’s had advocated for brought child labor to America.

In 2021, a Ben & Jerry’s franchise owner in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was caught employing 12-year-olds, but the latest revelations about the company are a good deal worse.

The New York Times story describes a 14-year-old migrant boy who had his hand crushed in an industrial milking machine on a dairy farm. While the paper does not name the company, Ben & Jerry’s sources milk from farms in Middlebury VT where the accident took place.

Ben & Jerry’s and Pinto had previously made headlines for reaching an agreement with Milk With Dignity, a migrant workers group, at which one worker boasted that “I never had a day off before the program. But now I have two days off per month.” Ben & Jerry’s claimed that its partnership with Milk With Dignity means that the farms it uses no longer exploit anybody.

“Respect for human rights is one of our core values,” Pinto claimed.

The Milk With Dignity code goes so far as to bar “the threat or use of sexual or physical assault” against workers, which is pretty noble of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. Nothing says respect for human rights like agreeing not to sexually assault workers.

But the code only bars “systemic unlawful child labor”. That’s quite a few loopholes in 4 words. The full wording in the code defines “the use of systemic unlawful child labor, as defined by applicable law in the jurisdiction in which the farm is located.” That’s as good as an admission. Child labor can be systemic or it can be unlawful, but it can’t be both systemic and unlawful.

Behind the meaningless organic labels and the images of bucolic cows and photogenic hipster farmers marketed by progressive upselling brands like Ben & Jerry’s is a dairy industry that, despite its location across the country, looks a lot like California’s illegal alien farms.

A local paper described “the coyotes who smuggle migrants across the border, the people who run safe houses, the van drivers who make regular interstate and cross-country runs, and the farmers are part of a complex, underground system powered by cell phones and money.”

“Sex traffickers are a small part of that network. Most of the dairy workers are young men stuck on rural farms with no transportation. Enter the pimps who, exploiting the loneliness and isolation of the workers, drive women to remote farms. A prostitution ring in Vermont came to light in 2011, when police arrested two men who brought women to have sex with workers for $60 a trick.”

“They just bring girls, Mexicans and Colombians, mostly Latinas,” Carlos, who came to the country as an “unaccompanied minor”, told a journalist.

That’s the grim reality behind all the hipster brands and leftist politics, the cutesy celebrity names, the photos of woke icons like Stephen Colbert and Ava DuVernay, are Mexican teens living in unheated barns and working to milk cows twice a day in between visits to trafficked girls. It’s little wonder that Ben & Jerry’s keeps searching for new radical causes to embrace.

In 2021, Ben & Jerry’s announced that it was joining a boycott of Israel because selling ice cream in the Jewish State was “inconsistent with our values”. The move came at the behest of Anuradha Mittal, the Ben and Jerry’s social justice board chairwoman, who had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and whose offices were decorated with a “Support the Intifada” poster.

Selling ice cream in Israel was inconsistent with Ben & Jerry’s values, child labor wasn’t.

Ben & Jerry’s support for BDS and for other radical leftist causes like BLM came as it was trying to divert attention from the products and processes at the heart of its business. Its social justice logorrhea has led the company in just the last month to endorse critical race theory as a “long-overdue correction to the whitewashed history taught in most American schools”, to claim that brain injuries are worse for black people and to endorse slavery reparations. Much like hating Israel, none of this has anything to do with ice cream. And that’s the whole point.

Like a criminal in police custody, Ben & Jerry’s would like to talk about anything and everything in the world except its own crimes. Smearing Israel, America, Jews, white people and anyone else is a convenient distraction from the fact that the social justice ice cream empire is built on child labor and on the open borders it champions and whose exploitation it benefits from.

Ben & Jerry’s talks nonstop about its values. What are its actual values beyond its hashtags about BLM, open borders, Israel, sexism, transphobia and climate justice? As Groucho Marx quipped, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

The only values of the ice cream, that is uniquely flat and tasteless in all its diversity of overpriced social justice flavors, are what it does, not what it claims to believe. One of those revealing moments came some years ago when migrant workers protested in a march to the Ben & Jerry’s factory. A few of the illegal aliens were arrested.

“We are concerned that hard-working, productive members of our community, who contribute to the success of dairy farms in Vermont, would face criminalization,” Ben & Jerry’s said, in a statement that had a very different tone than its usual bellicose social justice tweets. ​“We need policy change that serves Vermont’s dairy workers, farmers, and industry as a whole.”

That was the sound of Ben & Jerry’s talking about the intersectionality of its support for open borders and its business model that depended on illegal aliens. Another came when its values sourcing boss responded to the New York Times story by suggesting that, “If migrant children needed to work full time, it was preferable for them to have jobs at a well-monitored workplace.”

Those are Ben & Jerry’s real values. They’re not as marketable, but unlike the others, they’re true. Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Greens promote child slave labor and ecological destruction

Why don’t African black lives and ecological values matter? or impacts in and beyond Virginia? 

Paul Driessen 

The US Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 to reverse a lower court ruling that had invalidated a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will bring West Virginia natural gas to Virginia and North Carolina, for home heating, factory power, electricity generation and manufacturing petrochemical feedstocks. 

Environmentalists had claimed the US Forest Service had no authority to issue the permit, because a 0.1-mile (530-foot) segment would cross 600 feet below the 2,200-mile-long Appalachian Trail, which is administered by the National Park Service. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion scuttled that assertion. 

Pipeline project developers Dominion Resources and Duke Energy should receive the USFS and other permits relatively soon – and have the pipeline in operation by early 2022 – unless a Biden administration takes over in 2021 (with AOC as woke climate and energy advisor to Biden and Democrats) and imposes Green New Deal bans on drilling, fracking, pipelines, and eventually any use of natural gas, oil and coal. 

Meanwhile, environmentalist groups plan more lawsuits. They insist the pipeline would put rivers and streams at risk of increased sedimentation, scar pristine landscapes, and harm sensitive species.

These plans and assertions underscore how inflexible they have become in opposing any US fossil fuel use. How incapable of recognizing or rationally discussing the far greater human and ecological impacts from energy systems they favor. How reliant on blatant double standards and mob rule, instead of on rational, cohesive, persuasive discussion. 

Barely a few years ago, the Sierra Club and allied groups gladly took $187 million and more from Michael Bloomberg, natural gas producers and other financiers to wage their War on Coal. Having closed down most US coal mines and power plants, they then turned gas from a “climate friendly bridge fuel” to evil incarnate. Today they to end fossil fuel use nationwide. Via delusion, incantation and cancellation of debate, they have convinced themselves that wind, solar, battery and biofuel “alternatives” are somehow “clean, green, renewable and sustainable.” Reality says otherwise.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will be underground, mostly invisible beneath a grassy right-of-way. Any sedimentation will occur during short term construction operations, when some wildlife will be scared off or displaced for a spell. Any threat to sensitive species, even in the event of a leak, will be minimal. 

In stark contrast, their preferred energy systems will have massive, permanent impacts – in Virginia and far beyond its borders. Virginia solar panels will blanket more than eight times the land area of Washington, DC. Hundreds of 850-foot-tall bird-killing wind turbines will create an enormous obstacle course for whales, ships and planes off the Virginia Beach coast. Many thousands of 1,200-pound batteries will provide backup power to replace coal and solar for a sunless, windless day or two. 

Hundreds of miles of new transmission lines will soar into the sky and snake across the countryside. Just bringing wind-based electricity from West Virginia to Blacksburg, Roanoke and Lynchburg, Virginia – and solar energy from all those Virginia panels to Staunton and Harrisonburg – will require several new transmission lines across the Appalachian Trail. Not 600 feet below it; right across it.

But somehow, we and our courts are supposed to believe, all these enormous industrial facilities – and the blasting, tree clearing, machinery, noise and other impacts associated with building and maintaining them – will cause no stream sedimentation, landscape scarring or harm to sensitive species. 

In reality, the radical greens, utility companies and Democrats promoting these projects under the Virginia “Clean” Economy Act will simply demand that courts ignore the arguments they raised and environmental laws they cited when they raged against coal and gas power plants and the pipelines and transmission lines associated with them. They’ll demand that citizen groups opposed to these monstrous wind, solar and battery complexes be thrown out of court. They’ll want the same double standards applied nationally. 

Eliminating fossil fuels would mean America would have to replace 100% of its gasoline and all its oil and natural gas feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers – and plastics for cell phones, computers, car bodies, packaging, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. That would require turning some 700 million acres of food crop and habitat land (four times the land area of Texas) into biofuel corn, sugarcane and canola plantations for ethanol and biodiesel. 

More extreme versions of the Green New Deal would eliminate coal, gas and nuclear electricity and backup power, gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and internal combustion vehicles. We’d replace it all with wind or solar – and use wind or solar on good days to generate enough extra electricity to charge batteries for seven windless, sunless days. That’s 8.5 billion megawatts – twice what we used in 2018!

We’d need some 75 billion solar panels ... or 4.2 million 1.8-MW onshore wind turbines ... or 320,000 10-MW offshore wind turbines ... and some 3.5 billion 100-kWh backup batteries. The concrete, steel, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, aluminum, cobalt, plastic and other materials to build them would require vastly more mining and manufacturing than the world has ever seen – nearly all of it with fossil fuels. 

Environmentalists oppose almost all mining anywhere in the United States, and even by US companies operating overseas under rigorous Western rules. That means essential metals and minerals get mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control, under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mining and industrial areas have become vast toxic wastelands. 

For cobalt alone, over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away alongside their parents in mines, for a dollar a day, risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. That’s today – for today’s battery, solar panel and wind turbine needs. Imagine how many would be needed to serve the Green New Deal. 400,000 perhaps? 4,000,000? 

China alone will soon have 200 times more coal-fired generation than Virginia will be shutting down. During 2020, says consulting company Wood Mackenzie, Europe and the United States will close down 22,000 megawatts of coal-fired power capacity – even as Asia opens 49,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants, on top of those it already has and in addition to its growing fleet of gas-fired units. 

China is building or financing numerous coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India already has hundreds of coal-fired units and is building or planning 400 more. China and India are also building or planning hundreds of new airports, and putting millions of new cars and trucks on their roads. That (plus the GND mining, processing and manufacturing) means, even if Virginia or the entire USA eliminated all fossil fuel use tomorrow – it wouldn’t make an iota of difference for global carbon dioxide levels. 

These environmental and human rights travesties can happen only under a system of rampant double standards: the same kinds that excoriate and ban religious services and funerals, anti-lockdown protests and Trump rallies – while permitting, excusing and praising Black Lives Matter marches that have too often turned into anti-police mobs, riots, looting, arson, beatings, and murders of people like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood, whose also precious black lives certainly haven’t mattered much to this crowd. 

They also require that the woke Campus Cancel Culture spread its intolerant, authoritarian rule to our cities, media, social media, and even legislative bodies and courts – to instill constant anger and anarchy, and silence, defame and punish anyone who dares to offer nuanced or contrarian viewpoints. Every victory brings new demands, with no accountability for the mayhem and destruction they inflict. 

Why should rural, poor, minority and working class families and communities have to accept the ecological, health and economic damages inflicted in pursuit of this pseudo-renewable energy utopia? Why should Africans, Asians and Latin Americans have to accept slave status to advance this agenda? 

The situation is coming to a head. Let’s hope the now-silent majority can restore law, order, civil debate, thoughtful reflection on our complex history, and rational resolution of these thorny problems. 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.

Child Labor, Economic Development, and the Folly of Good Intentions

October 8, 2017 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

One of my great frustrations (and there are many) is that the conventional wisdom about economic history oftentimes is wrong. It is very common for students to learn things that simply are not true.

• The history books usually promote the myth that capitalism caused the Great Depression and that FDR’s policies saved the economy.
• The history books usually promote the myth that antitrust laws were needed to protect consumers from rapacious “robber barons.”
• The history books usually promote the myth that government intervention was necessary to stop sweatshops from exploiting workers.

Let’s add to that list by looking at the issue of child labor. The conventional wisdom is that child labor was a regular feature of an oppressive capitalist system and that children were eventually saved from abuse thanks to government intervention.

Hardly. Child labor was – and still is, in some places – a way for desperately poor people to stay alive and perhaps create a stepping stone for a better future. And capitalism-enabled prosperity is the best way to end the unfortunate practice.
I previously cited some World Bank research, in a postscript to a column on bureaucracy, showing that restrictions on child labor had negative long-run effects on income for poor people.
Let’s augment that research. Here are some passages from a very sobering study about the unintended consequences of restricting child labor (h/t: Dev Patel via Tyler Cowen).

While bans against child labor are a common policy tool, there is very little empirical evidence validating their effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the consequences of India’s landmark legislation against child labor, the Child Labor (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986. Using data from employment surveys conducted before and after the ban, and using age restrictions that determined who the ban applied to, we show that child wages decrease and child labor increases after the ban.

Some basic economic analysis shows why this happens.

…families use child labor to reach subsistence constraints and where child wages decrease in response to bans, leading poor families to utilize more child labor.

And it’s worth noting that there are all sorts of harmful secondary effects.

The increase in child labor comes at the expense of reduced school enrollment. We also examine the effects of the ban at the household level. Using linked consumption and expenditure data, we find that along various margins of household expenditure, consumption, calorie intake and asset holdings, households are worse off after the ban.

The bottom line on this issue is that some children are born to very poor families in very poor nations. In those tragic situations, child labor is a matter of survival rather than a lifestyle choice.
I don’t think that the businesses employing children are noble. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them mistreat kids. And even the nice ones probably would seem horrifying to those of us lucky enough to live in rich western nations.

But I also don’t believe in putting good intentions above real-world results. Businesses that employ child labor are offering a better (or, to be more accurate, offering a less-worse) opportunity for people stuck in horrid poverty. Capitalism is the only effective escape from economic misery.
Let’s close with some libertarian satire. It’s focused more on sweatshops, but it also applies to child labor (and “neoliberal” refers to “classical liberal” rather than modern leftism).

 

For what it’s worth, child labor was ubiquitous in the western world prior to the explosive growth that was unleashed by free markets and limited government.

If we want poor children in poor families from poor nations to have a better life, we should urge the same policies in the developing world. Assuming we prefer good results over good intentions, of course.

India Sells It's Daughters! Parts 1 and 2

Daughters for Sale: India's Child Slavery Scourge, Part 1

By Anne Backhaus

 Millions of Indian children work as slaves in factories, brothels or in the homes of families. Out of poverty and desperation, parents sell their daughters, and human traffickers wait at train stations for runaways and scour for orphans in monsoon-ravaged villages.

On the day that Durga Mala was rescued, she lay crying on the stone floor, where she was attempting to cool her back. She was 11 years old and her skin was covered with blisters, from her shoulder blades to her buttocks. A few days earlier, her owners had poured hot oil over her because they thought she was working too slowly.

Suddenly Durga heard screams and huddled on the floor. Acting on a tip, police stormed the apartment in the heart of Bangalore. When they broke the door down, Durga crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes. She was only wearing a pair of panties -- that's all the clothing that her owners had allowed her to have. Durga says: "I was ashamed." …......To Read More....

Daughters for Sale: India's Child Slavery Scourge, Part 2

By Anne Backhaus

Krishna lights a cigarette and explains that the work has become difficult because there are too many competitors. Most of them don't do their job as well as he does, he claims. "I know exactly which child matches which employer," Krishna says with pride. "They come here and want work and I find them the right employment," he boasts.

A number of passersby nod to Krishna. He returns the gesture with a barely noticeable movement of the head. "I'm a good man," says Krishna, adding: "People like me." He has been in the business for five years and he immediately notices if a child is strong enough, Krishna claims. The boys are brought to hotels and repair shops, he says, and most of the girls go to tailors or to a colleague who caters to private buyers. Krishna wears a gold watch…… To Read More….

My Take - There are two things that mold the structure of every society. Its religions and its politics!  In the case of India they have been intertwined for so long it is difficult to separate them in the cultural structure of Indian society.  India chose badly in both cases.  Socialism has no moral foundation and only Judiac/Christian principles have ever given the world any solid moral structure. 

Steve Milloy: His Agenda 21 Picks

By Rich Kozlovich

These are Steve’s picks for the last couple of weeks. Steve posts them by date; I have waited to post them to see how some things play out in order to organize them by topic. This gives a better picture of what actually happens; as in the issue regarding the state of Arizona and Agenda 21. After the first two links you will be taken directly to Junkscience.com which will have further links if you wish to follow them.

I would like to point out that a few years ago everyone was laughing at the idea that this is a worldwide socialist conspiracy. After all….we know there is no such thing as a conspiracy...right?

However, if the groups promoting all of this are socialistic in nature, including the environmental movement….actually especially the environmental movement; if the end result of imposing all of these regulations and policies will be overseen by the U.N. (clearly a socialist organ) and this will impose socialistic central planning worldwide; then why is it irrational to assume this is anything but a conspiracy to impose socialism worldwide? Apparently there are a great number of officials that believe this is what is actually happening.

As you read these articles that try to claim that there is nothing sinister about Agenda 21; that it is all some conspiracy nuts imagination; you may wish to ask yourself; is humanity being Keyser Sözed into believing no villain actually exists?”

Rep. Dennis Hedke, R-Wichita... noted that most U.S. citizens are unaware of the agenda or the implications of what he called a, “Massive attempt to restructure human activity on the planet.” “There is no other way to put it — this is the most aggressive attack on individual liberty and the foundations of our country we have ever seen.”

Agenda 21: What is it? What are its Goals? What would be the consequences?

Agenda 21 Conspiracy Theory or Threat
The battle over Agenda 21 is raging across the nation. City and County Councils have become war zones as citizens question the origins of development plans and planners deny any international connections to the UN’s Agenda 21. What is the truth? Since I helped start this war, I believe it is up to me to help with the answers. The standard points made by those who deny any Agenda 21 connection is that:

 Local planning is a local idea.
 Agenda 21 is a non-binding resolution not a treaty, carries no legal authority from which any nation is bound to act. It has no teeth.
 The UN has no enforcement capability.
 There are no “Blue-Helmeted” UN troops at City Hall.
 Planners are simply honest professionals trying to do their job, and all these protests are wasting their valuable time.
 The main concern of Agenda 21 is that man is fouling the environment and using up resources for future generations and we just need a sensible plan to preserve and protect the earth. What is so bad about that?
 There is no hidden agenda.
 “I’ve read Agenda 21 and I can find no threatening language that says it is a global plot. What are you so afraid of?”
 And of course, the most often heard response – “Agenda 21, what’s that?”
 And after they have proudly stated these well thought out points, they arrogantly throw down the gauntlet and challenge us to “answer these facts.”

Well, first I have a few questions of my own that I would love to have answered.....

Agenda 21 Links.
Agenda 21 and the impact on personal property rights and land rights content, This page is updated often, last update was November 19, 2011. The most recent updates are first, but the foundational video series are below. (under the Taking Liberty Video Documentary.) We have had several hundred thousand visitors to this page due to its in-depth resources on Agenda 21 and property rights. You can also search our database of over 15,000 content news and commentary articles for more information. Use the search box in the upper right corner above the donation button.

Hood Richardson: Property rights…who needs them?
Government regulatory agencies, environmentalists, liberal politicians, courts and proponents of the “common good” have worked hard during the past 30 years to make property rights less important if not eliminate them all together where they could.

Karel Beckman: “Replace emission trading scheme with a carbon tax”
If the European Commission wants to stimulate “green growth”, as its official policy states, then the Emission Trading System (ETS) is the wrong instrument.

Michael McGuire: Indonesia, UK, Liberia in charge of UN’s Agenda 21
The leaders of Indonesia, the United Kingdom and Liberia will lead the effort in planning the implementation of the United Nations’ Agenda 21, the UN announced Wednesday in an emailed news release.

Warnings against SDG ‘rush’ ahead of Rio+20 Summit
The setting of internationally agreed sustainable development goals (SDGs) has emerged as a dominant likely outcome of next month’s Rio+20 Summit in Brazil.

U.N. Fails to Finalise Rio+20 Plan On Sustainable Future
After two weeks of closed door negotiations, a U.N. preparatory committee (PrepCom) has failed to reach consensus on a global plan of action, titled “The Future We Want,” to be adopted by a summit meeting of world leaders mid-June in…

Ileana Johnson Paugh: The Global Warming/Globalist Crowd is on the March Again
The globalists are on the march and quite busy in the month of June 2012. The Rio +20 is meeting in Brazil to check on the progress of United Nations Agenda 21 twenty years later.

Henry Lamb: Agenda 21′s Role in America’s Financial Breakdown
For more than 20 years, now, the most powerful word in advertising has been “sustainable.” This term sells everything from toilet paper to spark plugs. This same term is even more powerful when applied to public policies such as: “sustainable” energy; transportation; agriculture; development; housing, and almost every other policy considered by government. When the term “sustainable” is used to sell a product, the product will be more expensive and less efficient than it has to be. When the term “sustainable” is used to sell a public policy, the policy will not only be more expensive and less efficient, it will be controlled by the government, and it will ultimately fail.

Arizona and Agenda 21

Arizona Bill Would Ban UN Agenda 21 Within State
As nationwide opposition against the controversial United Nations Agenda 21 “sustainability” plan continues to build, a popular bill in Arizona that analysts say looks set to pass would prohibit all state agencies and political subdivisions from implementing or supporting any …

Agenda 21: Arizona close to passing anti-UN-sustainability bill
Arizona lawmakers appear close to sending to Gov. Jan Brewer a tea party-backed bill that proponents say would stop a United Nations takeover conspiracy but that critics claim could end state and cities’ pollution-fighting efforts and even dismantle the state …

Bill to Ban Sustainability and Climate Change Action Fails in Arizona
This Week in Clean Economy: Five states fail to pass anti-Agenda 21 laws, with Arizona being the most high profile. Bills remain alive in three states

Michael McGuire: UN weighs in on California politics
The Arizona legislature’s passage this week of a bill to prohibit the state and its subdivisions from participating in United Nations Agenda 21 has been dismissed as an act of paranoia, but the UN has shown an increasing interest in …

Tennessee and Agenda 21

Haslam Opts Not to Sign Resolution Against Agenda 21
Governor Bill Haslam has chosen not to go along with conservative lawmakers in condemning an international environmental program. Tennessee’s House and Senate both voted overwhelmingly to oppose the United Nations sustainability blueprint called Agenda 21. Haslam left the resolution unsigned.

Kansas and Agenda 21

United Nations on trial in KS Legislature
It sounds like the theme of a sci-fi terror flick, or an action film involving computers and a secret government plot to enslave the world…

Kansas Lawmakers Seek Resolution Against “Insidious” UN Agenda 21
Lawmakers in Kansas are considering a strongly worded resolution condemning a controversial United Nations “sustainability” scheme known as Agenda 21, saying the global plan is a “dangerous” attack on private property rights, individual liberty, and national sovereignty..

U.S. Federal Government and Agenda 21

House passes UN conspiracy resolution
The House advanced a resolution Thursday demanded by lawmakers fearful about covert infiltration of U.S. environmental policy by socialist ideals espoused by the United Nations.

Larry Greenley: EPA’s Plans for Implementing UN’s Agenda 21
One of the most successful grassroots campaigns during the past year has been the Stop Agenda 21 movement both at the local level and state level. However, we haven’t heard as much about Agenda 21 implementation at the national level.

Agenda 21 Update: Labor Dept. Withdraws Child Labor Restrictions In Farm Bill
The Department of Labor (DOL) has apparently heard the voice of the American farmer (and the American people) and backed off its plan to restrict or severely limit family members under the age of 16 from working on family farms.

###

Dickensian Truths?

Editors Note: Reprinted with permission from Dr. Ray. Did everyone see the movie "The Mutiny on the Bounty"? Perhaps everyone would like to read the real history of that story also; most importantly to read the follow up history.  

Except for the characters, the ship, the voyage and the fact that there really was a mutiny, everything you know about this account is a lie.  There is a startlingly large amount of things that people "know for sure" that just simply aren't true.  

 Once we get past these historical "truths" about society in general, perhaps we can move on to "green" activism in order to see it correctly.  RK

By Jon Ray

Although we never normally think of him that way, Dickens may be the second most influential Leftist after Marx. His storytelling ability enthralls us to this day and is for almost all of us the only picture we have of the 19th century -- and a dismal picture it is. Dickens portrayed the worst of his times, not the average or the typical but we tend to accept his verbal pictures as typical. And the situations that Dickens described were so bad that the word "Dickensian" has come to mean oppressive, uncaring and inhuman. His novels were, however, political propaganda. Surprisingly, England in the Victorian era had a social welfare system that was both fairly comprehensive and independent of the government.

Even in the modern era of universal government welfare payments we can still find people living in "Dickensian" conditions -- for one obvious instance, the Australian Aborigines. All systems have some weaknesses and concentrating on the worst cases tells us nothing about how well the system works as a whole. A modern-day Dickens could equally well describe terrible situations caused by the actions of heartless government employees. See SOCIALIZED MEDICINE for just some examples of that. So let us now look briefly at what history tells us about the Victorian system rather than at what the novels of Dickens tell us about it:

There were two main sources of social security in Victorian England: The parish and the Friendly Societies. The parish system is the one Dickens concentrated on but it was in fact the Friendly Societies that were more important. We still have many of the Friendly Societies with us to this day. Most Australians will have heard of Manchester Unity, The Oddfellows, The Druids and various other societies. These days just about all they provide is health insurance but in the Victorian era their functions were much broader.

They also provided unemployment insurance, widows benefits, funeral benefits and various social functions. In the Victorian era a skilled worker would normally join a Friendly Society associated with his work, his town or his religion. If no other Society suited him he could join the Oddfellows. When he joined, he signed up to pay a weekly subscription to the society out of his wages. In return the Society covered him for most of the problems of daily life. If he got sick he went for free to the Society's doctor or a doctor that the Society had an agreement with. If he got really sick he could be admitted for free to a hospital run or approved by the Society. If he became unemployed he would receive a weekly payment from the Society to keep him going. If he died, his widow would be looked after. So ordinary workers in the Victorian era in fact had quite a high level of social welfare benefits -- all privately provided without any involvement by the government.

Some people, however, fell outside the Friendly Society system by reason of being too poor or too foolish to join. For these there was the parish system of poorhouses and workhouses. This was a system whereby the local parish of the Church of England gave charity to the poor so that nobody need be without shelter or food. It provided only the most basic food and shelter and did nothing to make poverty comfortable but it did make sure that everybody was provided for in some way. It was in that system that Oliver Twist was portrayed by Dickens as asking for "more please", implying that the people in it were not well fed. About that, though, we read:

Doctors writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) say they have uncovered the gruel truth behind the Victorian workhouse. Charles Dickens, they contend, was exaggerating when he portrayed Oliver Twist and other orphans driven to the brink of starvation by a miserly diet of watery porridge. In fact, the food provided under 1834 Poor Law Act, which set up workhouses for the destitute poor in mid-19th-century Britain, was dreary but there was plenty of it and the diet was nutritious enough for children of Oliver's age, their paper says.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens wrote, the orphans were given "three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sunday." On feast days, according to the novel, the inmates received an extra two and a quarter ounces (64 grams) of bread.

Four medical experts, with skills ranging from nutrition to paediatrics and the history of medicine, say such a diet would have killed or crippled the children, inflicting anaemia, scurvy, rickets and other diseases linked to vitamin deficiency. They took a closer look at the actual historical record, sifting through contemporary documents and even replicating the gruel that workhouse children most likely had.

One important source for their research was a treatise by a physician, Jonathan Pereira. He wrote it in 1843, five years after Dickens completed "Oliver Twist" and ignited a furious debate about the workhouses. Pereira found that the local boards of the guardians of the poor had a choice of six "workhouse dietaries", one of which they could choose according to the circumstances of each establishment. On the basis of Pereira's figures, using a recipe for water gruel taken from a 17th-century English cook book, the authors calculate Oliver would have had around three pints (1.76 litres) of gruel per day, comprising 3.75 ounces (106 grams) of top-quality oatmeal from Berwick, Scotland. Far from being thin, the gruel would have been "substantial," the authors say.

This would not have been the only source of food. Pereira details "considerable amounts" of beef and mutton that were delivered to individual London workhouses. "The diet described by Dickens would not have supported health and growth in a nine-year-old child, but the published workhouse diets would have generally met that need," the BMJ paper says. "Given the limited number of food staples used, the workhouse diet was certainly dreary but it was adequate."

The authors add a caveat, saying that this assumption is made on the basis that inmates actually received the quantity and quality of food prescribed, but Pereira's book suggests this was generally the case.

Such a system was sometimes no doubt heartless and could be abused and it was episodes of heartlessness and abuse that Dickens portrayed -- and which he moved his middle-class readers to "improve". Attempting to improve the Victorian system, however destroyed it. As one commentator acerbically observes:

In effect, the bourgeoisie declared war on their underlings, and tried to improve them out of existence. Their weapons in this war were 'a national system of education, a state system of welfare, public housing schemes and, later on, a state system of hospitals, a comprehensive system of National Insurance and much else besides.' These might not all sound like unmitigated evils to LRB readers, but Mount does a spirited job of pointing to the ways in which all of these structures were imposed on top of previously existing working-class vehicles for self-help. In one of the most original sections of Mind the Gap, he evokes a thriving culture of schools, Sunday schools, reading rooms, Nonconformist religion, collective insurance and trade unions. 'It is not too much to say that the lower classes in Britain between 1800 and 1940 had created a remarkable civilisation of their own which it is hard to parallel in human history: narrow-minded perhaps, prudish certainly, occasionally pharisaical, but steadfast, industrious, honourable, idealistic, peaceable and purposeful.'

And then this civilisation was dismantled. To take only one of a number of Mount's examples, the extensive culture of privately run working-class schools was destroyed by the board-schools founded by the 1870 Education Act, which were not free, but were effectively subsidised to a point where they put their private competitors out of business. All of this was part of a process in which 'the working classes are firmly tagged as the patients, never the agents.'

So any system can be abused and can fail and there is no doubt that the present system of government welfare that we have is also often heartless and is also often abused. The main difference between then and now is that the present system is more generous. Our unemployed get more spent on them. Our society today is however much richer than the England of Victorian times so the more generous provisions of the present era would probably have occurred under any system.

Child labour

The plight of child labourers in Victorian Britain is not usually considered to have been a happy one. Writers such as Charles Dickens painted a grim picture of the hardships suffered by young people in the mills, factories and workhouses of the Industrial Revolution. But an official report into the treatment of working children in the 1840s, made available online yesterday for the first time, suggests the situation was not so bad after all.

The frank accounts emerged in interviews with dozens of youngsters conducted for the Children's Employment Commission. The commission was set up by Lord Ashley in 1840 to support his campaign for reducing the working hours of women and children.

Surprisingly, a number of the children interviewed did not complain about their lot -- even though they were questioned away from their workplace and the scrutinising eyes of their employers.

Sub-commissioner Frederick Roper noted in his 1841 investigation of pre-independence Dublin's pin-making establishments: "Notwithstanding their evident poverty ... there is in their countenances an appearance of good health and much cheerfulness."

A report on workers at a factory in Belfast found a 14-year-old boy who earned four shillings a week "would rather be doing something better ... but does not dislike his current employment". The report concluded: "I find all in this factory able to read, and nearly all to write. They are orderly, appear to be well-behaved, and to be very contented."

So once again we see that the Dickensian portrayal of something is at least questionable.

Happy people?

It is notable that contented, successful people (Podsnap, Gradgrind) are portrayed most unfavourably by Dickens. This too is Leftist. As noted conservative historian Russell Kirk quoted Bagehot as saying: "Conservatism is enjoyment". The converse is however more familiar: Leftists are miserable sods always complaining about something. They have a pervasive hatred of the world around them. And that, presumably, is why Dickens and many other literary figures are Leftist. Just as newspapers do well on accounts of disasters, so tales of suffering, unhappiness and escape from oppression sell novels. As Bagehot also said: "All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape." Conservatives, of course are not so driven. They see plenty to criticize in the world but are generally content just to get on with their own lives rather than constantly striving to tear down "the system". (More brilliant Bagehot quotes here)

Let me say just a few words about Mr Podsnap (in "Our Mutual Friend"). Read how Dickens describes him here

It is a classic piece of Leftist poison, where Mr Podsnap's contentment with himself and the world about him is completely transmogrified. Podsnap can literally do nothing right. Even his patriotism is portrayed as ignorant -- something that anticipated modern Leftism. And Podsnap's success in business seems to be just somehow accidental -- with no suggestion that Podsnap may work hard and intelligently at what he does. The Leftists of academe whom I know so well think exactly that way about business to this day. And even Mr Podsnap's furniture is ridiculed. And there is of course no suggestion that solid citizens like Mr Podsnap keep the world on an even keel. Leftists don't want the world kept on an even keel. Their ideal is revolution -- with all the hate-driven indifference to human life that that normally entails.

So let us not get a false picture of the evil capitalistic 19th century from Dickens's brilliant propaganda. The 19th century was in fact second only to the 20th century for the improvements it brought to the lives of ordinary English people.

I mentioned recently a minor Australian Leftist blog that seems to have a devotion to listing my "sins". If they ever read the present post they will no doubt add breathlessly to the list that I criticize the great Dickens. Horror! How imbecilic I must be to challenge such a conventional hero!

Leftists tend to think of themselves as iconoclastic (even though they have said little that is original since Marx) but they put up very effective mental barriers against real iconoclasm (such as my critique of Dickens). They just see real iconoclasm as too far beyond the pale to contemplate. That is certainly the commonest reaction I get from Leftists when I point out that Hitler was a socialist. Their low level of intellectual curiosity makes them very conventional thinkers. Only the simplest of propositions (e.g. Bush = Hitler) get past their mental portals.