Steven Colbert to Congress

[Kay/NC]

You owe it to yourselves to watch his testimony today. 

AMEN!

[nwobcw]

What a joke.  This ya hoo telling congress about farm workers after spending 1 whole day in a field is equivalent to myself talking about brain surgery after bumping my head.

[Kay/NC]

Don't dismiss this one this simply,  he's got quite a folliwign, adn his point is right on point. 

We are losing farms to Mexico, due to lack of workers. We are expecting people to come here and pick our food, ask for nothing while here, and leave when they are done. 

We have no native workforce to do this owrk, even in a time of extreme unemployment. 

I interface with a farily good number of Yuppies on a fairly regualr bbasis in volunteer work.  When they ask me about local foods, I ask them if THEY are raising their children to be bean-pickers.  Teh few hwo have a real spocial conscience actually get my point. 

Colbert used the example of picking beans beside migrant workers for a day, to clearly illustrate this paradox in America's plentiful food supply:  It cannot "get here from there," without migrants who are invisible people...read Reefer Madness  for a very good analysis of the overall problem in harvesting strawberries alone. 

I am so glad Colbert appeared in character...nothing/no one else would have done it as well.  If Congress can hear Elmo, it can hear the truth from Colbert.  Now let's just see if any of them were  listening. 

[ewright2986006]

Kay, slow down your typing.

Also, remember that agriculture only uses 250,000 to 400,000 migrant workers out of the 12 - 20 million illegal aliens. That's only 2 - 3 percent of the illegal aliens. There are probably more washing dishes in Chinese restaurants than there are picking crops.

I remember when I was in high school seeing migrants picking processing tomatoes across the road from the football field. Last year at the Indiana State Fair at the Normandy Barn they were showing a film about Red Gold Tomatoes. They pick the field once with a mechanical picker. It seems wasteful compared to picking the field for a month, but it is obviously more profitable than hiring migrants.

If there weren't illegal aliens working for less than minimum wages I'm sure that machinery makers would come up with something. Right now, illegals are cheaper than machinery.

[Kay/NC]

When I was a kid, tenant families (usually African-American) provided the cheap labor, along with child labor sources, like myself.  When the civil rights movement dismantled a lot of traditional relathionships between workers and farmers, machinery had to fill the void.  It was nto so much cheaper, as it was the only thing to fill the void. 

While there are still some farming families that expect their kids to work hard, most kids today would report their parents for child abuse if they had to work like we did back then. To be honest, i nearly died twice from farming accidents: one involving equipment, and another involving an accidental poisoning by dermal absorption.  Both were working in flue-cured tobacco, which is largely mechanized today, where contracts have relieved the need for actual grade quality, to the extent we had to produce it then. 

I suspect your estimates, given such a wide range, are actually quite inaccurate.  Not all who labor in ag are migrants, either.  We have to be honest about how we've kept prices for a lot of our collective lifestyle so low for so long.  We've enjoyed cheap energy, a cheap workforce, and a host of other cheap inputs to the average household's expenditures.  I think those days are numbered. 

[BA Deere]

FWIW, on a talk show this morning Iowa Rep. Steve King said those illegals cost the taxpayers $19,000 a head. Now if they make $20 grand a year and add the $19 grand taxpayer expense.....well, if those yuppies get hungry enough, they just might be happy to "pick beans" for $39,000 a yr. 

[nwobcw]

   Sorry Kay I respectfully disagree.  Colbert in or out of character isn't the proper messenger.   Now if a migrant worker with years of experience had testified that would be different.  I've had my fill of Hollywood types using their so-called celebrity status as a launching pad to being an expert on anything outside of a studio.  I think this started or least the 1st instance I remember is the actress going to congress over alar used on apples.  How did that turn out?

[Kay/NC]

We can certainly "agree to disagree," and do so respectfully to one another.  I know that I see this from the point of frustration with trying to hire a native-born American for a steady job with god pay for our area, and having no takers. 

A lot of that is due to the entitlements that they collect in EBT cards for free food, Medicaid that until only a year or so ago came to a large extent out of our extremely poor county's tax collections (NC forced local share, and the poorer the county, the more it cost proportionately- vicious death spiral there!), and every other sort of social program.  This escalated up to and including rewarding a healthy man younger than I am for not paying property taxes on his shanty in sight of our home, by giving him a brand-new home to sit deadbeat in, too. 

So, immigrants are not the only ones soaking it up, and at least most of them I see are at least willing to engage in lifting a stick to hit at a snake, as we say here.  People lucky enough to be born here that have learned to milk the system won't even do that, to save themselves, because they don't HAVE to to survive.

Example: I've just spent several months waiting for a seller to bring me a good deed for a half-interest in an adjoining property, nice-sized house lot with a mobile home on it.  I don't want it, but would really like to clean it up.  Meanwhile, our title search shows the other half-owner has managed to somehow encumber this small lot to an amount in excess of what it is worth in total.  Buying in would make me subject to her debts, or cost me more than it is all worth, to end up where she could simply bury it in debt yet again.

She has not worked in years, has two children that get picked up at her door, taken care of all day at public expense, fed and clothed ditto, and I am sure gets Medicaid, AFDC, WIC, etc.  A surcharge is tacked onto every one of my electric bills every month to help pay for indigent power bills, and the county has separate heating and cooling assistance.  If you have a car and cannot pay for its tires, Social Services will pay for that, too, according to our local tire service shop's owner. 

This woman is at least 25 years younger than am, and had a healthcare aide's job once, pre-babies, as that is the lady who bought this lot and trailer for her to work off...which she promptly decided not to do. 

Immigrants are excluded from public rackets to a large extent, since they are not able to access most social programming, except that directed at them specifically. Many of them have children born in the US, who - at least for now - are as much citizens as you or I.  That is a real quandary. 

As for celebrities making a case before Congress - I totally agree that it is an unfortunate fact of life that fame lends an aura to one's opinion in this country.  I admit to having been a longtime fan of Colbert...and I miss being able to watch his show daily anymore.  

The appearance in character - and the character of the "Report" is a genuinely creative invention - made it the ONLY appropriate reason for him to show up on the Hill for me.  He is a caricature of the ego-obsessed American. 

Let's run an ad tomorrow in the Sunday papers, and see how many beanpickers we could hire to replace the current ones, at any price.  Out of 300 million of us, if you can find that 300,000, I would fall over in total shock.  I personally know a certified "genius" who has Mr. Obama's ear, who can ony fill her social program's "living wage" jobs with convicts who will lose their parole if they quit.  Who do you  wan to turn loose on society to prove a point? 

[BA Deere]

Take away the government safety net, so it isn`t so profitable to sit in Mom`s basement playing X-Box 360, if they miss a couple meals you`d be surprised how many willing "bean pickers" you`d get. 10% of America`s income goes for food, lowest in the world, if you add all the expense of illegals, it`s actually much, much Higher. This is an area where gov`t should have a role, since companies are such greedy children they need to apparently be regulated to pay a fair wage to American employees. So the price of tomatoes go up 25 cents a pound and instead of 10% of our income going for food, it`d then be 13%, whoopty freaking Doo!  At least our country would retain it`s sovereignty.  

[Kay/NC]

X-boxers in Mom's basement are still on their parents'[ tab more than the public dole.  Not our biggest social problem...yet.  

The fact is, taxpayers already pay more than ten percent for their food, but much of the "undefined" percentage is buried in their general income tax bills, and comes out in the form of ag subsidies adnd other program payments.    They hate the heck out of those...but individually cannot do much about them. 

I see it all the time...people who work harder at not having to work than they'd work if they worked...you know?  They make getting onto disability their main occupation.  I'm watching a new example of it right now, and it makes me very disappointed in the person who's doing it. 

Some people will never get it. .would rather starve than sweat. Then, too, we occasionally have days when we look at each other and ask why we have struggled so hard to build a bit of something, to teach our kids our work ethic, only to end up footing the bill for so much of the madness around us.