US Department Of Labor Is NOT Banning 'Farm Chores' For Children

Several people sent me this news about the US Department of Labor banning farm chores, so I thought I would take a look at it.

Google news showed that the citations were all from social conservative sites, and most if not all were quoting a single site that printed this news this morning. No major news media was carrying the story.

 Here is what I found out about it. You can read the entire story here.

 I like the way this author ended his piece. 'Trust, but verify.' We are in a period of growing hysteria.

Demagogues will attempt to sway people and move them to action, often to counter legitimate complaints and efforts at reform, and to undermine legitimate protests.

 This sort of urban mythology and demonization can become very dangerous, especially when it starts looking for scapegoats among minorities.   The haters are coming, at least according to history, and you do not want any part of it.

Look for the facts and make up your own mind.  

"...The conservative social web has been freaking out this morning over a story from the Daily Caller who reported:

Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/rural-kids-parents-angry-about-labor-dept-rule-banning-farm-chores/

Twitchy even highlighted some of the knee-jerk reactionaries (I’m laughing with some of you) who took to Twitter to create the #ObamaFarmChores hashtag to mock the supposed impending doom of farm chores for boys and girls across America. Not that the kids would mind. Amiright?!

This Internet urban (or rural, in this case) myth is much ado about nothing. In the very US Labor Department proposal that the Daily Caller cited, the language is clear about this. From the 2nd paragraph of the US Labor Department proposal (my emphasis in bold):

The department is proposing updates based on the enforcement experiences of its Wage and Hour Division, recommendations made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and a commitment to bring parity between the rules for young workers employed in agricultural jobs and the more stringent rules that apply to those employed in nonagricultural workplaces. The proposed regulations would not apply to children working on farms owned by their parents.

Also, getting everyone in a tizzy is the rumor that 4-H would be eliminated under this proposal. Not true. From the US Labor Department site:

Five Facts about the Proposed Child Labor in Agriculture Rule

Fact # 1: The proposed Child Labor in Agriculture rule will not prohibit all people under the age of 18 from working on a farm.
The proposed rule would not change any of the Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum age standards for agricultural employment. Under the FLSA, the legal age to be employed on a farm without restrictions is 16. The FLSA also allows children between the ages of 12 and 15 years, under certain conditions, to be employed outside of school hours to perform nonhazardous jobs on farms. Children under the age of 12 may be employed with parental permission on very small farms to perform nonhazardous jobs outside of school hours.

Young people can be employed to perform many jobs on the farm – and this would be true even if the proposed rule were adopted as written. The proposed rule would, however, prohibit the employment of workers under the age of 18 in nonagricultural occupations in the farm-product raw materials wholesale trade industries. Prohibited establishments would include country grain elevators, grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, feed yards, stockyard, livestock exchanges, and livestock auctions not on a farm or used solely by a single farmer. What these locations have in common is that many workers, including children, have suffered occupational deaths or serious injuries working in these facilities over the last few years.

Fact # 2: The proposed rule would not eliminate the parental exemption for owners/operators of a family farm.
The parental exemption for the owner or operator of a farm is statutory and cannot be eliminated through the regulatory process. A child of any age may perform any job, even hazardous work, at any age at any time on a farm owned by his or her parent. A child of any age whose parent operates a farm may also perform any task, even hazardous jobs, on that farm but only outside of school hours. So for children working on farms that are registered as LLCs, but operated solely by their parents, the parental exemption would still apply.

Fact # 3: This proposed regulation will not eliminate 4-H and FFA programs.
The Department of Labor fully supports the important contributions both 4-H and the FFA make toward developing our children. The proposed rule would in no way prohibit a child from raising or caring for an animal in a non-employment situation — even if the animal were housed on a working farm — as long as he or she is not hired or “employed” to work with the animal. In such a situation, the child is not acting as an “employee” and is not governed by the child labor regulations. And there is nothing in the proposed rule that would prevent a child from being employed to work with animals other than in those specific situations identified in the proposal as particularly hazardous.

Fact # 4: Under the proposed rule, children will still be able to help neighbors in need of help.
In order for the child labor provisions of the FLSA to apply, there must first be an employer/employee relationship. The lone act of helping a neighbor round up loose cattle who have broken out of their fencing, for example, generally would not establish an employer/employee relationship.

Fact # 5: Children will still be able to take animals to the county fair or to market.
A child who raises and cares for his or her animal — for example, as part of a 4-H project — is not being employed by anyone, and thus is outside the coverage of the FLSA. Even if the child needs to rent space from a farm, the animal is not part of the farm’s business and with regard to the care of the animal no employer/employee relationship exists, so the child labor provisions would not apply. Likewise, there would be no problem with taking the animal to the county fair or to market, since the child is doing this on his/her own behalf – not on behalf of an employer. The proposed prohibitions would apply only if the child was an employee of the exchange or auction.

There are some portions of this US Labor proposal that do need some attention, but not the one being widely misreported.  The lesson here: trust, but verify."

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Jack of All Trades, And We'll Be All Right

The capping on gold and silver is hard to miss.

There was a fairly stiff gut check tossed at gold around the time the FOMC decision came out, but it bounced back quickly.

Paper and physical are in a bit of a struggle here, and so we see price winding tighter and tigher on the chart.

Intraday commentary on the financial system here.   Tavakoli 'tells it like it is.' 

Someone asked, why bother, why be concerned?  Why be so concerned about reform?

"Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake."

Garrison Keillor

That's why.   Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for Me.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Apple Dumplings

APPL came in with very good results last night, and so the markets rallied led by tech.

No breakouts, so we are still waiting to see which way this goes.

Today was a good day to go for a walk.

Tavakoli: Another Financial Crisis Looming, And You're On Your Own

Janet Tavakoli takes the gloves off and tells it like it is in the cover story in the May 2012 issue of Research Magazine.

You'll have to read it here, because I doubt you would hear this in any of the mainstream media.
 
I hate to apply the overused term 'expert,' but Janet is a highly credentialed expert in financial derivatives with years of practical experience.   That does not mean that everything she says is necessarily right, but it certainly has credibility.

Someone asked me why would someone who is in the financial industry, and has benefited from their expertise in derivatives, speak out like this? 

Have we really sunk that low that we cannot believe that some people could ever wish to speak the truth as they see it from moral principles, even against their short term material advantages?  No wonder we are so easily taken in by lies, because that is what we want to hear.   We are a lost generation.

This straight talk is a good spice to add to the somewhat bland presentation on the financial crisis last night from PBS Frontline.

It's all about fraud and the subsequent cover up and ongoing bailouts.   Its the credibility trap, and it continues to undermine the recovery and the real economy today.

The cover story is that these are just well meaning and extremely bright people who did their best, but a few people got carried away, and well, you know, things just happen.

Just like MF Global, right?  

Finding the Culprits
Derivatives expert Janet Tavakoli takes a hard look at what — and who — caused the financial crisis.
By Jane Wollman Rusoff

April 25, 2012

...Now Tavakoli sees another huge financial crisis looming.

The University of Chicago MBA has traded, structured and sold derivatives at firms including Merrill Lynch, PaineWebber and Westdeutsche Landesbank; and she had earlier stints at Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs. Research recently talked with her about red flags and preventive solutions.

You write that, in the past three years nothing has been fixed but that we must hold Wall Street responsible for the fraud that resulted in the financial crisis. What should be done?

We need to have investigations. But with the pushback and all the lobbying, what they’ve been counting on is that the statute of limitations for some of these frauds is expiring. So if you don’t file complaints, you may not be able to.

Members of Congress are enabling the lack of punishment and covering up great misdeeds in our financial system — and they’re doing it with no fear of consequences — i.e., being voted out of office, in which case they could find themselves the subject of investigation.

What do you mean: “covering up”?

Many people are covering up for cronies who have a lot of money sloshing around. We threw money into the financial system with no accountability and thus made the problem worse. Our system has been completely infiltrated and bought off. Things aren’t changing because Big Money doesn’t want it to change.

What other indications are there of a cover-up?

The MF Global dog-and-pony show. The attitude toward bundlers like Jon Corzine [the firm’s ex-CEO], who is a big bundler for the Obama campaign, is that the guy can do no wrong. This was before he even testified. People who are raising big money for campaigns get off with no real investigation.

In the Sarbanes-Oxley age, for MF Global to say they were unaware of what they were doing beggars belief. And yet there has been no indictment.

Is President Obama part of the cover-up?

Yes, in that he’s enabled it. He’s left people in place who crashed the global financial system in the first place: [Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner and [Federal Reserve chair] Ben Bernanke. Obama had told us: “You can’t keep doing things the same way and expect different results.” So he’s been quite a hypocrite.

Who else is in the cover-up?

Mary Schapiro was appointed [by President Obama] to head the SEC. She was formerly head of FINRA, the antichrist of investor advocacy! Yet she was chosen SEC [chair] because the regulators are captive by and serve the people they’re supposed to be regulating. They do not serve investors.

In a way, Obama has been the anti-regulator because he didn’t put people in the regulatory agencies, the Fed or the Treasury who would investigate and fix things that are wrong in our global financial system.

If he’s re-elected, then presumably, things will continue in this same way?

Yes.

What if a Republican is elected President?

Who else is not in the pocket of Big Money interests!  (Ron Paul - Jesse)

So, no matter who’s President, these crimes — if you want to call them crimes — will be perpetuated?

Yes. And we do want to call them crimes! They are crimes.

What should Obama do now to help Americans?

He has a lot of resources at his disposal, one main one being moral suasion — he’s got the pulpit. When there was a crisis, Reagan, Carter, Bush went on television and explained what needed to be done. We haven’t seen that kind of leadership from President Obama. If anything, the American people have been told things to make them think [conditions] aren’t really as bad as they are: inflation isn’t as bad as you think because an iPad is cheaper now — nonsense like that.

So the public is being poorly informed?

Yes. Therefore, financial advisors need to be doing fundamental analysis of investments and not [only] be reading the Wall Street Journal or, God forbid, watching CNBC.  (Don't look for any appearances on CNBC or Bloomberg TV, Janet - Jesse)

In other words, FAs should do their own research and figure things out for themselves.

Yes. Sadly, you’re on your own. That’s part of how we got into this mess: We lost the art of rolling up our sleeves and looking for opportunities.

On Internet TV, you stated that we’re “absolutely vulnerable to a repeat [crisis] because the fraud went unpunished and we printed money like crazy to bail us out of the last one.” That’s scary.

But the fact is we’ve bailed people out and had no consequences for them. So it emboldened them to turn around and behave in the same way. Look at banks like JP Morgan: Shortly after the crisis, they thumbed their nose at the idea of trying to separate speculation from the rest of the bank. So if you don’t have restraints on behavior, you’ll see it repeated. And now we’ve made it worse. It’s like handing a drunk driver who got into a crash the keys to a bigger, faster car together with a bottle of vodka.

In every area of finance where we bailed people out, you see the same wrongdoers volunteering to help fix the situation. That’s pretty funny: They weren’t trustworthy before, and they’re not trustworthy now.

But what about the investigations that already have been held?

They’re all for show, and people end up with a slap on the wrist for minor issues. Investigators should be looking instead at the interconnected fraud that infected the mortgage lending market. And there is still a lot today, especially fraud on borrowers. If you go to the root of the problem and choke off the money supply, you stop the fraud in its tracks.

But the banks say they lost money.

The fact that a bank lost money isn’t an indication that they were a victim as opposed to being a perpetrator. A classic problem with control fraud is that the parasites destroy the host — in this case, the host being the bank and the parasites being the bank employees. If you were the victim of a control fraud by the people who worked in your own bank but meanwhile, you were collecting huge bonuses, you overlooked the control fraud within your own institution.

Why haven’t the apparently guilty been punished?

We haven’t seen the felony indictments that these people richly deserve because our regulators and investigators are captive — and Congress, more than ever, has been lobbied, courted and bought off by Wall Street. More than any time in the past, you’ve seen these big-money interests protected by Congress.

Is there an alternative to bailouts, such as those of the financial crisis?

Yes. Troubled financial entities should be restructured, old shareholders should be wiped out and we should return Glass-Steagall.

What should have been done in the case of, say, AIG?

Bankruptcy declared, and then [the government] says: “We’ll back-stop your contracts for now, but we’re going to investigate all those fraudulent credit derivative contracts and ‘claw’ money ‘back’ from your counterparties — like Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse — if need be.” So there’s a controlled demolition. You’re not just handing money out with no consequences....

Read the rest here.