If you had been wondering why Democrats and their big-box media enablers are suddenly zealously pushing for reparations for black farmers, a heretofore invisible subcategory in the ever-growing identity politics ranks, Jon Ossoff shed some light on the matter in Georgia.
Jon Ossoff
The Democratic is going up against Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) in one of two Jan. 5 Peach State runoff elections that will decide control of the Senate. He became the focus of some attention for using the term “campesino” in a Dec. 13 campaign speech. The Spanish word can be translated as farmworker, but its far greater significance is as “peasant,” with all the highly charged social justice connotations that come with that label.
The sight of Ossoff, the product of a wealthy and entitled upbringing, referring to migrant farm laborers as serfs has drawn deserved criticism of pampered progressive elites who utilize revolutionary terminology as bumper sticker talk from the safety of their ivory towers. But a deeper dive into the term “campesino” opens the door to an entire movement that is well organized and heavily funded. If allowed to fester, the spirit of the campesino social justice warrior threatens to bring nothing short of South American-style socialist revolution to America’s farming heartland.
This perilous development is being fueled by the naked greed of corporate billionaires like Republican donor Charles Koch. These moneyed elites have already resumed their eager pining for massive immigration reform in what they hope will soon be a post-Donald Trump America so they can ship more cheap labor into the U.S.
The problem should be obvious. You cannot import a banana republic labor system to the United States without ending up with the class-struggle insurrection that inevitably thrives under such primitive and brutal conditions. Campesino is not just a word. It is a warning.
‘Food Apartheid’
Seemingly out of the blue, Black Farmers Matter has appeared on the race-obsessed progressive scoreboard. ABC News breathlessly reported on Nov. 29:
“There was a time when Black-owned farms were booming – before those farmers were stripped of tens of thousands of acres because of racist policies.
Today, most rural land in the U.S. is owned by white people. But now, finally, a new piece of legislation could help African Americans reclaim some of that acreage.
The Justice for Black Farmers Act, introduced earlier this month by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., would allow Black farmers to reclaim up to 160 acres each, at no charge, through a Department of Agriculture system of land grants.”
It’s hard to get more inflammatory than that in what is ostensibly a straight news report by a dominant media outlet. But Booker’s legislation is not just one more exotic plank washed ashore after Hurricane (George) Floyd. It has its roots in a much larger progressive “food sovereignty” movement that seeks to fundamentally transform Western society.
An informative primer posted on the Colby College community website declares that the newly discovered plight of the black farmer is due to a “food apartheid” system that operates in America:
“One example of this intersection between social justice and food security is with the shift in language from ‘food desert’ to ‘food apartheid.’ Food justice activist Karen Washington proposes to replace the term ‘food desert,’ areas void of good-quality, affordable fresh food, with the term ‘food apartheid’ to take into account the systematic racism permeating America’s food system.”
The post goes on to list a proposed “Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers” to overcome the oppression.
What’s In a Word?
But the radical screed also reveals the full meaning behind Ossoff’s intentional choice of words in Georgia:
“First coined by La Vía Campesina, the International Peasant’s Movement, the concept of ‘food sovereignty’ is one example of the potential to radically transform our current unsustainable, inequitable agroindustrial food system through the empowering of indigenous and peasant communities. While many have looked to science for solutions to our current food crisis, what is really necessary to push for large-scale change is a grassroots social movement that operates outside of our current industrialized, capitalist food system and instead prioritizes the fight against systematic exploitation, oppression, and colonization.”
Heifer International, a respected global NGO in establishment ranks, further detailed the significance of Ossoff’s verbiage in an April 17, 2012 blog post titled “A Word About the Word Campesino”:
“Today is International Day of Peasant Struggle, a day commemorating the massacre of 19 landless farmers in Brazil who were demanding land and justice in 1996. Every year on this date, people around the world unite through actions that support the rights of ‘peasants’ and small-holder farmers.”
The blog post quotes another writer who “focuses on social justice terminology for translators and interpreters” to highlight the more profound “complexity of the word.” International Day of Peasant Struggle “owes a lot to La Via Campesina, an organization that Heifer sometimes collaborates with in our Americas Area Program,” the post declares.
La Via Campesina is a global organization that champions many salutary measures for small farmers. Unfortunately, this is accompanied by a starkly radical agenda couched in the frightening rhetoric of Marxist tyranny.
La Via Campesina staunchly supports massive Third World migration into Western nations in the name of fighting “against racism, xenophobia and discrimination.” A feverish Nov. 24 statement on the group’s website calls for a “Global Pact of Solidarity” on migration and asylum. The phraseology is downright Leninist:
“We, the affected communities of migrant and refugee peoples, together with the movements, networks and organisations involved in the process of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT) on the violations with Impunity of the Human Rights of migrant and refugees, propose a Global Pact of Solidarity for the Rights of Migrant and Refugee peoples. We reach out globally, to all those who believe that to Migrate or Seek Asylum is not a Crime – It is a Human Right. Let us build together, this Global Pact of Solidarity.”
La Via Campesina is one of many noteworthy international organizations advocating the need for the “Global North,” meaning North America and Europe, to subsidize the “Global South,” i.e., South America, Africa, and Oceania, in the name of social justice. As Liberty Nation reported on Nov. 19, this global leftist perspective has its adherents embedded in Joe Biden’s political circle. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation senior advisor Linda Etim is Team Leader for International Development on Biden’s presidential transition team.
“[T]he Global North cannot routinely pretend away the rest of the planet — and perhaps no phenomenon demonstrates this point as clearly as migration,” Etim proclaimed in an Oct. 6 paper she co-authored for the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace. The internationalist think tank states on its website that it has received “$1 Million and Above” in funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Seeding Racial Division
The socialist spirit of the leftist “food sovereignty” struggle is fully evident in Sen. Booker’s black farmer’s bill. The leftist magazine Mother Jones hailed the proposed legislation’s racial redistribution scheme:
“Co-sponsored with senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), the bill would, among other things, create an Equitable Land Access Service within the USDA, including a fund that devotes $8 billion annually to buying farmland on the open market and granting it to new and existing Black farmers, with the goal of making 20,000 grants per year over nine years, with maximum allotments of 160 acres.”
Booker, Warren, and Gillibrand were all prominent Democratic presidential candidates for the 2020 election.
The tragedy in all of this is that our corporate consolidated agriculture system is indeed in need of dire reform. Policies should be advanced to vastly increase the numbers of small farmers in this nation, no matter what their race. But because the current system has been solidified around the factory farm model and its addiction to cheap labor, a ceaseless flow of poor, low-skilled migrants continues to flood into America.
Rather than proposing solutions that would boost small farming by American citizens of all stripes, unscrupulous Democrat politicians instead turn to the politics of racial division to promote socialism.
Charles Koch
As Breitbart’s John Binder noted, Charles Koch has popped up again to call for amnesty for illegal aliens and a rise in the number of immigrants to the U.S. “With more support and action from people across the country, Congress will find its way to enact the immigration policies that reflect the best of America and enable more people to contribute to our country’s future,” Koch asserted in a Dec. 15 op-ed for CNN co-written with Brian Hooks, president of his Charles Koch Foundation.
In short, Koch is pushing for the acceleration of forces that have already fostered the rise of a grievance-based politics that seems to have taken complete hold of today’s Democratic Party.
No one of goodwill denies that the cheap labor that Koch and his cohorts covet truly are exploited. They are Jon Ossoff’s peasants toiling in 2020 America. In the short run, large corporations will profit greatly from this evil. In the long run, however, such a system isn’t just unsustainable; it is bound to end in chaos and quite likely large-scale violence.
International Day of Peasant Struggle was birthed in Brazil 24 years ago. Take a look around. We are rapidly becoming Brazil. The United States is turning into a nation with a certain number of rich people, a far larger pool of poor people, and no middle class in between.
And what are we doing about this situation? Governing elites are imposing authoritarian lockdowns that devastate small business in the sketchy name of “health” while corporate goliaths wield their vast wealth to influence these politicians to allow the importation of an endless supply of peasants.
This is all going to end very badly.
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