NJ Legislature and Corporate Left tries to kill small home businesses
/By Rubashov
You can buy baked goods from Amazon. They deliver.
And apparently Senator Joe Vitale wants to make corporate giants like Amazon the only option for consumers. Hey, Amazon doesn’t own hunks of the media and engage in a billion dollar corporate public relations and lobbying effort for nothing.
For the last ten years, the New Jersey Home Bakers Association has fought for the right to sell their products in the marketplace, but corporate crony capitalists and their allies (see Senator Joe “the Moe” Vitale) have blocked them. So the bakers ramped up their efforts with a lawsuit, which focused the honorables’ minds.
Allowing people to work from home sounds like a good idea, right?
Not to Senator Vitale, an arrogant and petty fellow, to the point that when he finally allowed the necessary legislation to be heard in his committee, he gutted the original bill (S-73, proposed by Senators Bateman, Republican, and Sarlo, Democrat). Vitale larded up his version of the bill with unreasonable licensing requirements and fees, and restricted the types of baked goods that could be produced to a list with which it would be nearly impossible to comply.
Vitale actually added provisions forbidding home bakers from producing special occasion cakes or cookies. That’s what’s called hamstringing the little guy in favor of big food corporations. Imagine government instructing a small business that government will send men-with-guns and shut you down if you commit the high crime of writing “happy birthday” in icing!!! As if things aren’t bad enough for small businesses already.
But it gets worse, Vitale is so anal and pedantic that he included a provision banning certain baked goods from being coated in chocolate! No kidding, chocolate, the most popular confectionary in the country. Of course, this is how you make sure that these small businesses never make it. Senator Vitale wanted to strangle them in their crib.
Facing more economic ruin at the hands of politicians, the New Jersey Home Bakers Association put together a grassroots effort to fight back. Earlier today, the Senate Health, Human, and Senior Services committee held a hearing on Senate Bill S-73, the current iteration of the Home Bakers’ Bill. Vitale’s version was withdrawn, but more shenanigans happened.
The bill was amended just before the Committee started, without most of the members present even having the opportunity to read the amendments. This is what goes for transparency and the democratic process in the New Jersey Legislature. Shameful.
As amended, the new legislation includes inspection requirements, very high licensing fees, and restrictive regulations. Oh well, if you want cake you will still have Amazon… they deliver. And that’s the idea, isn’t it?
But wait, the political class wants you to know that it has other forms of employment for you to consider…
On Thursday night, Tucker Carlson aired a segment on how the coronavirus shutdown has made poor, unemployed young people so desperate they’re willing to sell their bodies, and he called out the media for promoting it.
(Click on image for video)
“OnlyFans and IsMyGirl are porn websites. Both of them allow women to sell explicit photos and videos of themselves to men online,” Carlson said.
“Both sites have seen explosive growth during the coronavirus shutdown,” Carlson added, accusing the sites of “feasting off our collapsing economy.”
“This is unimaginably ugly,” he said. “It is the purest, most degrading form of exploitation. When you have nothing left to sell can you sell your body. The people who broker that sale are called pimps. Healthy societies do not celebrate pimps; they put pimps in prisons. And yet our pimps receive fawning profiles in daily newspapers. Our media greet this human tragedy like its progress. It’s the new frontier in the gig economy. Imagine anything more decadent than that.”
After shutting down businesses and making people unemployed and without access to health care, perhaps Governor Murphy will helpfully suggest this option at his next press opportunity? Stay tuned…
"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."
(George Orwell, aka Eric Blair)
Quoted by Chris Hedges, in his bestseller, “Death of the Liberal Class" (2010).
