Posted on 07/30/2010 4:05:05 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Had Andrew Breitbart dutifully written a column detailing how an obscure USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, and her husband, Charles Sherrod, had scammed the government out of millions, the story would have had the range and lifespan of a fruit fly.
Instead, as the world knows, Breitbart released an edited version of Shirley Sherrod's speech before the NAACP that provoked national headlines and caused the NAACP to denounce her and a panicky Obama administration to fire her from her position as the Georgia Director of Rural Development for the USDA.
Then, of course, when the full version of the speech emerged -- which showed Sherrod as a recovering racist, not as a practicing one -- the Obama White House fell all over itself apologizing, and the media turned their guns on Breitbart.
Breitbart, however, had put a potentially huge story into play the only way he could -- through sheer provocation. As he knew, and as we are learning, the story goes well beyond Sherrod's long-ago racist mischief-making with a poor white farmer.
This past Sunday, in his weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle, "Willie's World," veteran black politico Willie Brown confirmed that "there is more to the story than just [Sherrod's] remarks."
"As an old pro," Brown acknowledged, "I know that you don't fire someone without at least hearing their side of the story unless you want them gone in the first place." Brown observed that Sherrod had been a thorn in the USDA's side for years, that many had objected to her hiring, and that she had been "operating a community activist organization not unlike ACORN." Although Brown does not go into detail, he alludes to a class action lawsuit against the USDA in which she participated some years ago.
In the way of background, in 1997, a black farmer named Timothy Pigford, joined by four hundred other black farmers, filed a lawsuit against Bill Clinton's Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, claiming that the USDA treated black farmers unfairly in all manner of ways, from price support loans to disaster payments to operating loans. Worse, they charged that the USDA had failed to process any complaints about racial discrimination.
The notion that the Clinton Ag Department had spent four years consciously denying black farmers their due defies everything we know about Clinton's use of race and should have made the media suspicious about Pigford's claims dating back to 1983.
Flush with revenue in 1999 and eager to appease this bedrock constituency, the administration settled with the farmers -- more realistically, their attorneys -- for fifty grand apiece, plus various other perks like tax offsets and loan forgiveness. If any of the presumably racist USDA offenders were punished, that news escaped the media.
After the consent decree was announced, the USDA opened the door to other claimants who had been similarly discriminated against. They expected 2,000 additional claims. They got 22,000 more, roughly 60 percent of whom were approved for this taxpayer-funded Lotto.
Despite having a year and a half to apply, some 70,000 more alleged claimants argued that they not only had been discriminated against, but also had been denied notice of the likely windfall that awaited them.
In 2008, for reasons unknown, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa lobbied to give the alleged 70,000 "another bite at the apple." Co-sponsoring the bill was none other than U.S. Senator Barack Obama. In February of 2010, the Obama administration settled with the aggrieved 70,000 for $1.25 billion that the government did not have to give. This money, by the way, was finessed out of a defense appropriation bill.
At the time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the agreement would close a "sordid chapter" in the department's history, a chapter in which no one seems to have been so much as reprimanded.
The major media reported the settlement as though it were the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. For the last forty years, as the civil rights industry has manufactured more and more absurd grievances -- most notably the Tea Party smear that incited Breitbart's reprisal -- the media have reported on them with increasingly wide-eyed innocence.
In the various stories on the settlement, not one reporter that I could identify stopped to do the math. Pajamas Media did in a detailed article by "Zombie" titled appropriately, "Pigford v. Glickman: 86,000 claims from 39,697 total farmers?"
Although 86,000 black farmers are alleged to have received payments, at no time in the last three decades have there been more than 40,000 black farmers. Nor is there much turnover in the farming business. No entrepreneurial activity involves more long-term investment.
Realistically, of the 40,000 or 86,000, how many could have applied for a USDA loan and been rejected while white farmers in comparable circumstances were getting loans? If there were hundreds, let alone thousands, the heads of loan officers should have been rolling around the USDA floors, but I know of no such purge.
More to the point, out of about $1 billion paid out so far in settlements, the largest amount has gone to the Sherrods' New Communities Incorporated, which received some $13 million. As Time Magazine approvingly reported this week, $330,000 was "awarded to Shirley and Charles Sherrod for mental suffering alone."
Unwittingly, Charles Sherrod shed light on the how and why of the settlement in a speech he gave in January 2010. As he explained, New Communities farmed its 6,000 acres successfully for seventeen years before running into five straight years of drought. Then, according to Sherrod, New Communities engaged in a three-year fight with the USDA to get the appropriate loans to deal with drought.
Said Sherrod, "They were saying that since we're a corporation, we're not an individual, we're not a farmer." Nevertheless, the Sherrods prevailed, but the late payments "caused us to lose this land." In other words, the bureaucratic delay over taxpayer-funded corporate welfare payments cost them their business.
Then, thanks to their "good lawyers," said a gleeful Sherrod, who seems to have fully recovered from his mental suffering, the Sherrods successfully sued the government for "a large sum of money -- a large sum of money." While saying this, he made hand gestures suggesting $15 million. The land itself was admittedly worth no more than $9 million.
Sherrod gave this talk to announce that the FCC had awarded New Communities a radio station in Albany, Georgia, still another race-based corporate welfare boondoggle. Before the award of this station, he added, the Sherrods "had no means of communicating with our people."
The "our people" in question, of course, are black people. With this new voice, the Sherrods will help "stop the white man and his Uncle Toms from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black."
Yes, indeed -- these are just the people we want spending the money we don't have.
An exercise:
Google News Search -
Sherrod + Edited
3,920 articles
Sherrod + Excerpt
626 articles
Words do mean things - the left uses ‘edited’ to shift the blame onto Breitbart for a tape that he did not edit. The tape was excerpted.
The excerpt was complete and not altered(edited).
If edit and excerpt mean the same thing, why is there a large disparity of word usage? Why is ‘edit’ the favored word?
Why was once ‘Global Warming’ favored and now ‘Climate Change’ is the favorable choice?
FOX needs to have WILLIE BROWN on!!! That was a VERY INTERESTING comment he made!!!! GO WILLIE!!!
With the way MS Fox News is headed....Willie Brown may be too conservative for MS FNC
Gosh..even today Faux and Friends were gushing over a bogus poll that claimed “62% of Arizonans support letting Illegal Aliens stay”. MS Fox News is pretty much Liberal now...
That is actually very good news. Breitbart should get a team of lawyers together and bury this b*tch in discovery requests going all the way back to her days with Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” movement in the 60’s.
*********************
It is, and he will.
Shirley is burnt bread.
Damn. That article pissed me off no end. Nicely done.
There is absolutely a difference between editing and excerpting. A major difference, in fact, when you're implying manipulation of the original.
AMEN!!! Most of FOX, except for Glenn Beck, is UNWATCHABLE!
This seems like a very important story but I’m a little confused and the discussion here has been terse or sidetracked. Is this article saying that Shirly Sherrod recieved 13 million in direct payments from the Department of Agriculture where she works to her corporation? Did she administer the distribution of these funds or was she solely a beneficiary? Did she get an additional 15 million on top of the 13 million? 80,000 black farmers were paid but only 40,000 exist? Sherrod’s corporation recieved 330,000 just for mental suffering, and a settlement was made for corporate mental suffering? The Obama administration reopened the case unnecessarily and agreed to pay additional moneys that totalled over 1 billion dollars to black farmers?
I really don’t fully understand the article but it seems important.
To say “absolutely a difference” is to repeat the robo-meme.
Excerpting is a form of editing. Fixing typos is a form of editing. Rearranging excerpts — say like the Coppola did to the three Godfather movies in order to produce the chronological “The Godfather Trilogy 1901-1980,” is a form of editing.
An apple is a fruit. A pear is a fruit. To say that Eve gave Adam a pear is wrong. To say that Eve gave Adam a fruit is correct. To say that Eve gave Adam a fruit is a common and old way of quoting the passge.
The word used in the original Hebrew is “p’ri”, which in means fruit of a tree in general, and in some contexts means a more specific fruit, perhaps an apple, even.
The truth here is the edits of the Sherrod video, which were all excerpts kept in order, did present a variant message than that she intended to provide with her whole speech, in in that sense, the excerpted tape was unfaithful to her whole message in a way. However the excerpted tape was indeed a accurate representation of Sherrod’s racism in office and how it negatively affected a fellow human. By being an excerpt highlighting and focused on that action of hers it no more misrepresented her later claimed ‘redemption’ than a security camera of a thief robbing a convenience store misrepresents his possible later ‘redemption’.
And in fact, as we all have learned a bigger picture of Mrs. Sherrod continuing today by her present actions and statements, she still comes off as a truly UNREDEEMED racist.
To say that Eve gave Adam anfruitapple is a common and old way of quoting the passge.
There has only been 40,000 black farmers. Ever. But the USDA paid out to 80,000.
Pigford vs Vilsack II was the reopened case where more "damages" were awarded. Most of this is posted on FR.
Good points. The whole robo-meme of ‘excerpt-vs-edit’ distracts from the real story. Breitbart released an edited tape. The edits PROPERLY represented the racial warfare that Sherrod is CURRENTLY part of.
Because people do not have genders they have sexes. Words have meaning.
Edit means "to change". Excerpt means "to select a portion of"
So, yes, I WILL INDEED complain when OUR SIDE ADOPTS policies of destructive word games that reinforce and empower that tactic when the social deconstructionists and Marxists use it.
Good. then you will have no objection to using the correct word in this case (Excerpt) rather than the misleading and dishonest word (edit)
Are you getting that the Sherrod’s got 150,000 each from this story or is that out there elsewhere?
Source: {excerpted] http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/gender
GENDER NOUN:Based on the usage note it is more proper to use 'persons of opposite gender' when referring to marriage as a social contract.
- A grammatical category ... that may be itrary or based on characteristics such as sex or animacy ...
- Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.
- The condition of being female or male; sex.
- Females or males considered as a group: expressions used by one gender.
Usage Note:
Traditionally, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter," but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as gender gap and the politics of gender. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. According to this rule, one would say The effectiveness of the medication appears to depend on the sex (not gender) of the patient, but In peasant societies, gender (not sex) roles are likely to be more clearly defined.
Hope that enlightens you!
It’s out there in other stories. And some of those articles were posted on FR.
New Communities is due to receive approximately $13 million ($8,247,560 for loss of land and $4,241,602 for loss of income; plus $150,000 each to Shirley and Charles for pain and suffering).
I believe she received it BEFORE she got the job with the USDA And she works for the GEORGIA section, not the Fed, as I read it.
Did she administer the distribution of these funds or was she solely a beneficiary?
She was a beneficiary. Most of the beneficiaries were members of her family, or friends, -- a group that she put together for the purposes of the lawsuit.
Did she get an additional 15 million on top of the 13 million?
I don't know. I think those additional funds were paid to other parties.
80,000 black farmers were paid but only 40,000 exist?
That is my undertanding.
Sherrod’s corporation recieved 330,000 just for mental suffering, and a settlement was made for corporate mental suffering?
No. Sherrod and her husband PERSONALLY received $330,000 just for themselves for metal pain and suffering. The others got an average of $70,000 apiece.
The Obama administration reopened the case unnecessarily and agreed to pay additional moneys that totalled over 1 billion dollars to black farmers?
That is my understanding. More than 4 times the number of pay outs than the estimate were made and more than double the number of "black farmers" that existed were paid.
Thank you, I’m starting to understand. 13 million is a LOT of money. 300,000 is a lot too, but if big chunks of the 13 million went to Sherrod’s family and friends that makes her not very sympathetic (to say the least). And when did she have this realization about race if she is a recent hire?
Thanks, that clears up a lot. What a scandal. Hope Brietbart takes them to the woodshed on this.
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