Shirley Sherrod Turns Down Obama Offer - Now Free to Sue Obama

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Yesterday Shirley Sherrod, the Ag Department official who was fired by the Obama administration, met with the Secretary of Agriculture and turned down the offer from the Obama people to rejoin the team. As usual the media has continued to sidestep the most important questions to ask Shirley as if not asking will make the truth go away.

Since her story broke in the media we have consistently wondered why the mainstream, cable and progressive media have all chosen to ignore facts and pass sweeping judgments with no justification yet they still seem to have learned no lessons.

Silent is the media on whether Shirley and her husband stand to gain $350,000 from suing the Ag dept for discrimination on a long pending settlement. Should she get a large award and the answer lies in a pending bill for over a billion dollars buried in Congress, then one wonders how a former Ag official could sue and win money from the very department she works for. Sounds awful close to a conflict of interest.

Better yet, why did no media ask if she intends to sue the Obama administration for one of the most blatant acts of discrimination every admitted to by the government. Any half baked lawyer could win a huge settlement based on the dumb mistakes the Obama people made, then admitted to making.

If she has already sued the government before, did Obama or Ag Secretary Vilsack attempt to talk her out of suing again when they met with her? Did they ask her to wait until after the fall elections before going after her retirement fund?

Shirley deserves to win big because she was a victim, not of the media though the media and NAACP were stupid in how they handled it, but of the Obama administration because they should have known better than to find her guilty with no review of the facts. When the White House can ignore due process we are all in trouble.

As for the media, they remain silent on the issues I raised weeks ago and that are just as important today. If the media were truly interested in the facts this information would have been disclosed long ago. Did she sue before? Will she get $350,000 when Congress approves the bill? Will she sue again? Did the president, Ag Secretary or anyone else try and talk her out of suing or ask her to delay the inevitable? Why did the media not check out the obvious?

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White House and Ag Secretary apologize - Is Sherrod going to sue for a Retirement Fund?

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It seems that the White House and Agriculture Department might have just handed Shirley Sherrod a retirement gift by apologizing for discriminatory actions by the Administration. Such an apology is an admission of guilt on the part of the White House of discrimination.

They just might have apologized to the wrong person as Shirley may have much more in mind than an apology. You see, Shirley was part of a group that sued the Ag Department years ago and in 1999 a group of 16,000 Black farmers received a nearly $1 billion settlement, meaning each received about $50,000. But Shirley and her husband received an extra award for pain and suffering of $150,000 each meaning an additional $300,000.

As part of a April 14, 1999 class action case settlement, commonly known as the Pigford case, U.S. taxpayers have already offered over $1 billion in cash, non-credit awards and debt relief to almost 16,000 black farmers who claimed that they were discriminated against by USDA officials as they “farmed or attempted to farm.” In addition, USDA’s Farm Service Agency spent over $166 million on salaries and expenses on this case from 1999-2009, according to agency records.



Settlement activities on thousands of discrimination suits against the Ag Department have been a priority of the Administration as about 80,000 cases for Black farmers, which were too late for the class action or thrown out for various grounds remain and Congress may soon be asked for an additional $1.5 billion to settle the remainder of the cases. As for Shirley, how much she really will receive would require an investigation of the "debt relief" and non-credit awards she received from the settlement.

Thus Shirley has previously sued Ag for discrimination and won a few hundred thousand dollars. Now she is handed on a silver platter a sure fire discrimination suit with the admission by the Administration of discrimination and a rush to judgment. How many more millions could she win by suing again, this time with provable grounds?

Perhaps this explains why she was reluctant to accept a new position with Obama when the apology was extended. Did her previous appointment by Obama to the Ag Department have anything to do with the earlier law suit settlement which remains to be paid? Did the Administration even know she had won a discrimination case against the government?

The Pigford case raises more questions than it answers. Settling the case has been a clear example of the waste and abuse by agencies if the cost of ligation to date, over $166 million, is the real cost. The fact less than half of the case is settled, so far 16,000 claims have been settled with 80,000 more to go, shows that such discrimination claims ran rampant in the government.

Are the settlements being negotiated to bury the claims so they cannot become political issues in the upcoming elections? There was a real rush to judgment but it may be repeated with the rush to apologize before the facts and background of the previous Ag Department discrimination suits are settled.



As for the conservative blog that exposed the tape in the first place, the liberal media and NAACP who first accused Shirley of racism and called for her resignation now say they were snookered by the conservative media. What idiots! Since when did the liberal media NOT have to fact check a story before throwing around condemnations? They claim the tape was edited. Nearly every day MSNBC commentators are throwing edited tapes on the air to prove the conservatives are the evil empire out to get the leftists. More often than not such tapes are taken way out of context, then repeated over and over on the various talking head shows of MSNBC by a series of daily Democrats from Congress smearing the conservatives or Tea Party for the out of context network claims.

Truth has never been a requirement of the left. Yet they suddenly found themselves caught in a quagmire of untruths and are still looking for a way to blame their irresponsible reporting on the Republicans and the Tea Party. People are fed up with the whimpering and whining of the liberal media and the wall of distortion that comes from the Washington news corps. Long ago Main Street learned this truth and media credibility ranks right down there with Nancy Pelosi and her agenda.



The following article today by Rosslyn Smith further explains the details still missing in the Shirley Sherrod episode which may be far from over.

Forty Acres & a Mule -- Sherrod Style?
Rosslyn Smith

Shirley Sherrod's quick dismissal from the Obama administration may have had less to do with her comments on race before the NAACP than her long involvement in the aptly named Pigford case, a class action against the US government on behalf of black farmers alleging that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) had discriminated against black farmers during the period from 1983 through 1997. According to Wikipedia:

The plaintiffs settled with the government in 1999. Under the consent decree, all African American farmers would be paid a "virtually automatic" US$50,000 plus granted certain loan forgiveness and tax offsets. This process was called "Track A".[2]

Alternatively, affected farmers could follow the "Track B" process, seeking a larger payment by presenting a greater amount of evidence - the legal standard in this case was to have a preponderance of evidence along with evidence of greater damages....

At the time the case was settled, it was estimated there would be in the area of 2,000 to 3,000 claims. As with most estimates involving government handouts that number was woefully short of the mark. Again, according to Wikipedia:

22,505 "Track A" applications were heard and decided upon, of which 13,348 (59%) were approved. US$995 million had been disbursed or credited to the "Track A" applicants as of January 2009, including US$760 million disbursed as US$50,000 cash awards. Fewer than 200 farmers opted for the "Track B" process.

Beyond those applications that were heard and decided upon, about 70,000 petitions were filed late and were not allowed to proceed. Some have argued that the notice program was defective, and others blamed the farmers' attorneys for "the inadequate notice and overall mismanagement of the settlement agreement." A provision in the 2008 farm bill essentially allowed a re-hearing in civil court for any claimant whose claim had been denied without a decision that had been based on its merits

In other words, according to Agri-Pulse.com the number of total claims filed not only exceeded the original estimate by almost 40 to 50 times, it is close to four times the USDA's estimate of 26,785 total black owned farms in 1977! One reason for this is that the settlement applied to farmers and those who "attempted to farm" and did not receive assistance from the USDA. Getting the latest round of Pigford cases from the 2008 farm bill settled is said to be a high priority for the Obama administration.

So where does Sherrod come into this picture? In a special to the Washington Examiner, Tom Blumer explains that Sherrod and the group she formed along with family members and others, New Communities. Inc. received the largest single settlement under Pigford.

... 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). There may also be an unspecified amount in forgiveness of debt. This is the largest award so far in the minority farmers law suit (Pigford vs Vilsack).

What makes this even more interesting to me is that Charles appears to be Charles Sherrod, who was a big player in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s. The SNCC was the political womb that nurtured the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers before it faded away.

Blumer has some questions about this settlement and about Sherrod's rapid departure from the USDA

Was Ms. Sherrod's USDA appointment an unspoken condition of her organization's settlement?

How much "debt forgiveness" is involved in USDA's settlement with New Communities?

Why were the Sherrods so deserving of a combined $300,000 in "pain and suffering" payments -- amounts that far exceed the average payout thus far to everyone else? ($1.15 billion divided by 16,000 is about $72,000)?

Given that New Communities wound down its operations so long ago (it appears that this occurred sometime during the late 1980s), what is really being done with that $13 million in settlement money?

Here are a few bigger-picture questions:

Did Shirley Sherrod resign so quickly because the circumstances of her hiring and the lawsuit settlement with her organization that preceded it might expose some unpleasant truths about her possible and possibly sanctioned conflicts of interest?

Is USDA worried about the exposure of possible waste, fraud, and abuse in its handling of Pigford?

Did USDA also dispatch Sherrod hastily because her continued presence, even for another day, might have gotten in the way of settling Pigford matters quickly?

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Obama's Chicago Thugs Keep Racism alive by Forcing the Firing of Black Appointee for Racism

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In what must go down as one of the most bizarre episodes of the Obama presidency the White House, the NAACP and the national and cable news industry all showed their true colors, and it was not the rainbow prism they like to talk about but the darkness of bigotry and prejudice they claim to abhor.



Yesterday morning a conservative web blog released a partial video of a USGA official talking about an incident that took place nearly 25 years ago. In it she appeared to be making racist remarks. There is nothing wrong with a conservative or liberal web site raising questions.

This story came on the heels of the NAACP, in a lust for national attention, starting a firestorm by accusing the Tea Party of being racist. Of course Tea Party and media people fired back and in the end the NAACP would have been much better off saying nothing.



With that backdrop, the conservative story appeared. While there is nothing wrong with the release of a story for political purposes, there is a lot wrong when the White House gang and news media react to the story with no fact checking and in a panic mode, and nothing else could explain the amateur reaction by the Obama gang.

Perhaps they were trying to shove the issue under the carpet so it would not distract from today's big Obama news splash when he signs the financial reform bill and proves he is going after Wall Street. Of course with the stock for Wall Street bad boy Goldman Sachs going up, and Goldman was the top Obama campaign supporter, in spite of the Obama bill and a paltry fine imposed by the SEC, one wonders if financial reform Obama style is not just a ruse.



Back to poor Shirley Sherrod at the Agriculture Department, she was driving back to her office and got three calls from the Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture Sharon Cook and was finally told to pull off the road. She was told the White House wanted her resignation before the story broke on the Glenn Beck Show on Fox News later in the afternoon. She was forced to text her resignation.



No due diligence. No protections guaranteed under the rules and Constitution. No one even asked her side of the story. The Chicago thugs running the White House will throw any staff appointee under the wheels of the nearest bus on just the threat of Glenn Beck talking about it on his show.



Well shortly after his election the White House and Obama declared war on Fox News and tried to punish Fox News by cutting off White House contact with them. After two years of the war with Fox News Obama and his gang are getting the same result as in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Administration continues to spin their wheels while trying to suppress all opposition. That does not sit well with the American public who has proven they want media watchdogs like Roger Ailes and Fox News to keep an eye on Obama because Fox is burying everyone else in the Nielsen ratings.



Shirley was not being racist, all any responsible person in the news media, White House or Agricultural Department would have known that with a simple fact check. But none was done and they fired her first with the approval of the president. That is a reckless disregard for all laws and protections in this nation. In fact, the white farmer she was supposed to have discriminated against came to her defense saying she saved his family farm.



Ironically, it took a combination of a Black appointee by the president, Glenn Beck and Fox News to show the true colors of this Administration. Their words have no meaning. Truth is a matter of convenience. They will destroy the careers of their own people to protect their media image.

As for the news media, they were just as guilty in failing to fact check the story. The same was true in many incidents in the past. The forces trying to manufacture the news are in control and the American public beware. DO NOT TRUST THE NEWS MEDIA. DO NOT TRUST THE WHITE HOUSE THUGS.

We can only hope that Obama was being used and was not behind the sinister plot to destroy the career of Shirley Sherrod for political expediency. This case of White House manipulation must be investigated and it better be by an independent prosecutor since the Obama Justice Department has proven itself to be inept and far too political to investigate itself.



Civil rights are in question today, and not because of the bigotry of the people but the actions by our political and media institutions. In the process very good and loyal administrators like Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, have been steamrolled into huge mistakes by the White House and will be compromised by taking the heat for the president.

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