Showing posts with label Sherrod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sherrod. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 26, 2021

USDA Appointments

 The Livingston County News picks up a CQ piece on the appointment of Jewel Bronaugh as deputy secretary for USDA. It notes the criticism of Biden's nomination of Vilsack to return as secretary due to the Sherrod firing.  Includes an endorsement from the VA Farm Bureau, and hopes from John Boyd.

FSA employees may be pleased that she was previously FSA state director in Virginia under the Obama administration.

[Updated: DTN piece on the same.]

Monday, November 12, 2012

Friday, September 23, 2011

Obama Overreacts Again

With the Shirley Sherrod incident the Obama administration over reacted: fearing adverse publicity they pulled the trigger first and then worried about their aim. They may be doing it again in the case of conference costs (the $16 muffins which were reported in the Post earlier this week.).  The Washington Post piece includes a reaction from the Hilton Hotels explaining, including this: " In Washington, the contracted breakfast included fresh fruit, coffee, juice, muffins, tax and gratuity, for an inclusive price of $16 per person."  The Post rather weakly says they relied on the DOJ's OIG report, which cited "$16 muffins"--in the print paper this morning this correction was buried inside on the Federal page.

In Obama's defense, there's a very small window in which to calibrate one's reaction, and the politics of modern media are such it's usually better to shoot first.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Sherrod Still Negotiating

That's the word from the Post.   As I read the Jackson Lewis Civil Rights Assessment I thought I was seeing repeated suggestions that USDA hire Jackson Lewis for follow-on work.  I'm not clear whether Sherrod's group would be doing that, or whether it's two separate areas of work.

[Updated: corrected the name of the firm doing the assessment.] 

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Return of Shirley Sherrod

Politico reports Shirley Sherrod will be working for USDA, not in USDA.
Sherrod will be a contract employee leading one of three field programs designed to bolster relations between the USDA and minority farmers and ranchers. Support for the programs is among several recommendations contained in a sweeping, two-year study released Wednesday that examined decades of discrimination claims by African Americans, Latinos, women and Native Americans.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Sherrod as Faceless Bureaucrat

One puzzle about the Sherrod episode is why, why was it so explosive, so radioactive?  Why did the administration and NAACP react so quickly?  Race is obviously part of the answer, but I'd suggest bureaucracy, specifically "faceless bureaucrats", is also part of the answer. [ed--gee that's a surprise.]

As I see it now, this is my best guess at what actually was happening in 1986 and then what happened last week.

What's the context?  The NYTimes has an article published Sept. 10, 1986, which provides some background. Essentially the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHA) of USDA had made lots of loans in the 1970's which, in the hard times for agriculture in the 1980's, had turned sour. Meanwhile the Reagan administration, not known for its enthusiasm about government programs, had tried to cut back on FmHA's programs.  And GAO and the press had found a lot of instances of abuse of the programs. And finally 1986 was the first time there was an automatic cut in federal programs under Gramm-Rudman. All this meant bad times for farmers. Although FmHA was trying to collect delinquent loans, as the Times article says, "The agency has been sued 55 times since 1981 by farmers saying its loan-collecting and foreclosure practices were unconstitutional. The agency lost 37 times...." My suspicion from Sherrod's statement is that the Federation had participated in one or more of the lawsuits and, perhaps, had obtained an injunction against FmHA's pressing its foreclosure actions.

To complicate the situation even more,  in 1986 Georgia and the Southeast were suffering a historic drought as described in this Times article. "In Georgia, Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin is predicting, ''We may lose up to 5,000 farmers over the cycle of the next 12 months.'' That would be 10 percent of the state's index of 50,000 farmers and ranchers, ''and of that 50,000, probably 25,000 are in financial trouble,'' he said."  

From what we are told, in 1986 Sherrod was working for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Land Assistance Fund,  presumably as a counselor of some kind. Don't know how long she's worked there--the Federation seems to have originated in the late 60's.  (In 1980 there was a Times article about the Emergency Land Fund and its efforts to preserve black land ownership. The Fund  merged with the Federation in 1985.)

Sherrod was about 38.  In comes Mr. Spooner, who is her first white client.  She assumes that he's not here of his own volition; he's not a walk-in customer like other customers (I'm assuming black farmers would often come to her first); he's been sent by USDA or GA Department of Agriculture.  (I'd assume having him as a client means she becomes rather tense, more tense than usual.  That would be my reaction, but maybe that's wrong, because she may be an extrovert people-person.)  She's definitely on guard.

What's Spooner feeling? Sherrod says he eventually ended up in Chapter 11 bankruptcy so I'll assume he probably had FmHA loan(s) and was in trouble. We don't know why he tried the Federation--Sherrod's assumption that USDA had sent him might be correct. If FmHA was trying to foreclose, it might be a conflict of interest for them to advise Spooner on the best way to fight it.  Referring him to a third party, like the Federation, would make sense.

Spooner is about 20 years older than Sherrod, so he's born in the early 1920's, in south Georgia when the KKK is riding high.  We don't know what his opinions and feelings were in 1986; maybe he had evolved faster than other Georgians (who had elected Lester Maddox of pick-axe handle fame, then Jimmy Carter of the famous grain in earlier decades). In the interests of telling the story it's probably fair to say he's not happy about turning to a radical organization, which would have been the reputation of the [coop] and one which caters to blacks, but he needs to save his farm.

Again, we don't know if this is the first time Spooner is acting as the customer/client of a black, a situation where he is a supplicant.  Let's say it is; almost certainly he's never applied for help on such an important matter to a black woman.  So in addition to feeling trapped by his economic situation, he may well be feeling uptight from the situation--he's asking for help from a black woman. And it's a younger person

So, as Sherrod describes it, Spooner talks and talks.  To her he comes across as trying to be superior. Maybe that's true, maybe not; maybe he's compensating for his helplessness..  Maybe he's telling his story from day 1 and trying to show that his predicament isn't his fault; maybe he's just anxious about getting help.

Back to Sherrod now: She says she's trying to figure out how much help she'll give him.  There's an implication of games-playing here; he's trying to impress her, she's feeling her power.  If she's bad, she'll turn him away.  If she's good, she'll help him all she can.  Somewhere in between is where she comes down, at least in her telling; she sends him to a white lawyer. I'm not clear why that's not the optimum solution.  Sherrod isn't a lawyer and he's got legal problems, but maybe she thinks her advice would have been good.  Or maybe she knows the lawyer isn't much good, as he turns out to be, and maybe that fact gives her a little malicious pleasure. It's definitely a situation with a lot of emotional currents.  When the NAACP audience listens to it, William Saletan in his analysis of their reaction only allows for one interpretation, but to me there's enough going on that likely different people picked up on different elements. Most of all, I suspect they were, as we do, empathize with her mixed emotions.

Now what about Sherrod's narrative strikes someone so strongly that they make the excerpt, someone adds text giving wrong information to the front, it gets played, and NAACP and USDA over react to it?

The first and obvious answer is racial.  Breitbart's position now is that she's recounting an episode of discrimination and her audience is enjoying it. The idea is "man bites dog"--a black person has power and discriminates against a white.  And, given the misframed excerpt, the idea which Vilsack and the NAACP was reacting to, the [wrong] fact she was a USDA bureaucrat when she did this. But humans tend to enjoy reversals: we love to see the powerful take a pratfall, so I don't think the racial element, by itself, was enough to account for its power.

I think there's another story here, a story which is symbolized by the conversion of "faceless bureaucrat" into an epithet. In part it ties into American anxieties about the power of the faceless bureaucrat.  We don't like power; we tolerate powerful people if they don't rub our noses in it. But we're aware whenever we deal with a bureaucrat that they know the rules, we don't.  They have the power, we don't.  So the idea of a bureaucrat, like Sherrod, being arbitrary and capricious is frightening; it's particularly frightening if you represent people who usually sit across from the bureaucrat, like the NAACP, or if you manage a bureaucracy, like USDA, which has been called the last plantation.

So arbitrary bureaucracy is our bogeyman (a good old Scots term, apparently) which has a scare power all out of proportion to its reality. That's why the excerpt had its power. And because it was powerful, Vilsack and the NAACP reacted too fast. 

Monday, July 26, 2010

A Little Remembered Fact? White Lynchings

Matthew Yglesias blows up an American Spectator piece on the lynching of Sherrod's father, but he includes a graph showing lynchings from 1882 on.  In the first 10 or so years, the graph seems to show more whites being lynched than blacks (caution: my memory is that statistics on lynchings were very hard to gather so need to be taken with a grain of salt).  Of course, in proportion to population, the rate for blacks was always higher, but white lynchings remind us just how violent a country we used to be.

Friday, July 23, 2010

Audience Approval of What in Sherrod's Speech?

William Saletan does a careful analysis of the audience's reaction to Shirley Sherrod's speech.  My own reaction, which I've hesitated to state because I don't have a lot of experience listening to majority black audiences responding to black speakers and ministers, was that they were giving the audible feedback which seems to be the norm in such settings.  Saletan's analysis is much more careful than that, and convinces me that Breitbart's claims are wrong.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Sherrod: The Albany Movement, New Communities, and Pigford

Shirley Sherrod's husband was one of the leaders of the Albany Movement. 

Apparently they were leaders of the New Communities: 
One of the most important initiatives of the Southwest Georgia Project was the organization of New Communities, Inc., a land trust. By January 1970, the group had purchased nearly 6000 acres of land in Lee County Georgia, which made it the largest single land mass owned by Blacks in the United States. The purpose of the project was to upgrade the quality of life of rural, poor, and mostly Black communities by offering meaningful employment, creating economic leverages to ensure and improve the income of small farmers, and ownership opportunities for its settlers.
Apparently the trust ended up losing the land, under circumstances which led to the award under the Pigford suit.  At this early date it's not clear the ins and outs of how the Sherrods' relate to the money awarded--are they still trustees and who would be the beneficiaries. Fox has a piece here.  My guess is that New Communities was one of the case subsumed under the Pigford class action suit.  The suit was resolved by having two tracks:  Let me quote from the 2005 CRS report:
The Pigford consent decree basically establishes a two-track dispute resolution mechanism for those seeking relief. The most widely-used option — Track A — provides a monetary settlement of $50,000 plus relief in the form of loan forgiveness and offsets of tax liability. Track A claimants had to present substantial evidence (i.e., a reasonable basis for finding that discrimination happened) that
! claimant owned or leased, or attempted to own or lease, farm land;
! claimant applied for a specific credit transaction at a USDA county office during the applicable period;
! the loan was denied, provided late, approved for a lesser amount than requested, encumbered by restrictive conditions, or USDA failed to provide appropriate loan service, and such treatment was less favorable than that accorded specifically identified, similarly situated white
farmers; and
! the USDA’s treatment of the loan application led to economic damage to the class member.

Alternatively, class participants could seek a larger, tailored payment by showing  evidence of greater damages under a Track B claim. Track B claimants had to prove their claims and actual damages by a preponderance of the evidence (i.e., it is more likely than not that their claim is valid). The documentation to support such a claim and the amount of relief are reviewed by a third party arbitrator, who makes a binding decision. The consent decree also provided injunctive relief, primarily in the form of priority consideration for loans and purchases, and technical assistance in filling out forms
7
Finally, plaintiffs were permitted to withdraw from the class and pursue their individual cases in federal court or through the USDA administrative process.

Sounds to me as if the New Communities must either have been a Track B, or an individual case. Although I've reservations about Pigford issues, the Track B cases are the most likely awards to be warranted, IMHO. And without knowing how awards are computed, the current market value of 6,000 acres of Georgia farmland would be high.

[Updated: it's possible the suit was outside Pigford entirely--no doubt this will be clarified as time goes on.]

The Blindness of the Chattering Class

One common meme among the chattering class in discussions of how to fix the deficit is to mock the great American public. Polls often show the public preferring to cut foreign aid as their first choice to fix the deficit, not realizing how small a percentage of the budget is spent on foreign aid.

But, as the Bible used to say, remember the beam in your eye before the mote in your neighbor's eye. The chattering classes, both right (Breitbart et.al.) and left (Vilsack and NAACP) missed the lies in the framing of the Sherrod video.  The main one: that RD spends $1.2 billion in Georgia is easily debunked if you have a sense of the numbers.  My thought process:
  • how big is Georgia--don't know, but Atlanta has been growing, so let's say it's 15 million people.  
  • the U.S. is something over 300 million, so Georgia is 1/20 of the US.
  • if Georgia gets 1/20 of the RD funds, that means RD is spending $25 billion total.
  • no way RD spends that much.  The USDA budget is somewhere around $100 billion, about 50-60 percent food stamps and other nutrition programs, etc. $15-20 billion for farm programs, doesn't leave much for all of the rest.
Now I haven't checked my accuracy, except to find I overestimated Georgia's population and, to find RD spends closer to $1.2 billion nationally

Shirley Sherrod's Speech, Book to Follow?

I have to apologize to Shirley Sherrod.  From the video bit, I thought she wasn't the best story teller.  But reading the transcript of the full speech (well, almost the full speech--I guess the transcriber got bored when she started on the Rural Development programs) she's pretty good.  I think she's a bit younger than I, so I remember some--the sheriff she mentions who fined everyone coming through the county.

Not great--she says growing up she wanted to leave the farm, get away, go north and get herself a Northern husband.  But she ended up marrying someone in the civil rights movement.

About now there should be a handful of journalists contacting her and offering to write her memoirs.

There are some things she describes which fit into the Pigford case.  I may incorporate them into a future post.
[Updated--she and her husband apparently won the biggest award under Pigford--I say apparently because the release here isn't quite as explicit as I'd like.]
[Update 2--her husband, Charles Sherrod, has a short bio here.]