been continually denied the right to due process, regardless of which party has held the white house, if it isn't the Administration of the
different Parties, then it could only be the so called POWERS That BE Evil and Corrupt Bureaucrats calling the shots or working for those that are, so take a look at the records of those who have been there or their legacy families have been there, to be doing all the
crimes against the American farmer, who in turn effects the American food supply that ultimately affects the world food supply .
Melissa Seaver
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Subj: Civil Rights Abuses at USDA Continues Under the Obama/Vilsack Administration
the below can give you some idea of what is going on inside usda (see below lesa donnelly letters to secretary vilsack, monica davis article,and open letter to john boyd ), while claims that usda civil rights administration is just fine. this a marathon away from the real truth.
with documented widespread racism, sexism, assaults, reprisals, hostile work environment, racial slurs/epithet, bullying and more, against usda employees around the country, secretary vilsack and his top office of civil rights team, continue refusing to meet with the usda coalition of minority employees, to discuss our issues and concerns.
usda tells the american people they are open and transparent.
lawrence lucas, president
usda coalition of minority employees
856/ 910-2300
"the mouth will say anything.....but behavior don't lie"
Click here: The Agriculture Hit Man: USDA ignores 1999 class action, illegally revives debt and threatens whistleblowers | Bef
My name is Lesa Donnelly. I am the Vice President of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees. I am a former Forest Service employee and currently represent Forest Service employees before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Merit Systems Protection Board. I've worked for and with the USDA for approximately thirty years. I've been meeting with congressional representatives for fifteen years to identify and resolve USDA's discriminatory practices and "The Last Plantation" mentality that permeates this agency. I've been invited to the White House three times to discuss these issues and spoke at Congressional Hearings last year. In fifteen years there have been some positive changes � but very little change indeed.
I read with interest your April 21, 2009, letter, "A New Civil Rights Era for USDA." I found it curious that you began your letter, "As you know, civil rights is one of my top priorities." I did not know that. There are many of your employees who also do not know that civil rights is a priority for you. The reason for this � they are currently being harassed, intimidated, retaliated against, threatened with violence, and discriminated against based on race, gender, and disability, and no one in USDA is doing anything to stop it or hold the perpetrators accountable. Allow me to share a few examples of egregious situations in the Forest Service:
Mr. Secretary, the list of similar incidents is seemingly endless. There is little difference between the incidents described above and the ones I described to Secretaries Mike Espy, Dan Glickman, Ann Veneman, Mike Johanns and Ed Schafer.
I am experiencing déjà vu from your 14 action items. While they sound like a good start, excuse me if I am somewhat skeptical of your plan to bring in a new era of civil rights at USDA - I've heard it before. And while past "new approaches" took years to implement, employees continued to lose their financial, emotional and physical well-being from harassment and retaliation. The number one reason for this is that many of the employees you will task to implement your action items are the same employees who worked under Espy, Glickman, and so on. They were obstacles to positive change in civil rights then and they will be obstacles to change now. I would like to take this opportunity to recommend that you pay close attention to the current employees in your OGC and inspector general offices, civil rights office, human resources office, mediation cadre, and your directors and regional foresters because these employees have been the biggest obstacle to making positive changes in civil rights. I would like to suggest that you seriously reconsider contracting with attorneys to represent the agency. I've observed they have little vested interest in settling EEO cases and much interest in receiving thousands of taxpayer dollars as they extend cases to oblivion. Action item one should be - Weed Out Obstructionists.
The USDA Coalition of Minority Employees is available to meet with you, as we have with former Secretaries, to discuss the issues and work toward this new era of civil rights at USDA. That would truly be change we can believe in.
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Lucas says that the agency's aggressive retaliation against critics, whistleblowers and farm activists is widespread and he is not surprised that a USDA manager, Shirley Shirrard came under fire. Many activists and farmers believe that Sherrord was targeted because she was so successful in assisting family farmers to keep their land. According to several congressional hearings, USDA has been following a 1972 Nixon era policy of eliminating family farmers and moving US agriculture to a "more efficient corporate farm model" for two generations. This process was described in a Congressional Hearing 40 years ago. (See: www.themilkweed.com/Issues_In_Depth.htm www.buzzle.com/editorials/4-17-2006-93693.asp and www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/151897 )
Lucas says the lack of accountability within the organization has gone on for years. He and Burrell are highly critical of the USDA's practice of using taxpayer dollars to fund the defense of USDA managers and employees who actively and aggressively use illegal and unconstitutional means to foreclose on farmers and retaliate against USDA critics and whistleblowers. Both men a irate at the agency because it continues to hire expensive "K-Street type attorneys" to fight whistleblowers and employees who complain and file charges against the agency.
Lucas says the USDA backlog of whistleblower complaints and civil rights complaints has not been speedily addressed. "As long as you allow people to abuse people and get away with it, and as long as you use the tax payer's money to defend the abusers against poor employees who are struggling day by day, you are not going to get any improvement against this plantation culture at USDA."
When asked to define that "plantation culture," Lucas said:
"I mean a culture that is abusive, that is disrespectful, that is hostile, an environment that allows slurs being thrown at Jews, racial epithets being exhibited in the workplace, like hangmen's nooses, people being called the n-word. The plantation mentality goes beyond just race, the problem that Mrs. Sherrard pointed out was not just about race, but was about economic deprivation. In other words, poor people were suffering the same abuse as minorities, especially African Americans."
Lucas described the abuse and hostile environment at USDA. "You have white women being abused, sexually abused, and assaulted in the workplace. You have black people being denied promotions, being denied awards. Their white counterparts are treated differently. Because of the abuse we have suffered, we have identified USDA as a plantation. In fact, it was one of the last federal agencies to integrate bathrooms and cafeterias in Washington, DC."
Lucas says he and others continue to document cases of abuse, promotion denial, and retaliation against USDA whistleblowers. "Ms. Lisa Donnelly (a USDA forestry employee and vice-president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees) and I have testified about these abuses at congressional hearings and little has been done. I can't for the life of me understand why race is being put on the back burner, because race is an issue at USDA, but there is also widespread abuse of minority and female employees, that we did not expect to continue under this administration."
Sherrard became an unwilling tool in a long-time effort to drive black and disadvantaged family farmers out of business―and set minority and white family farmers against one another. Lucas and others say Sherrard was doing too good a job. They believe she was targeted before she spoke about her own personal redemption and epiphany at an NAACP conference: USDA bias affects all family farmers, and disadvantaged white farmers are at risk, as are black and minority farmers, but in differing degrees.
According to Lucas, the pro-corporate farm and plantation mentality continues to infest the USDA. It is manifested as institutional racism, bias and bigotry in loan and subsidy programs. According to Tom Burrell, "A lot of employees at the county level would ignore the court order, and go back into their files and reattach liens, reattach that debt. In other words, the farmer had his farm free and clear under the consent decree, but underhanded USDA employees would go back into the file and put the liens back on the property." Essentially what they did was to ignore the judge, dismiss the class action lawsuit ruling, and
And, most importantly, the pro-factory farm policies have generated a retaliation operation and covert personnel policies such as retaliation, intimidation, and failure to prosecute cases of rape and abuse of female and minority employees.
Retaliation. According to Lucas, the USDA operates a counterintelligence operation against internal and external critics, routinely deny blacks, minorities and women promotions, awards and recognition, retaliates and reprises against those who file complaints.
As far as new administrations having a clean sweep effect, bringing in new ideas, policies and change is concerned, Lucas says that, in his experience, it takes less than six months for USDA to co-opt and neuter new administrations and USDA managers. "This excuse that political appointees come and work hard to make change. We've found that most of the time the political appointees take on the same culture and same behavior and same indifference of the bureaucrats that have been there for a long time. It is almost like these people become chameleons, and they suddenly change., People with good intentions suddenly change."
USDA critics such as Lucas and others also say that Breitbart, the Internet blogger, was a sort of "useful fool" (a person who does the dirty work of a government/government agency). They say Breitbart used information that was sliced, diced and edited by others, all of which served two purposes: to paint blacks within the USDA as vindictive individuals who were out to harm whites, and two, to poison the waters for the passage of the Black Farmers settlement by the Senate.
The Senate failed to pass the measure and headed out of town on recess, leaving tens of thousands of black farmers at risk of losing their land. A situation Many of these farmers stand to lose, or have already lost their land, due to ―many because of illegal activities
Lucas says that, despite expectations that the Obama Administration would herald a new era of openness and legality inside the USDA, recent events such as firing of Ms. Shirley Shirrard without due process, the failure of Congress to address decades of domestic terrorism, and violence within the agency, and the tacit approval of institutional managers. Female employees of the agency are raped, beaten and targeted. Whistleblowers and critics are at risk as well.
Long before a provocateur inside an NAACP conference filmed longtime United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee and farm rights activist Shirley Sherrard and sent a selectively edited version of her allegedly racist presentation to Internet blogger Breitbart, USDA had a reputation. The agency's reputation for institutional racism, retaliation against whistleblowers, and domestic terrorism long since earned it the title "The Last Plantation."
Even today, farm activists and civil rights say the agency maintains a powerful intelligence operation which targets whistleblowers and critics in an outside of the agency. Using tactics first developed and refined by a covert "anti-communism" element within the US intelligence agencies, including the FBI, COINTELPRO targeted so called enemies of the Nixon administration, civil right activists, black power revolutionaries, peacenicks, and other political nonconformists. Agents developed extensive files on individuals such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Stoakely Carmichael, Bobby Seals, and any other individual deemed a threat to the social order.
Part of that social order included the vast domain of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which generate agriculture policies and operated one of the largest government agencies in the nation. The USDA is responsible for billions of dollars of agriculture, nutrition and land bank dollars and controls agriculture equipment and land loans, develops farm aid policy, creates economic policy as it relates to food, feed, fiber and fuel―a large portion of the American economy.
Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, in defining USDA's mission, said:
"We will promote the production of food, feed, fiber, and fuel, as well as increased exports of food and agricultural products, as we work to strengthen the agricultural economy for farmers and ranchers. America's farmers and ranchers are the most productive and efficient in the world, and this budget maintains the policies that help maintain our nation's food security. This budget increases our funding for export promotion as part of President Obama's National Export Initiative and provides more support than ever before for competitive research, which can lead to gains in agricultural productivity. (USDA)
Given the existence of Cointelpo―the FBI intelligence operation which targeted "enemies of the state" 40 years ago--political radicals, civil rights leaders and would be revolutionaries, together with the revealations uncovered by the illegal firing of USDA manager Shirley Sherrard, one has to wonder how economic intelligence and organizational sabotage exist in USDA today, as inheritors of a 1972 Nixon era, pro-corporate agriculture policy called the Young Executives Report.
5 may 2010
John Boyd, President
National Black Farmers Association
Black Farmer Advocate & Friend
Open Letter
Below is an update of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees web site. This is a concerted effort to improve our communications with all those interested in our activities and our unrelenting struggle for justice, dignity and respect, at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
There are widespread improvements to be made within the USDA Office of Civil Rights and administration.....internal and external.
In the wake of continued lack of civil rights accountability and much more, the Obama administration at USDA will have a serious public relations nightmare around the following issues in 2010-2012:
The Black farmers legislation failures....and the Obama administrations inability to properly address the seriousness and it's wide implications
The refusal/inability to settle program cases, minority farmers, especially, Black farmer claims. Also, those claims covered by the two year Statute of Limitations, Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA)
Not holding discriminating officials accountable....to include those that lend support, perpetuate and do nothing
Not having an effective and aggressive settlement/resolution program in place for employment and program cases. This includes all USDA civil rights back log cases, employees and minority farmer claims, especially, Black farmers
The continued discriminatory county committee system/process, that haunts minority farmers applying for loans and programs, offered by USDA
Poorly addressing the settlement of class action discrimination claims.....both employment and program cases
Not properly addressing the widespread acts of reprisal, intimidation, harassment of those addressing USDA civil rights concerns, to include those abused for filing and speaking out against civil rights abuses. Washington DC metro area, Iowa APHIS laboratories, USDA Forest Service, Region 5, California, remain hot spots of civil rights neglect and other widespread abuses
Recent years and now the sudden rise in hostile work environment, racial slurs and racial related epithet (such as hangman's nooses, the "N" word, Black employees referred to as monkeys & more), sexual & none assaults, harassment, and "bullying" in the work place. Again, not holding those accountable for these abuses seems to be beyond the scope of the Obama administration at USDA....to grasp and understand the seriousness. These are political blind spots of this administration
Unwilling to deal with the issue of race
The serious inability of the new administration to come to grips with the "plantation culture" at USDA
The continued control of the civil rights process at USDA by the USDA, Office of General Counsel, especially & specificly, those cases that are in the administrative process at USDA
The continued paying out of millions of American tax dollars to K Street attorneys, to fight employees attempting to resolve their cases
USDA spending millions, upon millions, of American tax dollars and lost productivity by hiring & using government attorneys (including the usda justice department), human resource personnel, and others, to defend discriminating and abusive top management officials, including political appointees. There is an unwillingness, nor a strong desire to stop this ongoing bureaucratic transformation.
The above is a road map of where The Coalition must go.
We must continue our mission to bring about a better America, and a better USDA, for all the people they serve and work there.
Lawrence Lucas, President
USDA Coalition of Minority Employees
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it". __Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
