The Agriculture Hit Man: USDA ignores 1999 class action, illegally revives debt and threatens whistleblowers

Interviews and analysis–

By Monica Davis

According to Lawrence Lucas, a retired employee of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and current president of the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, the United States Department of Agriculture is not your garden variety government bureaucracy. In an interview, Lucas said USDA operates as a plantation—a closed society which operates by its own rules, outside of the rule of law.

Tom Burrel, President of the one of the few black farmers who actually received compensation for USDA’s discrimination, based on the 1999 consent decree and the Black Farmers’ Settlement, goes even further. Burrell, who left a lucrative career in the automotive industry to return to his agriculture roots, says the USDA operates as a subversive agency, ignoring court orders and bypassing the Constitution. Burrell also says the agency operates its own intelligence and intimidation squad, targeting whistleblowers, farmers and critics. Violence is not unknown. Burrell likens these USDA operatives to the Gestapo.

Critics say the USDA is one of the most powerful federal agencies in existence, with a monster budget and little oversight. It routinely coopts political appointees, according to Burrell, and uses farm loan policies and procedures to eliminate disfavored minority and disadvantaged farmers.

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.