La Cucaracha by Lalo Alcaraz for August 07, 2010

I find it amazing that the most powerful man on earth gets his intelligence from a website. Er, how big is his staff?

bleeep [durn-burn] it, Lew. You almost made me post something that I would have been ashamed of.

I still haven’t seen anything that proves that Breitbart knew how out-of-context the excerpt was. When I first saw it, it certainly seemed to show that Sherrod was an anti-white racist, and apparently even the White House and the NAACP agreed. If Breitbart didn’t know, he just made an honest mistake.

But the fact that (last I heard) he hasn’t identified his source and has never issued any mitigating explanation (let alone an apology) is definitely suspicious. (I’ve never liked him anyway.)

For what it’s worth coming from an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and an opponent of socialism in all its forms, I’ve never found La Cucaracha or Lalo Alcaraz anti-American. Collectivist probably, but not anti-American.

pschearer: The phrase you are looking for is “plausible deniability”. If Breitbart actually checked his ‘sources’ before posting the Sherrod story, he’s have found the massive ‘taking words out of context’ editing that turned his credibility into a joke. He didn’t check. He didn’t want to know, he just wanted a juicy-sounding story.

Same applies to the ACORN story, where the shots of the secret agent video guy in the pimp suit were edited into the tape of him in a business suit, talking to ACORN employees. If Breitbart checked his ‘sources’ before posting this story, he’d have found the errors before turning his credibility into a joke. But he didn’t check. He didn’t want to know, he just wanted a juicy-sounding story.

(Of course the conservative media bombing machine is all one big circle jerk, so Breitbart continues to be a member in good standing with the wingnuts. You see, it’s that the entire conservative media’s credibility is a joke, they’re just in denial about it. America is slowly catching onto them.)

DirtyD: If America is catching onto the conservative media the way they long ago started catching onto the mainstream media, that is a good thing. As for the leftist media (i.e., farther left than the MSM), only leftist wingnuts have ever believed them. (Signing off now.)

The liberal media has been spin doctoring sound bites and out of context snippets for years. Now the left is all up in arms when someone turns the tables on them. I just love American politics.

Politics - derived from the latin “Poli” meaning many and “tics” small blood sucking parasites.

Neo Blakkrstal Love the definition, ROFL Must save for future use, thank you.

Ok, I came back, do every day. Good follow up with the strips. And yes I took the first as a stand alone comment. Together they make a good point. That’s the trouble with a dailey, if you see the first alone, it looks like a grab at the race card. And Vieuxmec, please a good arguement, not a grammar search. Maybe -10sp.

Hey Neo who is this all encompassing “left” you speak of? Conservatives have been involved in dirty tricks for years so this is not some individual event of turning tables. This is all about Breitbart trying to influence elections for his team. If any tables are being turned it’s on Breitbart who is finally being exposed as the fraud he is and is Fox. Neither has the right to use the name journalist or news organization.

Shirley and Charles Sherrod ran a plantation that exploited “their own” people under near slave labor conditions. Alcaraz knows this perfectly well, but ignores it because it would complicate his simple-minded narrative.

Summary:

• Paying farm workers as little as 67¢ per hour, far below minimum wage for the era. • Employing underage children to perform hard labor. • Compelling their employees to work in unsafe conditions, including getting sprayed with pesticides. • Firing any workers who acted as whistleblowers. • Forcing employees to work overtime in the fields at night with practically no advance notice. • Having a capricious payscale under which employees doing the exact same jobs were paid different amounts according to the whims of the managers. • Being unwilling to address the abuse even after it was raised by union representatives. • Seriously mismanaging the farm to such an extent that it went bankrupt.

Source:

http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2010/08/05/slave-labor-conditions-at-sherrods-farm/

Counterpunch:

The Story of Annie Hawkins and New Communities, Inc.

The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod

By RON WILKINS

Imagine farm workers doing back breaking labor in the sweltering sun, sprayed with pesticides and paid less than minimum wage. Imagine the United Farm Workers called in to defend these laborers against such exploitation by management. Now imagine that the farm workers are black children and adults and that the managers are Shirley Sherrod, her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod, and a host of others. But it’s no illusion; this is fact.

The swirling controversy over the racist dismissal of Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post has obscured her profoundly oppositional behavior toward black agricultural workers in the 1970s. What most of Mrs. Sherrod’s supporters are not aware of is the elitist and anti-black-labor role that she and fellow managers of New Communities Inc. (NCI) played. These individuals under-paid, mistreated and fired black laborers–many of them less than 16 years of age–in the same fields of southwest Georgia where their ancestors suffered under chattel slavery.

When I first noticed the story of her firing and the association of Shirley Sherrod’s name with the rural black poor and concern for “black land-loss”, I wondered if the person being praised was the same Shirley Sherrod whom I knew. One piece posted on the July 23rd Alternet and captioned “Shirley Sherrod and the black Land Struggle” even claimed that she “devoted her entire life to economic justice”. The mistreatment of black workers at NCI under the Sherrods is a matter of record that contradicts this claim.

More:

http://www.counterpunch.org/wilkins08022010.html

So now you have links from both the right and the left.

The first source, at Pajamas Media, goes to some lengths to authenticate its evidence.

The second source, at Counterpunch, was written by an African American college professor who actually worked on the Sherrod plantation for a while back in the ’70s.