What follows was eminently predictable, but noting it is nonetheless necessary.

Shirley Sherrod, and to a lesser extent her husband Charles, were media celebrities for a while in late July. Readers might have noticed their near absence from establishment media news reports during the past seven days. It would be easy to think that this has occurred because the story played itself out, with nothing newsworthy to add.

That stopped being true on Monday, August 2, when a column by Ron Wilkins (“The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod”) appeared in the leftist alternative publication Counterpunch.

Wilkins is currently a professor in the Department of Africana Studies (not misspelled) at Cal State University. He claims in the final sentence of his column that he is knowledgeable concerning what he is writing because “I was one of those workers at NCI.” “NCI” is New Communities, Inc., described at a RuralDevelopment.org link as “the land trust that Shirley and Charles Sherrod established, with other black farm families in the 1960′s.”

Here’s part of what Wilkins alleges (excerpted items are not in the same order as they originally appeared; out of order verbiage is identified):

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.

Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.

Worker protest at New Communities eventually garnered some assistance from the United Farm Workers Union in nearby Florida in the person of one of its most formidable organizers, black State Director, the late Mack Lyons. … Fearful of both UFW efforts to unionize NCI’s labor force and scrutiny by the Georgia State Wage and Hour Division, the Sherrods and NCI management hastily issued checks in varying amounts to strikers to makeup ostensibly for minimum wage differentials. It is bitter irony that the Sherrods have succeeded in being awarded $300,000 following a discrimination lawsuit, while … impoverished NCI black laborers whom NCI exploited were never adequately compensated for their “pain and suffering.”

(the following sentences appeared earlier in the column)

… Justice and integrity require at least as much accountability from Mrs. Sherrod to the poor black farm workers of NCI as to the white farmers she came to befriend. This lack of full disclosure of the whole truth is a “sin of omission” that trivializes the suffering of poor black farm workers and exacerbates the offenses of NCI.

This is hardly a right-wing hit piece. Wilkins’s bio at the end of his column describes him as “a former organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” and further claims the following:

In 1974, under an assumed name, he hired-on at New Communities Inc. The Emergency Land Fund, an Atlanta-based black land retention organization, which shared oversight responsibility for NCI’s progress, wanted to know the basis for NCI’s continued poor performance. … For his role in organizing NCI’s workers, management eventually fired him from his $40 per week position, evicted him from the rent-free shack on NCI property and orchestrated his arrest, on bogus charges, by FBI agents and Lee County, Georgia Sheriff’s deputies in the midst of an NCI labor protest. The charges were later dropped.

In his column, Wilkins refers to a report in El Macriado, which was then a monthly publication of the United Farm Workers. That report contains these two final paragraphs describing Charles Sherrod’s attitude toward labor-management relations:

Though (the original reads “through” — Ed.) several of the cooperative’s funding organization’s are pressuring Charles Sherrod, the farm’s manager, to reach a settlement with the strikers, he remains unwilling to negotiate.

With so few scabs left in New Community’s (sic) fields, the UFW first strike in the southeast area (outside of Florida) may bring the first of many UFW contracts to these fields that were once harvested by slave labor.

You read that right: “Scabs.”

Despite the contemporaneous evidence that his allegations of serious labor mistreatment are credible, Wilkins’s column has been ignored by the establishment press:

• On August 4, two days after the Counterpunch item appeared, the Associated Press published two pieces apparently intended to be the last word on the main players in the Sherrod controversy — one by Julie Pace (“AP Exclusive: USDA racial flap reconstructed”) containing what AP claims is the backstory of the lead-up to Sherrod’s firing, and another by Michael R. Blood (“Breitbart: Enemy of the left with a laptop”) which portrays Andrew Breitbart, whose posting of a brief speech excerpt at his BigGovernment.com web site first brought Shirley Sherrod to the nation’s attention (the USAcationnew.com web site actually posted the video first, as this July 15 tweet demonstrates). Neither AP article alludes to the Sherrods’ alleged troubled labor history.
• An advanced search on “Shirley Sherrod” (not in quotes) at the New York Times indicates that the latest related story was on August 1, the day before the Counterpunch item appeared. Searches at the Times’s Media Decoder, The Caucus, and The Lede blogs on the “Shirley Sherrod” tag also have nothing.
• A Washington Post search on “Shirley Sherrod” (in quotes) returns several items dated August 2 or later. But two of them are the AP items already noted, and the others don’t refer to the Sherrods’ alleged inhumane labor practices during the 1960s and early 1970s.
• An August 4 Tribune Media item originating from Albany, Georgia by Kathleen Hennessey (Hard feelings about handling of Shirley Sherrod have deep roots in Georgia) and carried at the Los Angeles Times contains several direct quotes from residents. Even though she was almost literally in the neighborhood, there is no evidence that Hennessey attempted to follow up on the allegations contained in the Counterpunch item that had been out for two days.

It is not reasonable to believe that the establishment press is not aware of the story by this time. A Google Web search on ["Ron Wilkins" "Shirley Sherrod"] (typed as indicated between brackets) for the past seven days returns about 180 items (it says almost 600, but it’s really “only” about 180). No cocoon of ignorance is that tight.

It’s more reasonable to believe that the establishment press is not interested in letting Wilkins’s charges get out to the majority of the population that isn’t paying close attention, lest it damage the current “Shirley good, Breitbart bad” meme.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

As it should, and as we should, but aren’t. And look at one of those who is (in bold):

With reason to hope that the ruptured oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is being brought under control, it’s time to start thinking into the future. The Obama Administration is sticking by its ruinous deepwater drilling moratorium, when it would be better to take a hint from the rest of the world’s oil-producers. Their response to the Gulf disaster? Learn from it, and drill on.

Norway, run by the very model of modern environmentalists, announced a deep-water drilling halt until the spill is done. However, its ban applies only to new drilling, unlike the Obama Administration’s total ban.

Norway also announced it’s moving ahead with a deep water push into the Barents and Norwegian Seas, putting up 94 new blocks for drilling leases. Minister of Petroleum and Energy Terje Riis-Johansen made clear he views the stoppage as temporary.

Brazil is accelerating its drilling pace, announcing it would spend some $200 billion the next five years to tap newly discovered offshore reserves at depths to 23,000 feet. State-controlled Petrobras, the world’s biggest deep water producer, recently struck oil three miles under Brazil’s sea—a reserve that could yield 380 million barrels of oil and natural gas.

Australian Resources Minister Martin Ferguson has offered 31 new leases off his country’s coast that allow for wells at twice the depth of the BP Macondo. As recently as 2000, Australia was self-sufficient in oil and gas but its import costs are rising. The new leases reverse that trend.

“There is no intention by the government to scale back the development of the oil and gas industry in Australia,” Mr. Ferguson said. “It is important in terms of the nation’s energy security, jobs and the overall economy.” Maybe he’d consider a position at Interior?

… Many of these countries even hope to benefit from America’s politically motivated moratorium by bidding for deep water rigs now working in the Gulf. Brazil’s Petrobras is looking far and wide for deep water drilling rigs, with a goal of 60 by 2017, and it’s looking to sign long-term contracts with owners of rigs now idled in the Gulf.

Did you know who is a major investor to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in Petrobas? Imagine that. This has all the telltale signs of being a major poltiical payoff.

A story of heroism, and a reminder that millions who weren’t Jews died in the concentration camps:

Aug 8, 2010 / 04:51 am

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan priest, missionary and martyr, will soon be celebrated throughout the Church on his feast day, August 14.

The saint died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, during World War II, and is remembered as a “martyr of charity” for dying in place of another prisoner who had a wife and children. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982.

… As a Franciscan priest, Fr. Maximilian returned to work in Poland during the 1920s. There, he promoted the Catholic faith through newspapers and magazines which eventually reached an extraordinary circulation, published from a monastery so large it was called the “City of the Immaculata.”

In 1930 he moved to Japan, and had established a Japanese Catholic press by 1936, along with a similarly ambitious monastery.

That year, however, he returned to Poland for the last time. In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Fr. Kolbe was arrested. Briefly freed during 1940, he published one last issue of the Knight of the Immaculata before his final arrest and transportation to Auschwitz in 1941.

At the beginning of August that year, 10 prisoners were sentenced to death by starvation in punishment for another inmate’s escape. Moved by one man’s lamentation for his wife and children, Fr. Kolbe volunteered to die in his place.

Survivors of the camp testified that the starving prisoners could be heard praying and singing hymns, led by the priest who had volunteered for an agonizing death. After two weeks, on the night before the Church’s feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the camp officials decided to hasten Fr. Kolbe’s death, injecting him with carbolic acid.

St. Maximilian Kolbe’s body was cremated by the camp officials on the feast of the Assumption. He had stated years earlier: “I would like to be reduced to ashes for the cause of the Immaculata, and may this dust be carried over the whole world, so that nothing would remain.”

Go here for the full story.

Item:

Obama Accused of Apologizing for Hiroshima

The son of the U.S. Air Force pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb in the history of warfare says the Obama administration’s decision to send a U.S. delegation to a ceremony in Japan to mark the 65th anniversary of the attack on Hiroshima is an “unsaid apology” and appears to be an attempt to “rewrite history.”

James Tibbets, son of Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., says Friday’s visit to Hiroshima by U.S. Ambassador John Roos is an act of contrition that his late father would never have approved.

“It’s an unsaid apology,” Tibbets, 66, told FoxNews.com from his home in Georgiana, Ala.

In May 2009, Bill Whittle wrote the definitive defense of this country’s use of the atomic bomb to administer final defeat upon Japan and bring World War II to an end.

In the earlier paragraphs of the essay, Whittle quotes a leaflet “dropped over Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 33 other Japanese cities on 1 August 1945 – five days before the Hiroshima bombing” (paragraph breaks added by me):

Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or friend.

In the next few days, some or all of the cities named on the reverse side will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique which they are using to prolong this useless war.

But, unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America’s humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives.

America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace which America will bring will free the people from the oppression of the military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan.

You can restore peace by demanding new and good leaders who will end the war. We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked but some or all of them will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.

No truer prediction has ever been made about the results of a brutal but absolutely necessary wartime act than the one made in the bolded sentence above.

If you don’t already know, read Whittle’s entire essay to fully understand why dropping the bombs was so necessary.

This nation has nothing to apologize for, and, as horrible as they were, the Japanese people should be grateful that Truman made the choice to use them.

In what I believe is the first direct acknowledgment by the wire service of what so many have known for so long, the Associated Press’s Tom Krisher wrote the following in an August 5 story about plans for an initial public offering by government-controlled General Motors (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Ever since the Obama administration gave the automaker a $50 billion dollar survival loan last year, many drivers have scorned the company and bought cars from rivals. Even though GM has cut costs, changed leadership, and reported its first quarterly profit since 2007, the resentment will linger as long as taxpayers have a 61 percent stake in the company.

Actually, the “resentment” goes back to December 2008, when the Bush administration bowed to pressure to use Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to “temporarily” loan a combined $13.4 billion to GM and Chrysler. Also, the total bailout dollars involved are at least $63 billion when GMAC is included, as it should be.

If you have relied exclusively on AP reports and its news feeds to subscribing publications since then, Krisher’s assertion that “drivers have scorned the company” would more than likely be the first time you have seen an AP reporter record that observation.

Any AP reporter covering the company almost any time in the intervening 20 months could have observed the existence of the scorn and resentment. But if this factor has ever been directly cited by an AP reporter covering the car industry until now, I haven’t seen it.

In January 2009, the first month after those “loan” funds were disbursed, year-over-year sales at GM fell 49%. In previous months, the struggling automaker’s year-over-year declines had been in the 30% range. In just one month, the company’s sales decline in the recessionary economy went from roughly matching those seen at archrivals Ford and Toyota to about what cratering Chrysler was experiencing.

GM’s sales plunge of 42% during last year’s first five months was far worse than Ford’s or Toyota’s, though not quite as bad as Chrysler’s.

During 2009, I only recall two instances where AP got into the neighborhood of explaining what was really going on. The first was in a May 1, 2009 story in the wake of April’s sales releases:

Detroit’s Big Three is becoming Ford and the other two.

While its rivals stay afloat with billions in government aid, Ford grabbed a bigger slice of the American car market in April with record sales of its fuel-efficient Fusion.

… Most of those gains (at Ford) came at the expense of General Motors and Chrysler, which unlike Ford are dependent on federal help.

Later in the report, the AP’s Kimberly S. Johnson and Dan Strumpf quoted an analyst who tied Ford’s success to Chrysler being in bankruptcy court and GM’s near-certain arrival there. Clearly those concerns were relevant, but the unmentioned scorn and resentment were already quite visible. An early June 2009 Rasmussen poll confirmed it: “The government bailout and takeover of General Motors remains very unpopular among the public. Just 26% of Americans believe the bailout was a good idea, and nearly as many support a boycott of GM products.”

The other instance of near recognition came in the eighth paragraph of an early November 2009 report (covered at NewsBusters; at Bizzyblog) about October’s sales results. In that item, Krisher and Dee-Ann Durbin wrote:

Ford Motor Co.’s sales rose 3 percent and it gained U.S. market share for the 12th time in 13 months as its critically acclaimed vehicles continue to grab buyers from rivals. Ford has benefited from consumer goodwill because it didn’t take government bailout money or go into bankruptcy protection, as General Motors and Chrysler did.

That’s fine, but it’s one thing to note that customers like the company that wasn’t bailed out. It’s quite another to assert that many resentful customers and potential customers abandoned GM and Chrysler because they were bailed out. Also, Ford wasn’t necessarily the only beneficiary of anti-GM and anti-Chrysler sentiment.

So why now? Why did the AP have to wait for GM Chairman Whitacre to say what he said before acknowledging what all of us already knew? Has the wire service seen protecting the company as part of its mission until now? If so, why?

Finally, Krisher cannot prove his claim in the opening excerpt that “the resentment will linger as long as taxpayers have a 61 percent stake in the company.” It’s very likely — I would suggest virtually certain — that the resentment will linger until the government sells its entire stake in the company. It’s also not unreasonable to believe that for some, especially those who remember how the government and the company “ripped off” unsecured bondholders during bankruptcy proceedings, the resentment will last a long, long time even if the government fully divests.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here. I don’t think the item really needs the question mark.

The Pajamas Media blogger’s main contributions are authenticating the El Macriado article describing worker mistreatment that occurred at the New Communities Inc. “collective farm” (my sardonic term) during the 1960s and 1970s, and bullet-pointing the key assertions in the Counterpunch column containing the original accusations of Ron Wilkins and the aforementioned El Macriado article .

Here are those bullet points:

Combined, the new 2010 allegations (by Wilkins) and the original 1974 allegations (in El Macriado) accuse Shirley and Charles Sherrod of:

• 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.

Here is an image of the El Macriado article. Note the last two paragraphs (the first word should be “Though” instead of “Through”):

_______________________________________________

UPDATE: Let’s contextualize an interesting piece of history, courtesy of Charles Sherrod himself.

In a video excerpt of Charles Sherrod’s January 2010 speech at a University of Virginia Law School conference coming up below, we see Charles Sherrod recount one tactic he attempted to save NCI:

We appealed to hundreds of black and white groups to save the land. $250 a(n) acre to save 6,000 acres. Lookin’ for 6,000 people to give $250 to save 6,000 acres of land, the largest piece of land owned by blacks in the country anywhere in a single tract. Muslims owned more land than we did but not in a single tract.

Be sure to look at the vid (at the 1:05 mark), and observe how absolutely indignant Mr. Sherrod is that he couldn’t find 6,000 suckers — er, donors — to help him bail NCI out:

It’s too bad yours truly wasn’t around to help Mr. Sherrod raise money back then. Here’s how an accurate and fully-disclosed request for help at the time the Sherrods were on the brink of losing NCI might have read, had I been given the opportunity to compose it:

Uh, we’ve got this “co-op” here that we’re going to lose unless we come up with $1.5 million quickly.

It takes money to mismanage a farm enterprise, and lots of it. But we’re up to the task.

Even though we have a history of underpaying our workers, exposing them to unsafe conditions, abusing child labor, paying people only what we feel like paying them, and working hard to keep the unions out, we still can’t make it without your help.

Won’t you please allow us to continue to mistreat our poor black employees and run our farm into the ground while posing as enlightened radicals who are showing “the man” that collective socialism is superior to exploitative capitalism? All we need is $250 each from 6,000 fools like you.

Please make your check payable to “The Charles and Shirley Sherrod Benevolent Fund” — er, we mean, “New Communities, Inc.”

Keep hope alive.

From Iowa City, Iowa (HT to AP):

August 6, 2010

In the fall of 1962, Karen Wilcox and Mike Wilson met as seventh-graders at South East Junior High.

e had gone to Hoover Elementary, she to Longfellow. Placed next to each other in alphabetized seat arrangements in homerooms and other classes, they became fast friends, even dating the following year as eighth-graders.

At 11:12 a.m. on Monday, they will get married in the same room where they had their first dance together, to Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” in 1963.

“I always liked him,” Wilcox, 60, said. “I loved him when we were together. I loved him when we were apart.”

Wilcox said they chose the wedding date based on the numbers, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. Since neither had a church denomination they belonged to, they opted to have their wedding in the place they both remembered fondly.

“We wanted a place that meant something to both of us,” Wilcox said. “We didn’t care if anyone else showed up. I feel we’ve been united since junior high.”

The couple had kept in contact with each other through the years, even as they married other people, with both having been married twice before. They have been seeing each other since January, shortly after Wilson’s 36-year marriage to his second wife had ended and he had decided to move back to Iowa City from Naples, Fla., where he had been living after retiring as an orthopedic surgeon. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

The run-up:

• ADP reported 42,000 private sector jobs added on Wednesday morning.
• Bloomberg — “U.S. employers cut 65,000 jobs last month, adding to a decline of 125,000 in June, according to the median prediction of 84 economists surveyed by Bloomberg before today’s release.” The report doesn’t say how much of that represents the remainder of the Census wind-down, or what the estimate is for the private sector.
• Reuters does have a breakdown — “Economists polled by Reuters expected the U.S. Labor Department report … to show a drop of 65,000 in non-farm payrolls in July as temporary U.S. Census Bureau jobs evaporated. Private employers are expected to have added 90,000 jobs.”
• In a brief report included in a collection of unrelated items, the Associated Press only deals with the private jobs number — “Companies are forecast to have added a net total of 90,000 private-sector jobs in July, according to economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters. That’s not nearly enough to bring down the unemployment rate, which is expected to rise to 9.6 percent from 9.5 percent.”

The real number needed:

Here’s where things on the ground stood in the private sector through June –

Last month, I suggested that the acceptability threshold for jobs added on the ground was 950,000 jobs added. The 863,000 added (pending revision today and in August) fell a bit short of that.

Based on what really happened in July 2004-2007 (average loss of 75,000 jobs), today’s acceptability benchmark is 100,000 jobs lost on the ground. I have a feeling that today’s number will be better than that, partially on a hunch, but also partially because General Motors kept its people working through all of July (meaning that many of its suppliers might have done the same). Auto plants often shut down during the summer for a couple of weeks.

Today’s seasonally adjusted private sector number may be a bit suspect because it has two bad years in the calculation, because July 2008 and 2009 were both parts of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy. This may cause a mediocre performance in the real, not seasonally adjusted world to look artificially good when seasonally adjusted (Update: It went the other way; the NSA number is really good, and the SA number masks it; see below).

The report will be here at 8:30. … Here is the first paragraph:

Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 131,000 in July, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Federal government employment fell, as 143,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. Private-sector payroll employment edged up by 71,000.

That’s somewhat short of expectations on the jobs side, while the unemployment rate didn’t get worse.

As noted above, the proof will be in the actual number.

And that number is … pretty darned good — so good that I wonder if the press is all of a sudden going to discover the virtues of looking at actual results instead of the ones that are seasoned:

June was revised down by 69K. May went up by 14K. The +91K seen on the ground in July is 191,000 jobs better than the acceptability benchmark set before the report came out. That’s impressive. The Birth/Death model isn’t skewing things either. The GM factor I cited earlier can’t be more than a small part of the improvement. Never mind what the seasonally adjusted number is — If the not seasonally adjusted +91K holds in subsequent revisions, or even stays above zero, it will be the first legitimately strong monthly private sector performance since the POR Economy began. It will take a long, long time to gain back what was lost, but perhaps the worst of our long national nightmare is finally beginning to end.

UPDATE: This Wall Street Journal report is downbeat –

The U.S. economy shed more jobs than expected in July while the unemployment rate held steady at 9.5%, a further sign the economic recovery may be losing momentum.

After the worst recession in decades, the recovery that began in July 2009 has recently been losing momentum, but it’s hard to say if it’s just a temporary slowdown or if the economy could start to contract again. The Federal Reserve may consider taking steps to support the economy when officials meet next Tuesday. Some worry that with unemployment still so high and consumer prices recently dropping, the U.S. economy runs the risk of falling into a Japan-like deflationary trap of very slow growth and falling prices.

The report, as press reports usually do, assumes that the seasonally adjusted data represeny what really happened on the ground. Readers here know that isn’t so.

Look, I’m not averse to being negative when it’s called for, but this isn’t one of those times. Looking back, the +91K actual private sector performance is the best for any July since 1999. One month doesn’t make or break the economy, but the Establishment Survey’s July news was very good, and got seasonalized away.

UPDATE 2: On the Household Survey side (the basis for the unemployment rate), the improvement isn’t as clear, but the trend towards improvement is:

BLS doesn’t break out the private sector in its Household Survey reports, so this look-see is a bit more difficult. The +252K performance in July 2010 clearly trails the average of July 2004-2007, but if the actual Census let-gos were factored in, it would come pretty close.

It is still troubling that the number of people entering the labor force didn’t go up as much as it did during 2004-2007 (+503,000 vs. a 701,000 average; after seasonalization, BLS shows a contraction of 181,000). But if the Establishment Survey results hold, that will probably change for the better in short order.

From Afghanistan:

Last updated at 8:01 AM on 3rd August 2010

A soldier who stood on a landmine and was shot in the chest in Afghanistan is convinced a rosary saved his life in exactly the same way as his great-grandfather towards the end of the Second World War.

Glenn Hockton, 19, who is now home from a seven-month tour of duty with the Coldstream Guards in Helmand Province, was on patrol when his rosary suddenly fell from his neck.

His mother Sheri Jones said today: ‘He felt like he had a slap on the back. He bent down to pick up his rosary to see if it was broken. As he bent down he realised he was on a landmine.’

Glenn had to stand there for 45 terrifying minutes while his colleagues successfully managed to get to him.
Mrs Jones, from Tye Green, Essex, said she was physically sick when her son rang to tell her of his ordeal.

His great-grandfather Joseph ‘Sunny’ Truman also credited a rosary with saving his life in a World War II blast that killed six members of his platoon.

He was with the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and after being captured towards the end of the war, he and other prisoners were forced to march away from the advancing Allied armies.

Mrs Jones, 41, recalled: ‘He was walking across a field with half a dozen of his platoon. He bent down to pick something up and was the only one to survive a sudden bomb blast. He had picked up a rosary.’

Before Glenn was deployed to Afghanistan, she said he asked for a rosary to take with him.

His mother and stepfather Danyal Jones have also kept a bullet which embedded itself in Glenn’s body armour when he was shot on a separate occasion. He was winded, but otherwise he was unhurt. …

Go here for the rest of the story.

I missed this a couple of weeks ago, but it deserves exposure.

Ohio’s Queen of Pork has earned CAGW’s coveted award for being so, well, porkulent (Direct YouTube):

CAGW is Citizens Against Government Waste, and I was referring to Kaptur’s proclivity for and hypocrisy in regards to earmarks. What did y’all think I was referring to?

________________________________________

UPDATE, 8 P.M.: From David Freddoso at the Washington Examiner — “PMA lobbying group founder indicted — which members of Congress will suffer?”

Kaptur was cleared by the House Ethics Committee regarding her involvement with PMA in February. It will be interesting to see if any evidence comes out indicating that the Ethics Committee’s conclusion was a whitewash.

UPDATE 2, 11:30 P.M.: In an e-mail, Maggie Thurber has pointed to this report about how “The House Ethics Committee released a report in February clearing all seven members of any wrongdoing. But the Office of Congressional Ethics did not agree and referred its investigation to the Justice Department.”

Well, there’s good news and bad news for you. The good news is that people with principles realize there’s something rotten. The bad news is that the Obama DOJ is probably using the Office of Congressional Ethics referral documents as wallpaper.

Has there ever been a more obvious enabler of the pervasive culture of corruption than Attorney General Eric Holder?

This post appeared at the Washington Examiner’s OpinionZone blog and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Tuesday.

______________________________________

Readers who saw my original Examiner post about Shirley Sherrod know that she and husband Charles received $150,000 each for “pain and suffering” as part of “a thirteen million dollar settlement in the minority farmers law suit Pigford vs Vilsack.” Based on history presented by Ron Wilkins Monday at Counterpunch, it’s appropriate to ask: “Whose pain and suffering?”

It now seems that Mr. and Mrs. Sherrod inflicted quite a bit of pain and suffering on their own — and on some of the very people Mr. Sherrod described as “our own” in a speech earlier this year — at New Communities, Inc. NCI is described at the Rural Development Leadership Network’s web site as “the land trust that Shirley and Charles Sherrod established, with other black farm families in the 1960s.”

Wilkins, who says he is “a former organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” and is currently a professor at California State University in the Africana Studies Department, writes: “I know this story well, for I was one of those workers at NCI.”

Here is some of what Wilkins describes (internal link added by me):

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.

… 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.

… (Shirley Sherrod) 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.

… Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.

… Worker protest at New Communities eventually garnered some assistance from the United Farm Workers Union in nearby Florida in the person of one of its most formidable organizers, black State Director, the late Mack Lyons.

At Riehl World View, Dan Riehl has posted a graphic of a 1974 El Malcriado article about a strike by children farm workers at NCI. That article reveals that “Wages vary from 67¢ – $1.63 per hour, and management pays each worker whatever they please, according to personal preference.”

The last two paragraphs of that article read as follows:

Though several of the cooperative’s funding organization’s are pressuring Charles Sherrod, the farm’s manager, to reach a settlement with the strikers, he remains unwilling to negotiate.

With so few scabs left in New Community’s (sic) fields, the UFW first strike in the southeast area (outside of Florida) may bring the first of many UFW contracts to these fields that were once harvested by slave labor.

“Scabs”? Oh my.

If Charles and Shirley Sherrod are the civil-rights crusaders they now claim to be and not still the brutal managers they appear to have been, they would be tracking down those who used to work at NCI and distributing their $13 million USDA settlement to them. After all, it was arguably won on the backs of exploited labor.

Larry Elder, whose latest column appeared last week before Wilkins’s revelations appeared, had no idea how right he was when he wrote: “Shirley Sherrod, Quit While You’re Ahead.”

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UPDATE, August 5: Context — the minimum wage in 1971 was $1.60 an hour. In 1972, it was $1.80. I know because that’s what I was paid at my summer jobs.

From the first paragraph of the introductory “Highlights” in the Trustees’ report (large PDF; HT Philip Klein at AmSpec) released today:

… During the year, an estimated 156 million people had earnings covered by Social Security and paid payroll taxes. Total expenditures in 2009 were $686 billion. Total income was $807 billion ($689 billion in tax revenue and $118 billion in interest earnings), and assets held in special issue U.S. Treasury securities grew to $2.5 trillion.

The bolded figures are the ones that matter. They show that taxes collected exceeded costs by only $3 billion. The “interest earnings” cited are in essence merely added to the balance the rest of the government owes the Social Security Trust fund.

The trustees say that this year and next, Social Security will pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. It will supposedly run a surplus for a few years, and will then have a negative cash flow as far as the eye can see as long as it remains structured as it is.

Of course, those who hang around here knew those deficits were brewing 10 months ago (“Social Security: The Train Wreck Is at the Station”). Most months since then have shown cash deficits.

As long as those in charge of the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy stay in charge, and don’t change their course, any projections in the Trustees’ report, which is dependent on economic growth assumptions that likely won’t materialize, are overly optimistic. Even if they do, assumptions made during the past 18-1/2 months that haven’t materialized because of this administration’s choice of alleged “stimulus” over meaningful tax cuts have permanently penalized the future, and nothing will ever change that.