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If you’ve been following any of the controversy around the Shirley Sherrod, Zombie’s latest will make your head explode: Slave-labor conditions at Sherrods’ farm?.
Shocking new allegations against Shirley Sherrod (the USDA employee recently embroiled in a controversy over a speech she gave to the NAACP) and the communal farm she ran with her husband Charles Sherrod have been confirmed by an article published 36 years ago in a farm workers’ newspaper.
Combined, the new 2010 allegations and the original 1974 allegations 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.Let’s first look at the new allegations, and then at the original allegations.
Read the whole thing. Zombie wrily comments:
The irony is that Shirley Sherrod baselessly accused Andrew Breitbart of wanting Blacks to get “stuck back in the times of slavery,” when in fact it was Sherrod herself who was practically enslaving poor Blacks on her farm.
Spin, strangeness, and charm 
I had a co-worker who is actually further to the right than me ask me as soon as the full video of Sherrod was released ‘I think this is the end of Breitbart- don’t you?’. He actually seemed a little upset.
I told them ‘No- there’s more to it than this. It would be out of charachter for Breitbart to be tripped up this easily.’
He thought I meant there was even MORE videotape out there. At the time, I was trying to convey that Sherrod was such an unsympathetic individual that there was probably something in her background that would undercut any sympathy for her if it ever saw the light of day…. and with her talk of suing Breitbart and appearing on all the talking-head ‘news’ shows, she let the spotlight find her…
Wonder if Breitbart scored the own-goal on purpose to make Team Sherrod overconfident and even more beligerent.