"Last week, auditors from the Government Accountability Office arrived at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to begin a review of how the agency has complied with a court settlement between the government and black farmers," reports the Daily Yonder. "The farmers had sued ... claiming the USDA had discriminated against African-Americans in granting loans and subsidies. The Agriculture Department had settled with the farmers in 1999, but many claims had been rejected in subsequent years. The GAO auditors had arrived to begin to sort out this ongoing dispute. The USDA kicked the auditors out."
Agriculture's deputy general counsel told The Associated Press that investigators called the department to say they were coming to interview USDA employees, and refused to say what they were investigating or let department attorneys be present for the interviews. Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and five other Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus protested in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer, citing "troubling pattern of obstructing congressional efforts to understand and remedy decades of discrimination against African-American farmers." (Read more)
"The story is an old, but interesting one — and may be particularly relevant because Obama has been consistent in his backing of the claims of black farmers," the Yonder reports. Its story includes a dispatch from contributor Rick Cohen about the sad history of the case and a link to a story in The Hill, a Capitol Hill newspaper, about the political implications should Obama be the Democratic nominee. The implications might be greatest in North Carolina, where Obama is leading Hillary Clinton in polls for the state's May 6 primary and running neck-and-neck with Republican John McCain in a general-election matchup.
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