New story up at Mother Jones:
After decades of discriminating against Black farmers and ignoring their complaints, the USDA is promising to do better. Again.
“Nobody is checking the law or trying to come to an understanding to see if this [employee] is telling the truth,” she says. “Nobody is trying to understand what happened. So based on the way we do investigations, by sending out these questions, it’s guaranteed to be a finding of non-discrimination.” That might be a problem if OASCR actually saw its mission as determining whether discrimination occurred. “But the purpose of our job isn’t that,” Kavanaugh says. “It’s to shuffle complaints through in 30 days or less so the numbers go down.”
