Inspired by the recent report “What Else I Know About The Negro” issued by rancher and eminent socio-anthropologist, Dr. Cliven Bundy, Facebook hosted the first annual Facebook Scholars Symposium whose theme “The Modern Negro and Its Sufferings: Of Subsidies and Slavery,” elicited spirited and often thought provoking commentary and original research from a wide array of the nation’s most expert scholars and academics working in Facebook’s rich intellectual milieu.

Dr. Bruce Childs weighed in early on to clarify some of Dr. Bundy’s more challenging concepts: “He was comparing the present status of the Negro being enslaved through government entitlements that removed their desire to work for a living simply because the government made NOT working a reasonable expectation…That is a comparison of the way the government treated the American Indian when they forced them onto reservations then took away their Guns so they could not Hunt for Food. The government destroyed the INDIANS’ WILL and Clive was just saying that the government (THROUGH WELFARE and Food Stamps has created another form of SLAVERY ) – – – that destroys the will of the lower class , rather they are White , Green , Red , Yellow or Black ….” Thus having unpacked some of Bundy’s more complex reasoning, Bundy added an observation of his own: “When the GOVERNMENT controls your supply line, be it FOOD STAMPS , Electronic Fund Deposits of Welfare … Then they CONTROL YOU…”

The Heathcliff Huxtable Professor of Negro and Colored Texts at Bob Jones University, Michele Whitehead-Wilt, quickly offered further exegesis of the Bundy Report: “…he was saying that we are slaves to the government, and may as well be picking cotton as the slaves did, many many years ago. He didn’t say anything about black people in general.” So far, however, black people do not generally seem convinced by this argument.

Esteemed researcher Mike McGraw issued a strong warning based on his own exhaustive seconds-long metaresearch of the relevant reportage: “Black America had better start looking at this issue with honest, open eyes, because they are being slowly placed back into slavery, by the left. All a black American has to do to prove this to themselves is stand aginst the Democrats just one time and see how quick they turn on you… Just because Obama is black, does not make him your friend and just because Bundy is white does not make him your enemy.” Black America has not yet issued a public acknowledgement of the McGraw warning.

Scoring seven likes from the FB academic peer review community, Dr. James Wiggins, hailing from Augusta Tech, boldly summarized his surprising findings from his own longitudinal study of the cumulative impact of various federal Negro subsidy programs: “Any person who willing becomes dependent on the government for any reason is a slave in all respects…it doesn’t matter if you are Black, White, Hispanic or anything other group…”

Left unanswered by the seeming consensus view of the symposium that federal subsidies have reenslaved the Negro id whether this means that Bundy and his fellow western ranchers have become Negroid by taking massive federal subsidies over the past six decades[1] or if they are simply slaves with cowboy hats.

It’s worth noting that while the bulk of Bundy’s research for the “What Else I Know About The Negro” report was done from a car speeding car passing an alleged subsidized housing project between his ranch and Las Vegas, the federal government spends just $9 billion a year on public housing.[2] Compare that to federal program subsidies for rural areas for which Congress authorized $300 billion[3] ( that’s about $60 billion per year for five years on redneck welfare, or about nine times the amount spent on what Mr. Bundy imagines the federal government spends on enslaving the Negroes in subsidized housing (without even any chickens in the yard or cotton to pick!).

Hooray for red state redneck independence.

[1]Under administrative rules put in place during the pro-rancher Reagan Administration an unchanged due to heavy lobbying by the powerful ranching lobbies ever since, BLM only levies a scant $1.35 monthly fee for each cow and calf that a rancher grazes on western public land; this applies across 258 million acres of western public land administered by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management — 81 percent of all the land administered by the two agencies in the 11 western states. There are approximately 23,600 public-lands ranchers, representing just 6 percent of all livestock producers west of the Mississippi River. HERE”S WHERE THE COWBOY WELFARE SYSTEM COMES IN: Market rates for grazing comparable western private land exceed $10 per animal unit month. In its 2005 report, the Government Accountability Office found that BLM and Forest Service grazing receipts fail to recover even 15 percent of administrative costs and are much lower than fees charged by the other federal agencies, states and private ranchers. The GAO found that the BLM and Forest Service grazing fee decreased by 40 percent from 1980 to 2004, while grazing fees charged by private ranchers increased by 78 percent for the same period.  http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05869.pdf

[2] http://www.cbpp.org/research/index.cfm?fa=topic&id=116

[3] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-110publ246/pdf/PLAW-110publ246.pdf