Obama Admin on Pigford: ‘Forget the 40 Acres and Mule’

The Obama Administration’s reparations Ponzi scheme, the multi-billion-dollar Pigford II settlement, has left legitimate black farmers out in the cold while paying off virtually anyone who grew a potato plant on their windowsill.

Picking up on the scandal exposed by Andrew Breitbart last year, Lee Stranahan reports on the massive government fraud and the Congressional Black Caucus’s culpability in perpetuating it in last Friday’s Huffington Post:

“I’ve been traveling around the South the past month interviewing people close to the Pigford settlement and it’s clear to me that the people who this fraud has hurt the most are hard-working Americans like Eddie and Willie. They have been pressured not to talk about the fraud, in some cases by members of the Congressional Black Caucus.”

Pigford V. Glickman was initially a class-action suit brought against the Agriculture Department for discrimination against black farmers in the South and settled during the Clinton Administration. Estimates at the time indicated that about 3,000 farmers were affected, but over 22,000 claims were filed and more than 13,000 were approved, at a minimum $50,000 a pop.

Breitbart at Big Government.com exposed the Pigford scandal in December of 2010, uncovering the scandal in the aftermath of his exposé on former Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod’s speech at an NAACP function last summer, in which Sherrod made statements that appeared to be racist while NAACP members applauded.

The resulting firestorm found the national media predictably cooking the story against Breitbart and bringing that fire down on his head. Left Coast Ledger even sided against the internet firebrand, a misjudgment we apologized for in December of last year.

Sherrod was fired from her post, but apparently wasn’t any the worse for wear, since she and her husband collected a whopping $13 million in the Pigford scam. But what piqued Breitbart’s interest was that she was not fired by Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, but by the White House directly. Why?

The story takes off from there.

In 2007, after the initial settlement had long been closed, then Senator Barack Obama joined with several dubious “civil rights” groups to reopen Pigford. Although a federal judge refused to reopen the suit, Obama used his senatorial powers to spur Pigford II forward, and the result is a $1-plus-billion tab for the taxpayers and a leg up for himself in the 2012 presidential election. In other words, Obama is using Pigford II to buy black Southern votes.

“The judge in the Pigford case refused to re-open the settlement for these late claimants,” says Big Government’s Gary Hewson, “and in 2007 Barack Obama single-handedly ignored the checks and balances of our system of government, and overturned the work of our judicial branch and a Clinton-appointed judge.”

While the media were all too quick to tar and feather Breitbart for exposing the NAACP for racism among its members, they have been astonishingly absent in covering the greater scandal the incident uncovered.

Stranahan continues:

“There’s proof that Pigford is being sold as reparations behind closed doors while the defenders of the current settlement call critics racist for questioning Pigford.”


Obama’s Pigford vote-buying scheme has cost American taxpayers literally hundreds of millions in fraudulent payouts to Southern African Americans who have never farmed a strip of ground, and left legitimate claims to go to seed. It could cost billions if it is not stopped.

GOP representatives Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Bob Goodlatte are leading the charge in the new House to ferret out illegitimate claims.

The Pigford Settlement and Obama’s Andrew Breitbart Smokescreen

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Back in July I was one of the first conservatives to criticize Andrew Breitbart for releasing the tape of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod making a seemingly racist comment at a NAACP dinner.

I was wrong.

Not only was Shirley Sherrod not innocent in telling a white farmer to seek “his own kind” for help, but she had a $13 million reason for doing so.

While I still feel Breitbart’s release of the now infamous tape was inappropriately framed, there is no question the NAACP audience in that room reveled in the “his own kind” comment. But, like thousands of other Americans, I still had a nagging question in the back of my head: “Why did they fire Sherrod so quickly and without a hearing?”

My concern wasn’t misplaced.

Former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, of all people, provided part of the answer. “This woman has been a thorn in the side of the Agriculture Department for years. She was part of a class-action lawsuit against the department on behalf of black farmers in the South. For years, she has been operating a community activist organization not unlike ACORN.”

The class-action Brown was referring to has become known as the “Pigford Settlement,” and Shirley Sherrod used her “not unlike ACORN” organization to personally profit from that settlement. Shirley Sherrod and her husband received $13 million and she was hired by the USDA for her end of the settlement.

Pigford v. Glickman is one of those stories that reads dry, but at its core is a leviathan of corruption and race-baiting Democratic Party abuse.

Pigford v. Glickman was a class action lawsuit against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging racial discrimination in its allocation of farm loans and assistance between 1983 and 1997. The lawsuit ended with a settlement in which the U.S. government agreed to pay African American farmers $50,000 each if they had attempted to get USDA help but failed.

In essence Pigford, while originally a legitimate grievance by about 400 black Southern farmers against USDA, has become a reparations Ponzi scheme that will cost taxpayers billions when the Obama orchestrated “resettlement” is paid out. It is rife with fraud, corruption and even murder.

In the end, virtually any black person who ever grew a pansy on their windowsill could file a claim as a farmer. There are no more than 33,000 black farmers in the US; 94,000 have filed claims. And Pigford opened a floodgate of lawsuits by other minorities to settle claimed injustices by the USDA. This week Native Americans who jumped on the bandwagon were awarded $4.55 billion, as well.

This is Pigford II.

Says Breitbart: “It is a classic story of a legitimate grievance by a small group of individuals that has been exploited personal profit and political gain.”

Andrew Breitbart had no knowledge of any of this when he released the Sherrod “His own kind” tape in July, but he had one of the most shocking stories of taxpayer fraud by the horns.

Breitbart’s breaking story, released today, on how this legitimate cause by 400 black farmers was hijacked by scoundrels like Sherrod, is a masterfully crafted exposé of Barack Obama’s blueprint to buy the Southern vote for his upcoming 2012 election bid.

The new GOP Congress should immediately open investigations and should not relent until every single person who participated in this fraud is brought to justice.