Today is the day that bloggers are asked to blog about the Pigford scandal. It is possibly the most under-reported major scandal in our history. Given the size of the payouts and the amount of fraud, one must only hazard a guess that it’s a leftist issue for it to be so ignored by the media.
I was writing for the Huffington Post when I interviewed Andrew Breitbart. In our first conversation, he asked me if I’d heard about Pigford. Like most people at the time, I had no idea what it was. Andrew sent me a draft of the report that he’d worked on with Peter Schweizer and Gary Hewson and told me to look into it myself. I quickly realized that Pigford was a major political scandal that had gone virtually unreported.
Such is the transformative power of the farmers’ settlement story, which lays bare the moral bankruptcy of the left by showing their pretense of altruistic concern on race issues is really just a way to buy votes and line the pockets of lawyers and fraudsters. Knowing what I knew about Pigford, it was impossible to maintain any respect for President Barack Obama and his cohorts in corruption.
People talk about how tireless Andrew was on this story but very few actually saw what that meant firsthand –the late night strategy sessions, the constant batting back and forth of information and the amount of time Breitbart spent on the phone talking to the actual black farmers that were the source of the some of the most important leads on the story. Anyone who knew him well will tell you Andrew Breitbart really cared about these hard working men and their stories of betrayal at the hands of the USDA.
The Pigford settlements were supposed to be restitution for discrimination by the FDA against certain black farmers. It was turned into a massive reparations program. If you were black and claimed you had a tomato plant on your porch, it was possible to make a claim that you were a “black farmer” and get $50,000 or more from the taxpayer’s pockets. It was later opened to Native Americans and Hispanics. This became a huge vote buying program. What makes it truly despicable is that Republicans agreed to the payouts. I surmise that they didn’t want to be called racist or something. The size of the payouts is staggering.
The cost of the settlements, which could exceed $4.4 billion, is the result of a process that “became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees,” the Times notes.
Among those influential members of Congress was then-Senator Barack Obama, who made Pigford payouts a priority in exchange for political support for his 2008 presidential campaign among a coveted group of black voters in the rural South, the Times reports.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told the Times that the settlements opened “‘a new chapter of civil rights at U.S.D.A,” claiming that critics of Pigford and other payouts were motivated by a “Pandora’s box” of hidden racial agendas.
Yet the Times documents how Pigford became a “magnet for fraud” across the South. “In 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina,” LaFraniere writes, “the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.” The government let many of the fraudulent claims slip by unpunished because “the bar for a successful claim was so low that it was almost impossible to show criminality.”
The whole thing is troubling on way too many levels. Let others know. Andrew Breitbart tried for a long time to sound the gong, but was largely ignored. Now that the NY Times has finally noticed the problem, dare we hope that this fraud will be exposed?
I am not holding my breath.