Claim: The Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit settlement paid out more than $1.25 billion, much of it to fraudulent claimants.
MIXTURE OF TRUE AND FALSE INFORMATION
Example: [Collected via e-mail, February 2011]
In 1997, 400 African-American farmers sued the United States Department of Agriculture, alleging that they had been unfairly denied USDA loans due to racial discrimination during the period 1983 to 1997.
The case was entitled "Pigford vs. Glickman" and in 1999, the black farmers won their case.
The government agreed to pay each of them as much as $50,000 to settle their claims.
But then on February 23, 2010, something shocking happened in relation to that original judgment: In total silence, the USDA agreed to release more funds to "Pigford".
The amount was a staggering......
There was only one teensy problem:
The United States of America doesn't have 86,000 black farmers!!!!
According to accurate and totally verifiable Official USDA 2007 Census census data, the total number of black farmers throughout America is only 39,697.
Hmmm... by the Official USDA 1992 Census data the US had only 18,816 black farmers!! Oops!!
Well, gosh - how on earth did 39,697 explode into the fraudulent 86,000 claims??
And how did $50,000 explode into
Well, folks, you'll just have to ask the woman who not only spearheaded this case because of her position in 1997 at the "Rural Development Leadership Network", but whose family received the highest single payout (approximately
Yes, folks it appears that Ms. Sherrod had just unwittingly exposed herself as the perpetrator of one of the biggest fraud claims in the history of the United States — a fraud enabled solely because she screamed racism at the government and cowed them into submission.
And it gets even more interesting...
race fraud.
As it turns out, the original judgment of "Pigford vs. Glickman" in 1999 only applied to a total of about 16,000 black farmers.
But....in 2008, a junior US Senator got a law passed to reopen the case and allow more black farmers to sue for funds.
The Senator was Barack Hussein Obama..
Because this law was passed in dead silence, and because the woman responsible for spearheading it was an obscure USDA official, American taxpayers did not realize that they had just been forced in the midst of a worldwide recession to pay out more than
Origins: Pigford v. Glickman was a lawsuit filed by Timothy Pigford in 1997 against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), naming Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman as the defendant. Pigford, who was initially joined by an additional
For many years, black farmers had complained that they were not receiving fair treatment when they applied to local county committees (which make the decisions) for farm loans or assistance. These farmers alleged that they were being denied USDA farm loans or forced to wait longer for loan approval than were According to [a USDA] commissioned study, few appeals were made by minority complainants because of the slowness of the process, the lack of confidence in the decision makers, the lack of knowledge about the rules, and the significant bureaucracy involved in the process. Other findings showed that
Litigation against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for discrimination against African American farmers began in
August 1997 with two suits brought by black farmers, Pigford v. Glickman and Brewington v. Glickman, but its origins go back much further.
white males; and
Under a consent decree that consolidated and settled the Pigford and Brewington cases, any African American who
discriminated against by the USDA on the basis of race, and
In response to claims that a large number of applicants were not fairly considered because, due to a lack of notice, they filed late and were denied review, Republican Senators George Allen and Charles Grassley introduced unsuccessful Congressional bills (in 2006 and 2007, respectively) to provide a mechanism for these applicants to have their claims considered. Finally, in January 2008 several members of Congress (one of whom was Senator Barack Obama of Illinois) urged the Senate and House Agriculture Committees to include in an upcoming
This provision did not reopen the previous Pigford litigation, but rather provided such farmers with a new right to sue. Ultimately, On February 18, 2010, Attorney General Holder and Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack announced a
Due to concerns about the large number of applicants who did not obtain a determination on the merits of their claims under the original Pigford settlement, Congress included a provision in the 2008 farm bill that permitted any claimant who had submitted a late-filing request under Pigford and who had not previously obtained a determination on the merits of his or her claim to petition in federal court to obtain such a determination.
In response to claims that the number of applicants in the Pigford cases exceeded the number of black farmers enumerated by census information, the Congressional Research Service reported that:
These statistics, however, failed to recognize that many farms are operated by more than one farm operator. In 2002, the Census of Agriculture collected data for a maximum of three principal operators per farm. The 2002 Census enumerated 29,090 African American farm operators. This statistical change more accurately captured the actual number of operators, that is, those who are In addition, it is important to note that there may be other reasons for discrepancies between the number of farmers reflected in farm Census data and the number of claimants under Pigford or
Questions have been raised about the number of black farmers who were or are eligible for a settlement under Pigford or Pigford II. Determining the number of African American farm operators who farmed during the period of
actually engaged in farming. For example, a single farm may be operated by four or more operators, each of whom could have conceivably made loan applications to USDA agencies. In addition, a farm operator might operate rented or leased land owned by a principal operator. In such a case, that operator renting or leasing farmland would not have been counted as the operator of that farm. Under the term of the consent decree, however, such a farmer could be an eligible claimant because he or she farmed or tried to farm during the requisite time period. The varying Census definitions of farm, farm operator, and farm owner help explain why the number of initial claimants in the Pigford case (approximately 94,000) was higher than the number of farms/farm operators enumerated by the Census of Agriculture between 1982 and 1997 and why the estimated number of potential
In April 2013, the New York Times reported that the latter settlement was agreed to despite substantial objections from those who maintained that there was no credible basis for it, and that the process for compensation was wide open to fraudulent claims:
The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it 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. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion. From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.
The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.
Shirley Sherrod was the USDA's Georgia State Director of Rural Development who was forced to resign in July 2010 after video excerpts from her address to a March 2010 NAACP event were posted on the Internet, excerpts which supposedly caught her describing how she discriminated against a white farmer who sought her help in 1986 when his farm was about to be foreclosed on. However, a review of the unedited video in its full context revealed that Sherrod said she had in fact extended help to the farmer in question:
In the heart of a farm community that still favored whites over blacks, with the USDA known as the "last plantation," Sherrod was tasked with helping Eloise and Roger Spooner save their farm. As she recounted many years later in a now widely viewed speech, Sherrod, by then working at a nonprofit organization that assisted farmers in danger of losing their farms, did not feel particularly motivated to help the Spooners, a white couple. Eventually, as any viewing of the entire speech makes clear, Sherrod changed her mind. She did help the couple, with whom she has remained friendly, and the experience became a turning point in her life when she learned to see beyond skin color and sought to work with blacks and whites battling to save small family farms that were shuttering by the thousands.
White House officials subsequently issued an apology to Sherrod and offered her a new position with the USDA (which she declined).
Shirley Sherrod and her husband received a share of a
Back then, local USDA offices with power over loans were run by whites, and it took three times as long, on average, to process loan applications from black farmers as it did for whites. The Reagan Administration had shuttered the civil rights division in the USDA, which meant that complaints about discrimination were routinely discarded or thrown in drawers even as black ownership of farmland was on a steep decline. The failure of New Communities was so emotionally devastating to its participants that Shirley Sherrod's husband Charles later told the Washington Post, "For two years after all this happened, I wouldn't even talk about it. Couldn't talk about it, it hurt so much." But [Shirley] Sherrod did not let the USDA off the hook. New Communities became part of a massive class-action lawsuit against the department that was initially settled in 1999, reopened in 2008 and continues to pay claims for thousands of black farmers found to have been ignored, dismissed or mistreated by the USDA in the 1980s and 1990s. Out of about
It was 1985, 20 years after her father was murdered by a white man who was never prosecuted, and the nearly
Last updated: 28 April 2013
Sources: |
Cowan, Tadlock. "The Pigford Cases: USDA Settlement of Discrimination Suits by Black Farmers." Congressional Research Service. 10 December 2010. Hennessey, Kathleen. "Hard Feelings About Handling of Shirley Sherrod Have Deep Roots." Los Angeles Times 4 August 2010. Pickert, Kate. "When Shirley Sherrod Was First Wronged by the USDA." Time. 23 July 2010.