Holder & Vilsack Insist They Will Fight Pigford Reparations Fraud: "
More than 92,000 “black farmers” have signed up for reparations from the Obama USDA after the Pigford case was extended this past year. That’s five times the number of blacks who were actually farming during the time period in question and would possibly qualify for the reparations.
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. To date, almost $1 billion has been paid or credited to the farmers under the settlement’s consent decree. Democrats want to add another $1.2 billion to the money pot and continue with the reparations.
FOX News Special Report covered this sensitive topic in August:
Today Attorney General Eric Holder and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack insisted they would fight Pigford reparations fraud.
TPM Muckraker reported:
Attorney General Eric Holder and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack hit back at critics of the settlement reached between the government and African-American farmers who say they were discriminated against by the Agriculture Department. Conservatives said the legislation, which President Barack Obama is set to sign into law today, has the potential for fraud.
TPM asked at a news conference this morning what the government was doing to combat fraud in the Pigford settlement.
“I think we have in place appropriate steps and we must recognize that what we’re doing here is compensating for acts of discrimination that took place some time ago,” Vilsack told reporters in response to a question from TPM. “There’s no question that happened and there’s no question the time has come for us to close that chapter in U.S.D.A. history and in civil rights.”
Holder said the Justice Department would take fraud very seriously.
“The fraud concern is legitimate, and one that I think the secretary has indicated has been addressed in the past and we’ll continue to use those mechanisms to implement this new settlement,” Holder told reporters. “But what cannot be lost is what the secretary also said: this is a settlement that addressed a historical wrong. It’s something that this country is not about and should not be about.”
Good luck with that.
Already there are reports that 8 applications in one family were filed and paid off in the Pigford scam.
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