The scandal of the Pigford settlements, which Andrew Breitbart and BigGovernment.com are working diligently to unravel, continues to clarify and putrify as more information surfaces.
BigGovernment’s Lee Stranahan, who was introduced to the site’s viewers as a left-leaning filmmaker, has a video up featuring Tom Burrell, who heads the Black Farmer Agricultural Association, as the latter describes the beginning of the Pigford cases. It seems that while there was indeed a class of claimants who were farmers and who could make a case that the U.S. Department of Agriculture discriminated against them, two months before that class was certified the plaintiff attorneys in the Pigford case successfully added a class of plaintiffs who “attempted to farm.”
And 92 percent of the claimants the government has paid to date come from the second group – the one which never actually grew anything.
It’s the second group, almost exclusively, which is the subject of the billion-dollar Pigford appropriation Nancy Pelosi rammed through the House of Representatives last month – with some 94,000 claimants included in the settlements. Only 18,000 black farmers existed during the period of the alleged USDA discrimination.
UPDATE: Apparently, in Arkansas (and other places as well, perhaps) for a share of the 50K settlement the USDA employees will fill all the paperwork out for you. And not get fired for the trouble.
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