Don't Drink That Racist Coffee!

Thanks to the yeoman's work of Andrew Breitbart, maybe one of these days we'll all have a national dialogue about race that includes a little bit of intellectual honesty, one that doesn't involve unfounded charges of racism. That does seem unlikely, when any criticism of Democrats or the Obama Administration is usually met with such charges, such as when a crowd of Tea Party protesters were accused of hurling racial epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus. It does not bode well for race relations when a reputed hero of the Civil Rights movement, Congressman John Lewis, along with other members of the caucus, are proven demonstrably to have lied about the whole thing.

That was just the beginning. When Andrew Breitbart produced video evidence of the institutional racism that infests the NAACP, it led to the firing of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod. In response, Sherrod threatened a lawsuit against Breitbart, who was defended by none other than Chris Matthews during a segment of MSNBC's Hardball, in which it appeared that Matthews persuaded Howard Dean that Breitbart was being falsely and unfairly maligned. He did not present the video out of context after all. It was not Shirley Sherrod he was accusing of racism, it was the NAACP itself, whose Chairman, Benjamin Jealous, initially promised to get to the bottom of the blatant racist reaction of many of his fellow members. Even Sherrod, as Breitbart points out, took his side on the matter, before being co-opted by the Administration.

Incredibly, however, the segment was redacted from the program when it was re-aired-just two hours later. Someone had gotten to Matthews, or to somebody at MSNBC, and warned them to get back on message. Something was obviously amiss.

To make a long story short(er), Breitbart eventually found out that he had stumbled onto a story of rampant government corruption in the form of the Pigford II settlement. Without going into a lot of detail, Pigford was a case decided in favor of black farmers who had been victims of the FDA's prejudiced policies. These farmers were demonstrably shown to have been unfairly denied loans and other forms of assistance from the FDA to which they were entitled, something for which no one in the FDA has yet lost their jobs.

Unfortunately, the final settlement seems to have helped the lawyers who filed the suit more than the original relative handful of black farmers truly victimized by the FDA, which by the time the suit was filed seemed to grow to a greater number than the actual number of black farmers in the US. It turned into a staggering sum of money so great it was originally slated to be included in Stimulus Bill, apparently at the instigation of Obama and others in his administration. When the story looked to be in danger of going public, it was removed from the bill.

The suit was originally filed in part due to the advocacy of the Sherrod family, which as it turns out just happens to have been the largest single beneficiary of the lawsuit. Shirley Sherrod's firing by the Administration was due mainly to this, and the fact that she probably should not have been hired by the FDA to begin with due to conflict of interest. The controversy over the video released by Breitbart merely afforded a convenient excuse to get rid of her, something many within the Department had already been clamoring for. It was also possibly a way of sweeping this story under the rug before it got out but, as so often happens, they only managed to arouse suspicions-notably those of Andrew Breitbart, who had already had more than enough of being under the gun.

Now he's produced documented evidence of what might turn out to be one of the biggest outright scams by the federal government perpetrated against the American taxpayer of all time. It is also worth noting that the black farmers the settlement was ostensibly meant to help received very little of the money. This is more like the workings of an organized crime syndicate working ostensibly to impose a reparations settlement on the American people under the guise of what was originally a legitimate cause of action.

You can download the pdf concerning the case here-The Pigford Shakedown: How the Black Farmers’ Cause Was Hijacked by Politicians, Trial Lawyers & Community Organizers — Leaving Us With a Billion Dollar Tab

There is really too much to go into here-including the murder of a potential informant by a couple out to unfairly take advantage of the settlement and thus defraud the government, and by extension the taxpayers. There is also the heretofore little known fact that this in large measure explains the depth of support for Obama from the Congressional Black Caucus against Hillary Clinton in the primaries. He campaigned on the premise of increasing the numbers of those entitled to relief from the settlement to more than twenty thousand, from an original number of just around four hundred.

By the time all was said and done, the number of litigants approached more than ninety thousand, with a final settlement figure in the billions of dollars.

Take the time when you can find it to pour over the pdf, and ponder the implications, preferably over a strong hot cup of non-racist coffee.