April 25, 2013

Obama hands out billions in fraudulent bias claims

I'm shocked, shocked to learn that former civil rights lawyer turned Chicago politician Barack Obama has been handing out billions of taxpayer dollars to largely fraudulent civil rights plaintiffs:

From the NYT:
Federal Spigot Flows as Farmers Claim Bias 
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp. 
Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm. 
But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost. 
They were wrong. 
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court. 
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. 
“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.” 
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. 

36 comments:

wren said...

Is the NYT reading Breitbart?

It is very nice (and surprising) to see this there.

Anonymous said...

to hell in a hand basket, we go...

eah said...

Mine eyes have seen the glory of black farmers in Zimbabwe.

$1.33 billion

All in an hour's work for Bernanke. Never mind the debt.

Dennis Dale said...

Drudge should group this in red along with the latest on sequester cuts.

This is the sort of stuff people should go to jail for. Good for the NYT. Old fashioned good-government journalism, in this day and age! And yet, it matters not a whit...

Gilded Age said...

Reminds me of Milton Friedman's bit on the 4 ways of spending money

rightsaidfred said...

The whole farm program is pretty bad in a multitude of ways: subsidizing production we don't need; big producers gaming the system; subsidies staying in place during record commodity prices; subsidies just being capitalized into rents and inputs.

But this minority slush fund is bad even by ag dept standards, akin to the absurdities one sees after a disaster: "Attention all looters, full time and those who will become so for the opportunity..."

rightsaidfred said...

The looting mentality here is most distressing. We have politicians and law firms that are happy to loot the Treasury. We have a populace that is happy to get something for nothing (or so they think.) It all speaks to the level of civilization we can sustain. "There is much ruin in a nation, and we are finding more everyday."

john marzan said...

PIGFORD was breitbart's big issue before he died.

Porter said...

I sometimes wonder if there is any abasement modern whites won't tolerate. But of course the answer is yes--the abasement of non-whites.

Anonymous said...

I'm shocked, shocked to find out that this is going on here!

Anonymous said...

Steve,

Off topic, you've been given a mention by Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/cousin-marriage-and-democracy.html

Mr. Anon said...

The USDA has been discrimininating against non-farmers like me for years. Can I get some money too?

Aaron Gross said...

David Frum has an excellent take on the bias-claim corruption: Do We Really Trust Government Bureaucracy to Handle Immigration Reform?

Jerry said...

So you're an immigrant to America, you come with the best intentions, you want to believe in this country, to replace what you've lost when you left the old country. And then you read something like this. (Story of my life.)

candid_observer said...

This is going to get some serious blowback for Obama.

Given that it's the NY Times reporting it, the accusations are going to be impossible to dismiss as partisan distortion.

To allow this in a context of continued economic downturn couldn't look worse for the true priorities of the Obama administration.

Right wing radio is now stocked for a generation with examples to feed their crowd.

Anonymous said...

I have stopped getting angry after reading stories like this.....just as it seems like liberal whites are getting angry, but its too late, the train has left the station. I see white people en mass getting in line for govt pot of gold, and their sheer size should make them get a good shake, following on Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" theme. The thing is liberal whites really really believe that their sh%^ does not stink, they really believe that only and only the truly discriminated farmers would ask for handouts, where could this belief in integrity come from? Could it be all their fellow liberal WASP's?

kaganovitch said...

We can see the terrible consequences of not including chechen farmers in this settlement; they are forced to take matters into their own hands.

Anonymous said...

Spigotry against bigotry.

But nothing compared to Wall Street robbery in the 100s of billions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7JNUH7P2Aw

Money gambled away in LOST IN AMERICA and Brooks can't get it back.

But Wall Street gambles away much more and get it all back.
That is the real terrorism.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmcN_XzQvU

Anonymous said...

Community organizer Barry Obama screws whitey.

Ex Submarine Officer said...

Interesting that there is an article in NYT that includes even implicit criticism of blacks.

I guess it is because they hate farmers (Apollonians?) more than they love blacks.

Marlowe said...

Forty acres and a mule just don't cut it no more.

Marlowe said...

its very design encouraged people to lie ...

Dem poor black folks forced to do wrong by evil whitey once more.

Dennis Dale said...

Previously the blatant theft of the administration has been at the comic "one million dollars" level--like Holder squeezing pennies out of banks for "predatory lending" (and it was the banksters, after all).
But four billion; this is starting to get real. Maybe that's why even the NYT has been given pause.

Anonymous said...

https://www.facebook.com/pages/UW-Madison-Center-for-the-Humanities/129388487109272?hc_location=timeline


"Don't miss this Arts Institute event: Wednesday, May 1st, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern in London will lecture on "Poets of the Infra-Ordinary." 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in L140 of the Elvehjem Building"

-----

Wow, really heady intellectual stuff.

Torn and Frayed said...

Obama made a serious mistake here. He's cutting checks to identity groups but if the New York Times has their panties in a twist it can only mean one thing: the Scotch-Irish "farmers" didn't get their cut.

And who can blame them for being pissed off? No identity group, and especially not the chosen tribe that created the concept, likes to hear the words Mylene Farmer made so famous in France, "Hey bitch, you're not on the list"

jody said...

there are probably more claims than there are actual african farmers. if there's ever been a stereotype that was true, it's that farmers are rural euro americans. country bumpkin types. and in the new america, in states with lots of mexicans, it's the mexicans working the fields.

unless it's in a year 2013 cultural marxist television commercial, where africans do everything from being scientists to astronauts, you could live a full life and never see an african working the field. funny considering that's mainly what they did 200 years ago. today they're seriously allergic to agricultural work, or rural anything, for that matter.

rob said...

they really believe that only and only the truly discriminated farmers would ask for handouts, where could this belief in integrity come from? Could it be all their fellow liberal WASP's?

Yes. It's very difficult for decent people to figure out that not everyone is decent. When they do it can get messy. The Utopian plans move from get rid of the corrupting influences to get rid of the corrupt.

In the US, I don't see how the current demographics could lead to anything but population transfer, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. I really, really hope I'm just crazy.

Anonymous said...

1/5 Americans are on food stamps. No shame attached to anything in American anymore. Why not screw your neighbor and get on food stamps? Obama will praise you for it.

Dennis Dale said...

It's very difficult for decent people to figure out that not everyone is decent
The universality of projection means the trusting will suffer more for trusting the untrustworthy, than the untrustworthy will suffer for not trusting them.


I read The Righteous Mind recently and was struck by an insight the author, as a liberal, missed. He makes an evolutionary case for two categories of people, conservative and liberal; the liberal is more concerned with the welfare of the weak, whereas the conservative is more concerned with fairness--people pulling their weight. Needless to say, the Dem satisfies this need by concerning himself with the needs of "weak" minorities.

He seems to miss then that the Democratic Party is composed of two very different halves: the liberals, mostly WASPs, who are somewhat genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor and minorities, and minorities, whose involvement in the party is entirely predatory group self-interest.

aandrews said...

A blatant example of the Cloward-Piven strategy in play.

This isn't going to end well.

Anonymous said...

I recall Jared Taylor claiming that more black farmers had filed claims than exist black farmers.

ben tillman said...

1/5 Americans are on food stamps. No shame attached to anything in American anymore. Why not screw your neighbor and get on food stamps? Obama will praise you for it.

Accepting government assistance is no longer a matter of shamefully stealing from members of your community. It's now a matter of grabbing resources for your community that would otherwise go to members of other communities.

Svigor said...

Accepting government assistance is no longer a matter of shamefully stealing from members of your community. It's now a matter of grabbing resources for your community that would otherwise go to members of other communities.

Yup. There's a point at which you realize it's all going to be looted anyway, so good people might as well loot too, so it all doesn't go into the hands of the thugs.

Pochinko said...

"Obama made a serious mistake here. He's cutting checks to identity groups but if the New York Times has their panties in a twist it can only mean one thing: the Scotch-Irish "farmers" didn't get their cut."


Nah, they know even gov't employees arent so gullible that they will believe that there are Scots-Irish farmers....

David said...

>1/5 Americans are on food stamps<

This can't be evidence of serious problems in the economy.

No, it can only be evidence that lazy bums is a-stealin'.

Some people see only what they want to see.

After 30 years, aren't the Reagan goggles getting a bit uncomfortable?