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Breakfast Scramble: The Pigford Scam

DavidL's Breakfast Scramble
Eugene Robinson gets it wrong, from Washington Post [1]:

It is time to stop giving Herman Cain’s unapologetic bigotry a free pass. The man and his poison need to be seen clearly and taken seriously.

[…]

But Cain’s prejudice isn’t against Mormons or Jews, it’s against Muslims. Open religious prejudice is usually enough to disqualify a candidate for national office — but not, apparently, when the religion in question is Islam.

Muslims are more akin to the Klu Klux Klan than they are to Mormons or Jews, and should the KKK want to build an edifice to their hatred, I am sure that Robinson would be the first to oppose it.

Pigford is scam, lame streamers get it wrong, first Margery A.Beck:

OMAHA, Neb. (AP [2]) — Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann pointed to one program in particular Monday when talking about wasteful government spending: a multibillion dollar settlement paid to black farmers, who claim the federal government discriminated Aagainst them for decades in awarding loans and other aid.

And second,  Jen Collins, Minnesota Independent [3]:

While on tour of flooded areas near the Missouri River in Iowa Monday, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann characterized a government settlement with black farmers who were discriminated against in the 1980s and 1990s as fraud, eliciting outrage from the farmers’ advocates.

Bachmann and U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said the $1.2 billion extension, which was signed last year, could be put to better use helping flood victims in Iowa, according to the Associated Press [4].

John Boyd, president of the Black Farmers Union, told the told the AP [4]that flood victims deserve “redress,” but that taking resources from people who had been historically denied them was a bad idea.

It is simply not accurate to describe a person who never farmed as a black farmer.   It is racism, pure and simple.  Pigford is a scam, There more black claimants than than there were total black farmers in the entire nation, from Pajamas Media [5]:

If there are only 39,697 African-American farmers grand total in the entire country, then how can over 86,000 of them claim discrimination at the hands of the USDA? Where did the other 46,303 come from?

Now, if you’re confused over what the heck I’m even talking about, let’s go back to the beginning of the story:
Pigford v. Glickman

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 farmers won the case, known as Pigford v. Glickman, and in 1999 the government agreed to pay $50,000 each to any farmer who had been wrongly denied an agricultural loan. By then it had grown into a class action case, and any black farmer who had filed a complaint between 1983 and 1997 would be given at least $50,000 — not limited to the original 400 plaintiffs. It was estimated at that time that there might be as many as 2,000 beneficiaries granted $50,000 each.

Later.