The Pigfords, Farmers, and waste, fraud, and abuse

REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

Pigford vs. 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 case was entitled "Pigford vs. Glickman" and in 1999, the black farmers won their case.

The government agreed to pay each of them as much as $50,000 to settle their claims.

But then on February 23, 2010, something shocking happened in relation to that original judgment: In total silence, the USDA agreed to release more funds to "Pigford ".

The amount was a staggering...... $1.25 billion. This was because the original number of plaintiffs - 400 black farmers had now swollen, in a class action suit, to include a total of 86,000 black farmers throughout America ..

There was only one teensy problem:

The United States of America doesn't have 86,000 black farmers!!!!

According to accurate and totally verifiable Official USDA 2007 Census census data, the total number of black farmers throughout America is only 39,697.

Hmmm... by the Official USDA 1992 Census data the US had only 18,816 black farmers!!
Oops!!

Well, gosh - how on earth did 39,697 explode into the fraudulent 86,000 claims??

And how did $50,000 explode into $1.25 billion??

Well, folks, you'll just have to ask the woman who not only spearheaded this case because of her position in 1997 at the "Rural Development Leadership Network", but whose family recei ved the highest single payout (approximately $13 million) from that action - Shirley Sherrod.
Oops again!!

Yes, folks it appears that Ms. Sherrod had just unwittingly exposed herself as the perpetrator of one of the biggest fraud claims in the history of the United States - - a fraud enabled solely because she screamed racism at the government and cowed them into submission.

And it gets even more interesting...
Ms. Sherrod has also exposed the person who aided and abetted her in this race fraud.

As it turns out, the original judgment of "Pigford vs. Glickman" in 1999 only applied to a total of about 16,000 black farmers.
But....in 2008, a junior US Senator got a law passed to reopen the case and allow more black farmers to sue for funds.

The Senator was Barack Hussein Obama..

Because this law was passed in dead silence, and because the woman responsible fo r spearheading it was an obscure USDA official, American taxpayers did not realize that they had just been forced in the midst of a worldwide recession to pay out more than $1.25 billion to settle a race claim.

But Andy Breitbart knew. And on Monday, July 22, 2010, he cleverly laid a trap which Sherrod - - and Obama + his cronies - - stumbled headfirst into which has now resulted in the entire world discovering the existence of this corrupt financial judgment.

As for Ms. Sherrod?? Well, she's discovering too late that her cry of 'racism' to the media which was intended to throw the spotlight on Breitbart has instead thrown that spotlight on herself and the huge corruption.
Sherrod has vanished from public view.

Obama Signs Bill To Pay Black and Native Farmers

But the perpetrator of that law passed in dead silence leading to unlawful claims & corruption..... is still trying to fool all of US.

Go to Google and read for yourself "Pigford vs. Glickman", or "Pigford Obama".

As some have said, "The Republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their President."

http://mydd.com/users/nancy-scola/posts/pigford-black-farmers-and-obama

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/01/10/obama-carries-on-the-pigford-fraud/

..... there are many more ....

Shirley Sherrod, Said ex-USDA worker: "White House forced me to resign over fabricated racial controversy"

• 

BY ALIYAH SHAHID

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

One strike and she was out.
A black employee who resigned from the Agriculture Department on Monday said the White House forced her out after remarks that she says have sparked a fabricated racial controversy.
Shirley Sherrod, the former Georgia director of Rural Development, said she received a phone call from the USDA's deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook on Monday while she was in a car. Cook told her that the White House wanted her to call it quits.
"They called me twice," Sherrod told the Associated Press. "The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry and that's what I did."

The Black (by the way why is negro used some times, African, African-American some time, and Black now?)  Farmers Side! Why haven't we heard more about this??

 The U.S. Senate has been criticized for dragging its feet on compensation for black farmers based on the famous Pigford discrimination case. The case was supposedly settled by an alliance between black farmers and Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture. The Obama administration has promised an extra $1.25 billion to settle the claims of the lawsuit.

Although a settlement had been reached, the Senate failed to move forward with the authorization to release the funds. That has led to a tremendous amount of frustration on the part of black farmers, who've been patiently waiting for the first black president and his colleagues to make amends for the discrimination they've suffered for decades.
t’s about time. After decades of legal wrangling and several stalled attempts in the Senate, a payout of $4.5 billion has been approved to settle longstanding claims of government discrimination against black and Native American farmers.
On Friday, the Senate approved $1.5 billion to settle claims with black farmers in the Pigford II case. That decision was followed by the upper chamber approving a separate amount of $3.4 billion to settle with aggrieved Native American farmers who alleged that the Department of Interior had badly mismanaged money accounts.
Senator Harry Reid is already claiming this as one of his big lame duck victories.
“Black farmer and Native American trust account holders had to wait a long time for justice, but now it will finally be served,” Reid said in a statement according to The Hill. “I am hearted that Democrats and Republicans were able to come together to deliver the settlement that these men and women deserve for the discrimination and mismanagement they faced in the past.”
The payout has been a long time coming. Black farmers had accused the government in a lawsuit of favoring white farmers for loans. That case was settled way back in 1999, and the deal was, and remains, among the largest civil rights settlements in history. But it’s taken over a decade — and nine failed attempts before the Senate — for lawmakers to actually approve the funds and begin the long process of paying the debt.
The money was finally approved as part of an extension of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
In an interview on Essence.com, Dr. John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association talked about how the Shirley Sherrod fiasco actually helped bring attention to the case.

It gave validation to what we had been saying for years—how the USDA had mistreated Black farmers, and also Black employees. We still have an employee problem at USDA. She’s an example of that because we have nearly 80,000 Black farmers that said they were discriminated against, and no one’s been fired. Yet they fired this woman on the spot because they thought she’d mistreated a White farmer. I call that a triple standard. We have a long way to go with the Department of Agriculture. The fact is, there’s a terrible distrust between the Black farmers and the USDA—they treated us worse than the dirt on the ground—and that’s not going to go away tomorrow. But paying the farmers will certainly put us a step further in the healing process.

Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians, spoke to NPR on Monday about the ordeal.
“It’s been such a long time coming and such a painful process,” Keel said on “Tell Me More.” “We’re just happy that we’re finally at a point where we can work with Congress and I’m happy to say that Congress has finally moved these things forward.”

Shirley Sherrod's Disappearing Act: Not So Fast

By: Tom Blumer | 07/20/10 3:00 AM

My oh my, that happened quickly. Perhaps too quickly.
Until yesterday, Shirley Sherrod was Georgia Director of Rural Development for the USDA. Earlier in the day at Big Government, Andrew Breitbart put up a video that exposed Ms. Sherrod as someone all too willing to discriminate based on race.
Within hours of the video's release, USDA Director Tom Vilsack announced Sherrod's resignation, and in the process issued an exceptionally strong condemnation ("We are appalled by her actions ... Her actions were shameful ... she gave no indication she had attempted to right the wrong she had done to this man").
The NAACP, at whose Freedom Fund Banquet Sherrod spoke of her discriminatory posture, and at which the audience seemed to indicate approval of her outlook, followed a short time later, virtually echoing Vilsack.
So I guess we're supposed to forget about Shirley Sherrod from this point forward.
Not just yet. Luckily, she's not going away quietly, and is complaining about Fox News and the Tea Party causing her dismissal. Keep it up, ma’am, because you and the USDA both deserve further scrutiny.
Ms. Sherrod's previous background, the circumstances surrounding her hiring, and the USDA's agenda may all play a part in explaining her sudden departure from the agency. These matters have not received much scrutiny to this point.
An announcement of Ms. Sherrod's July 2009 appointment to her USDA position at ruraldevelopment.org gives off quite a few clues:

RDLN Graduate and Board Vice Chair Shirley Sherrod was appointed Georgia Director for Rural Development by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on July 25. Only days earlier, she learned that New Communities, a group she founded with her husband and other families (see below) has won a thirteen million dollar settlement in the minority farmers law suit Pigford vs Vilsack.

What?
The news that follows at the link, which appears to pre-date the announcement of Ms. Sherrod's appointment, provides further details:

Minority Farm Settlement

Justice Achieved - Congratulations to Shirley and Charles Sherrod!

We have wonderful news regarding the case of New Communities, Inc., the land trust that Shirley and Charles Sherrod established, with other black farm families in the 1960's. At the time, with holdings of almost 6,000 acres, this was the largest tract of black-owned land in the country.

... Over the years, USDA refused to provide loans for farming or irrigation and would not allow New Communities to restructure its loans. Gradually, the group had to fight just to hold on to the land and finally had to wind down operations.

... The cash (settlement) award acknowledges racial discrimination on the part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the years 1981-85. ... New Communities is due to receive approximately $13 million ($8,247,560 for loss of land and $4,241,602 for loss of income; plus $150,000 each to Shirley and Charles for pain and suffering). There may also be an unspecified amount in forgiveness of debt. This is the largest award so far in the minority farmers law suit (Pigford vs Vilsack).

The Pigford matter goes back a long way, and to say the least has a checkered history, as this May 27, 2010 item at Agri-Pulse demonstrates (bolds are mine):

As part of a April 14, 1999 class action case settlement, commonly known as the Pigford case, U.S. taxpayers have already provided over $1 billion in cash, non-credit awards and debt relief to almost 16,000 black farmers who claimed that they were discriminated against by USDA officials as they “farmed or attempted to farm.” In addition, USDA’s Farm Service Agency spent over $166 million on salaries and expenses on this case from 1999-2009, according to agency records.

Members of Congress may approve another $1.15 billion this week to settle cases from what some estimate may be an additional 80,000 African-Americans who have also claimed to have been discriminated against by USDA staff.

... Settling this case is clearly a priority for the White House and USDA. Secretary Vilsack described the funding agreement reached between the Administration and advocates for black farmers early this year as “an important milestone in putting these discriminatory claims behind us for good and in achieving finality for this group of farmers with longstanding grievances."

However, confronted with the skyrocketing federal deficit, more officials are taking a critical look at the billion dollars spent thus far and wondering when these discrimination cases will ever end. Already, the number of people who have been paid and are still seeking payment will likely exceed the 26,785 black farmers who were considered to even be operating back in 1997, according to USDA. That’s the year the case initially began as Pigford v. (then Agriculture Secretary) Glickman and sources predicted that, at most, 3,000 might qualify.

At least one source who is extremely familiar with the issue and who asked to remain anonymous because of potential retribution, says there are a number of legitimate cases who have long been denied their payments and will benefit from the additional funding. But many more appear to have been solicited in an attempt to “game” the Pigford system.

Here are just a few questions about Ms. Sherrod that deserve answers:

• Was Ms. Sherrod's USDA appointment an unspoken condition of her organization's settlement?
• How much "debt forgiveness" is involved in USDA's settlement with New Communities?
• Why were the Sherrods so deserving of a combined $300,000 in "pain and suffering" payments -- amounts that far exceed the average payout thus far to everyone else? ($1.15 billion divided by 16,000 is about $72,000)?
• Given that New Communities wound down its operations so long ago (it appears that this occurred sometime during the late 1980s), what is really being done with that $13 million in settlement money?

Here are a few bigger-picture questions:

• Did Shirley Sherrod resign so quickly because the circumstances of her hiring and the lawsuit settlement with her organization that preceded it might expose some unpleasant truths about her possible and possibly sanctioned conflicts of interest?
• Is USDA worried about the exposure of possible waste, fraud, and abuse in its handling of Pigford?
• Did USDA also dispatch Sherrod hastily because her continued presence, even for another day, might have gotten in the way of settling Pigford matters quickly?

The media and the blogosphere shouldn't be so quick to forget about Shirley Sherrod.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/examiner-opinion-zone/shirley-sherrod039s-disappearing-act-not-so-fast#ixzz1SPHw5rqb

President Barack Obama- - - - - - - - - - - - -Apostate NOW!!!!!

President Apostate?
"Apostate"

Apostasy (pronounced /əˈpɒstəsi/) is the formal religious disaffiliation, abandonment, or renunciation of one's religion, especially if the motive is deemed unworthy. In a technical sense, as used sometimes by sociologists without the pejorative connotations of the word, the term refers to renunciation and criticism of, or opposition to, one's former religion. One who commits apostasy is an apostate, or one who apostatizes. The word derives from Greek ἀποστασία (apostasia), meaning a defection or revolt, from ἀπό, apo, "away, apart", στάσις, stasis, "stand", "standing". The term is sometimes also used to refer to renunciation of a belief or cause by (generally facetious) extension of the religious connotation, such as in reference to a political party or a sports team. Apostasy is generally not a self-definition: very few former believers call themselves apostates and they generally consider this term to be a pejorative. Many religious movements consider it a vice (sin), a corruption of the virtue of piety in the sense that when piety fails, apostasy is the result. Unlike apostasy, heresy is the rejection or corruption of certain doctrines, not the complete abandonment of one's religion. Heretics claim to still be following a religion (or even to be the "true believers"), whereas apostates reject it entirely. Many religious groups and some states punish apostates. Apostates may be shunned by the members of their former religious group[1] or worse. This may be the official policy of the religious group or may happen spontaneously. A church may in certain circumstances respond to apostasy by excommunicating the apostate, while some Abrahamic scriptures (Judaism: Deuteronomy 13:6-10) and Islam: al-Bukhari, Diyat, bab 6) demand the death penalty for apostates, although capital punishment for any offense is no longer permitted under Judaism, except for enemies of Israel.

By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK

BARACK OBAMA has emerged as a classic example of charismatic leadership — a figure upon whom others project their own hopes and desires. The resulting emotional intensity adds greatly to the more conventional strengths of the well-organized Obama campaign, and it has certainly sufficed to overcome the formidable initial advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton.

One danger of such charisma, however, is that it can evoke unrealistic hopes of what a candidate could actually accomplish in office regardless of his own personal abilities. Case in point is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world.

This idea often goes hand in hand with the altogether more plausible argument that Mr. Obama’s election would raise America’s esteem in Africa — indeed, he already arouses much enthusiasm in his father’s native Kenya and to a degree elsewhere on the continent.

But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

"I asked a British history buff I know if he could find out who the colonial registrar was for Mombasa in 1961.

He called me up a few minutes ago and said "Sir Edward F. Lavender"
Source(s): "Kenya Dominion Record 4667 Australian library."
Posted by Alan Peters at 11:56 PM

Testimony from a Mombasa science teacher and the Mombasa Registrar of births that Obama's birth certificate from Mombasa is genuine. A copy of President Obama's birth certificate that Lucas Smith obtained through the help of a Kenyan Colonel who got it recently directly from the Coast General Hospital in Mombasa , Kenya .

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

With few exceptions, the jurists of all Sunni and Shiite schools prescribe execution for all adults who leave the faith not under duress; the recommended punishment is beheading at the hands of a cleric, although in recent years there have been both stonings and hangings. (Some may point to cases in which lesser punishments were ordered — as with some Egyptian intellectuals who have been punished for writings that were construed as apostasy — but those were really instances of supposed heresy, not explicitly declared apostasy as in Senator Obama’s case.)

It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.

For example, in Iran in 1994 the intervention of Pope John Paul II and others won a Christian convert a last-minute reprieve, but the man was abducted and killed shortly after his release. Likewise, in 2006 in Afghanistan, a Christian convert had to be declared insane to prevent his execution, and he was still forced to flee to Italy.

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

That an Obama presidency would cause such complications in our dealings with the Islamic world is not likely to be a major factor with American voters, and the implication is not that it should be. But of all the well-meaning desires projected on Senator Obama, the hope that he would decisively improve relations with the world’s Muslims is the least realistic.

Edward N. Luttwak, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is the author of “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace.”