At the time of his premature death, the great provocateur Andrew Breitbart was more than a year into a grinding crusade to bring attention to a little-known class-action settlement called Pigford, which had begun with plausible accusations that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had discriminated against a small number of black farmers, but which had spiraled into a billion-dollar, open-ended government kickback machine for untold thousands that showed no signs of letting up.
Due to the pliability of the Clinton Justice Department and the dogged efforts of a few highly incentivized trial lawyers, the original Pigford settlement made $50,000 payments available to any African American who could merely claim to have been discriminated against by the federally deputized administrators of USDA bridge loans (loans designed to get farmers from the planting season to the harvesting season). And claim might even be too strong a word; since administrative records for the loan program were poor, the courts set the bar laughably low. To establish oneself as a farmer for the purposes of Pigford, it would all but do to establish that you had once bought a seed and passed within a country mile of a USDA office. And to establish that you were discriminated against there, it would all but do to affirm on a form that you found that experience less than satisfactory and to have your second cousin affirm that you told him as much at the time.
Unsurprisingly, this cash bonanza spawned a cottage industry of mountebanks and small-time frauds, including a few who toured the churches of the rural South recruiting farmers to stake their claims in lieu of reparations. And the number of claims exploded. Some claimants were as young as four years old; others had their forms filled out by lawyers just to keep the line moving. There were many reports of duplicative, even identical forms written in the same hand. In some towns, the number of claimants exceeded the number of farms there operated by individuals of any race. The Times quotes several USDA employees whose job was to process and ultimately rubber-stamp these claims. You couldnt have designed it worse if you had tried, one says of the process. You knew it was wrong, says another, but what could you do? Who is going to listen to you? Basically, it was a rip-off of the American taxpayers, says a third.
But as the Times reports in great depth, instead of closing the spigot, in 2010 the Obama administration did not just acquiesce to, it spearheaded the expansion of, the Pigford con on the taxpayers dime, and saw to it that not just black Americans, but any woman, Hispanic, or Native American who could so much as gesture at discrimination had access to a billion-dollar pool of easy money.
[NYPOST] Billionaire Manhattan hedge-funder Marc Lasry -- who this week turned down a coveted ambassadorship to La Belle France after his name surfaced in a $100 million illegal-gambling-ring probe -- has deep ties to the Clintons and President B.O..
The relationship was so strong that the powerful Dems hired each other's children and considered themselves family friends.
Lasry's son, Alex, worked as a $42,000-a-year special assistant reporting to senior Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, while Princess Chelsea Clinton did a three-year stint with Lasry's Avenue Capital investment fund.
Lasry's daughter, Samantha, was a staffer for then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who went on to become Obama's first chief of staff.
Lasry, always a big Clinton donor, was a top fund-raiser for Obama in 2012, pulling in more than $1 million.
Sources told The Post that Lasry declined the diplomatic post because of his friendship with Illya Trincher, the man feds say is the Russian-mob-connected kingpin of the gambling ring's New York outfit.
Lasry's camp yesterday said that he yanked his name purely for business reasons -- and that he has no relationship with Trincher. And he didn't want to be asked about his non-relationship at the hearing...
"He's played poker across the table from him, as have several celebrities, athletes and other boldfaced and not-so-boldfaced names," one person close to Lasry said. "It's not illegal to be sitting across the table from someone.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/29/2013 00:00 ||
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#1
A propaganda piece that serves multiple purposes. Informs the state controlled media on how to cover this regimes attack on Americans 2nd amendment right to bear arms. Clear and simple.
Boston is an example of how DHS has no desire to prevent terrorist attacis on Americans because the FBI had all the information necessary to apprehend the attackers. DHS has one mission, to protect the Obama Regime. Period.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/29/2013 00:00 ||
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Giving citizens of foreign countries free food stamps and the right to vote to keep members of the party giving away stuff paid for by actual citizens who are having their votes canceled out by those foreigners is criminal and requires a criminal prosecution at the very least.
#2
Commie-Speak. Here, let me translate:
[modified from a recent Mike Smith blog artikel]
We are greedy pigs and we are the most corrupt government South Africa the United States has ever seen and we are trying our best to be the most corrupt in the world. Unfortunately there are some people white journalist and white political commentators Racists who see through our corruption scam and we do not like them exposing our shenanigans, because they do not like to see a black man do well, by cheating and stealing from taxpayers.
So we will dumb down every sector of the police and the judiciary, even bring in laws against the media, so that these racists will never discover or expose how much we have stolen and still steal from you the citizens of South Africa the United States our loyal milk cows.
We will deny all allegations against us. We will falsify police dockets and bribe and coerce the judiciary to drop hundreds of charges against us. In fact we will do everything in our power to sweep allegations of corruption under the carpet.
#11
I am at this very moment listening to Bernie Goldberg on The Factor, compare the Champ to Nelson Mandela, as a media darling. O'Reilly opined that he more appropriately resembles Arch Druid Desmond Tutu. I think they're on to something.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
