Former Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer brings some interesting news to light. There have been more claims of discrimination than there are farmers able to bring such claims forth.
According to Schafer at BigGovernment.com:
I am shocked by the recent passage of legislation by the US Congress that provides a settlement for discrimination lawsuits filed by black farmers against the United States Department of Agriculture. With today’s focus on deficit spending and unaffordable government debt, Congress has decided to double the amount of dollars spent to date to settle these claims. Given the fact that there are more claims of discrimination than there are black farmers, I wonder if members of Congress knew the facts if they would have voted to spend another $1.2 Billion to settle claims.
The absurdity of there being more claims than farmers is enough to ruffle feathers, but the fact that this leads to increased deficit spending should be enough to put an immediate stop to the process.
I was surprised that over one billion dollars had already been distributed to aggrieved farmers and there were still so many open applications. It just doesn’t seem possible that with somewhere between 18,000 and 33,000 black farmers in the country there could be more than 90,000 claims of discrimination by the USDA. If that many farmers were discriminated against it would mean that the whole Department had a massive conspiracy against black farmers. Wouldn’t you think if that many incidences of discrimination actually took place the perpetrators would have to be pretty visible and easily identified? However, I could find not an indication that even one employee was fired because of discriminating against a black farmer. Something just doesn’t add up!
Schafer is right, something really isn’t adding up. And it doesn’t appear to be a conspiracy against a specific set of farmers.
There is definitely a rush to disperse these funds without a true investigation into the claims. In these times of dire financial straits, one would hope that someone inside of the vast bureaucracy would pause and investigate what is happening.
