From an anonymous source in the capitol:

These are redacted Pigford applications that are all done by the same lawyer.  All of the claimants come from Arkansas (two are related) and the stories they write on the application are clearly boilerplate, probably done by the same paralegal.  Some of the words are even misspelled consistently through the documents.

We don’t know the outcome of these apps but if they were successful claims it shows how little the claimants actually had to provide to get $50K.  This is the kind of information that we can’t wait to subpoena.

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Although the Pigford settlement story is a complex one that has major political implications, at the heart of it is a very simple question: does the settlement contain a significant amount of fraud?

If the Obama administration is telling the truth and there are only three cases of fraud out of 15,000 settled claims, then there’s no story here. If the fraud does exists, the attempt to silence people like Rep. Steve King or Andrew Breitbart aren’t just wrong but are a clear sign that some people will say anything to keep the truth about Pigford from coming out.

But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.  Eventhough the mainstream media has been silent on this story, there are witnesses. One brave whistleblower is Arkansas farmer Jimmy Dismuke, who recently sat down for an extensive, exclusive interview about Pigford. That entire interview will be made available on BigGovernment in the near future but today’s clip is powerful testimony about how simple it was for people — and by extension, their lawyers — to collect those $50,000 Pigford payments.

Today, in 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The following is based on an interview with a current employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

I’ve worked with the USDA for more than 25 years.  The situation with Pigford has been horrible.  There were cases of discrimination.  Perhaps 100 cases in the whole state of [redacted].  But the federal government paid out thousands of claims, a lot of them churned by attorneys who made a lot of money.

Attorneys caught on to the fact that the federal government doesn’t keep records.  They either don’t keep them well in terms of who they are meeting with or they are destroyed after a couple of years.  Attorneys recognized this and exploited it in Pigford.

My name started to appear on Pigford claims as someone who had discriminated against applicants.  I had to develop a chronology listing where I worked when, because almost all of the claims just didn’t make sense because I didn’t even work in those areas.  Names got out that you were a USDA employee and lawyers would just have people put them on an application. (more…)

In the pantheon of civic behavior, ex-politicians leaving DC to become lobbyists to advocate on behalf of private interests against taxpayer interests is right up there among the most undesirable.

What’s even worse?  When a former Secretary of Agriculture – who is African-American – leaves his post and now spends his time trolling for and representing litigants suing the USDA citing discrimination against African-Americans during the time he was in charge of the agency.

Why isn’t he suing himself, and paying the claims out of his own pocket? Instead, the USDA has admitted “no wrongdoing” (i.e. no one has been fired for the wholesale discrimination) and the taxpayer is completely and exclusively on the hook.

As Big Government will continue to show over the next few weeks, Pigford is a universe of its own filled with crooked politicians, cover-ups, greedy attorneys, and crime rings. And one of the brightest stars in the Pigford universe is Mike Espy:

MIKE ESPY (Alphonso Michael Espy) is the former Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture, and a former U.S. Representative from the 2nd District of Mississippi. He currently works as a private sector attorney, counselor, and agricultural advisor, having his own law and consulting firms: Mike Espy, PLLC, and AE Agritrade, Inc.

Prior to his appointment as USDA Secretary, Mike Espy served for seven years as a Member of Congress. While there, he served his bi-racial district as a member of the Budget and Agriculture Committees.

Before his election to Congress, Mike worked as a trial lawyer and served as Assistant Attorney General.

In 1997, Espy was indicted on 30 criminal charges of receiving gifts from food companies. Tyson Foods, the largest poultry producer in the U.S., was found guilty of paying Espy more than $12,000 in illegal gifts and was fined $6 million for the transgression. In another case, Sun Diamond was fined $1.5 million for giving Espy $6,000 in illegal gifts. (more…)

This is a copy of a three-page letter between Michael Sitcov, Chief of the DOJ Federal Programs Branch, who is defending the government against the Pigford suit, and class action Pigford lawyer Al Pires. This letter shows Sitcov’s obvious anger at the shenanigans of Pires, and the fact that a well-running mediation, that would have saved taxpayers billions, has been sabotaged.

We also print the mediation letter dated a few months earlier that shows that Pires and the government were close to a relatively inexpensive solution to a large portion of the Pigford suit.

The following is based on an interview with a current US Department of Agriculture employee who has worked for more than 20 years for the USDA:

It’s been ten years and I’ve really dealt with Pigford. It was a hard time. Frankly, I don’t like to talk about it anymore.

There was a lot of fraud. People collected money who had never stepped in the door of a USDA office. They had to prove they had been discriminated against to get their money so to get around that fact they would say they were never given an application. That’s how they got around the fact that there was no evidence of them having visited the USDA.

The burden of proof in Pigford was basically on us, the USDA, to prove that we didn’t discriminate against someone. How do you prove a negative like that? It’s really impossible.

I was assigned to Washington for a while to process Pigford claims. We saw claims come in from affluent areas. There were claims from Palm Beach and Palm Springs, and they said they were black farmers. One applicant said they were discriminated against by the Department of Agriculture’s Chicago office. There is no USDA office in Chicago. They got paid anyway. (more…)

President Obama’s announcement yesterday that he struck a tax compromise with Senate Republicans that will temporarily halt the automatic income tax hikes that were due to hit all Americans. Although the President announced the compromise with little excitement, saying he was “sympathetic” to the idea of fighting to raise taxes on high earners instead of striking a deal, the proposed plan is a small win for a sluggish economy that is saddled with 9.8% unemployment. But we need many more wins, and much larger ones, before the economy can recover and thrive.

In addition to preventing income taxes from rising on January 1, 2011, the plan includes a temporary two percentage point cut in employee payroll taxes, from 6.2% to 4.2%. That cut is also effective for employer contributions, reducing the overall Social Security tax from 12.4% to 10.4% for 2011. The White House says this tax cut will save families an average of $1,500 next year.

The compromise also locks the death tax rate in at 35% for two years, a provision strongly opposed by President Obama, who has called for raising the death tax significantly in previous budget plans.

The deal is an acknowledgment by the White House that in troubled economic times it is good for working people to keep more of their money to spur job creation. Mr. Obama recognized this connection when he announced the deal. “Make no mistake,” the President said yesterday, “allowing taxes to go up on all Americans would have raised taxes by $3,000 for a typical American family and that could cost our economy well over a million jobs.”

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Co-authored with Veronique de Rugy

A value-added tax, a soda tax, a gas tax, banning earmarks, freezing a portion of federal spending at “pre-stimulus” levels – there’s no shortage of ideas being thrown out to fix the country’s disastrous balance sheet, which threatens not just near-term economic recovery but the possibility of long-term growth. Like last week’s report from the president’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, most of the current plans to fix the country’s finances rely more on increases in revenues than on cuts in spending. In part due to its heavy reliance on revenue hikes, the commission, charged with balancing the budget by 2020, failed to win enough votes of its own members to present its recommendations to Congress.

Which raises the question: Can America really reduce its debt and deficit without raising taxes to job-killing rates or cutting essential services to developing-world levels? The answer is not simply yes, it’s that we have to.

Raising government revenue – taxes – substantially is not only bad policy, it has proven difficult and ultimately unsustainable for any length of time in the past 60 years. Since 1950, annual government revenue, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has averaged just below 18 percent despite every attempt to jack it up or tamp it down. Our post-World War II experience shows that if the government is going to live within its means, it can’t spend much more than 18 percent of GDP. Period.

Which is one reason to be happy that the debt commission’s recommendations won’t be presented to Congress anytime soon. The report assumes revenue equal to 21 percent of GDP and struggles to get spending to “below 22% and eventually to 21%” of GDP. That’s a recipe for disaster that would guarantee deficits and red ink.

Similarly, former Sens. Bill Bradley, John Danforth, and Gary Hart, working with the Committee for a Responsible Budget, have offered up a plan to balance the budget by 2020 that relies on revenue hitting 20.8 percent of GDP, a level that hasn’t been achieved once in the past 60 years. Republicans have not advanced any realistic near-term plans. Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) Roadmap to the American Future does not balance the budget until 2063. The pre-election GOP’s Pledge to America is worthless since it fails to provide specifics (and to the extent it does, it is no good).

The current situation is a bipartisan disaster that requires immediate action. Since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001, total federal spending has increased by a massive 60 percent in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars. In fiscal year 2010, which ended September 30, the federal government spent $3.6 trillion, or 25 percent of Gross Domestic Product. That’s the most spending, in terms of percentage of GDP, since 1946. Likewise, last year’s $1.5 trillion deficit, as a percentage of GDP, was the largest deficit since 1945.

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With Obamacare likely to remain front and center in the political debate going into 2012, the GOP could find itself in a real bind attacking it if a former Pfizer lobbyist who helped push Obamacare, Maria Cino, ends up heading up the RNC after the January elections.

Unfortunately, the establishment-backed candidate to presumably replace current RNC Chair Michael Steele, Maria Cino, opted out of a recent grassroots-focused political event for the candidates. The FreedomWorks and conservative caucus sponsored event was reported on at Big Government on November 2nd. Chris Stirewalt pointed out her absence as well, via FoxNews.

Worse, Stirewalt’s item is primarily focused on how establishment money is driving the race behind the scenes and Cino’s Mary Matalin-hosted fund raiser tonight is only one of Cino’s links to it. Her lobbying for Obamacare on behalf of Pfizer and a $1,000 donation to Mike Castle during Delaware’s contentious GOP primary may prove to be deal breakers for members of the GOP grassroots hoping that the GOP might turn the page on the same old, same old way of doing business in Washington that brought us Obamacare and has left America with staggering debt.

Maria Cino, former RNC deputy chairwoman, Bush administration official and executive director of the GOP’s House campaign arm, didn’t show for the debate. But she was able to tout the support of former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who will host a fundraiser for Cino’s bid at the home of Mary Matalin next week.

But why bother raising big bucks for an election where there are only 168 voters?

“This is a decision that rests with the party chairmen and national committeemen, and they’re not going to be swayed by any campaign,” said one influential Cino backer. “It’s not about the spending, it’s about the fundraising. This is a way to show what Maria brings to the table: fundraising ability and organizational skills. Those happen to be the things that the committee is most in need of right now.”

In fact, Cino was recently noted as one of the old GOP’s resurgent up and comers when it comes to corporate money driving political decisions in Washington.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Lt. Col. Oliver North to discuss his time at the Naval Academy, media on the frontline, and stories from his new book, American Heroes in Special Operations.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Coffee and Markets Archive
The Book: American Heroes in Special Operations
Learn More at OliverNorth.com
Oliver North on Facebook

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Compared to ideal policy, the deal announced last night between congressional Republicans and President Obama is terrible.

Compared to what I expected to happen, the deal announced last night is pretty good.

In other words, grading this package depends on your benchmark. This is why reaction has been all over the map, featuring dour assessments from people like Pejman Yousefzadeh and cheerful analysis from folks such as Jennifer Rubin.

With apologies to Clint Eastwood, let’s review the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

The good parts of the agreement is the avoidance of bad things, sort of the political version of the Hippocratic oath – do no harm. Tax rates next year are not going to increase. The main provisions of the 2001 and 2003 tax acts are extended for two years – including the lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains. This is good news for investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other “rich” taxpayers who were targeted by Obama. They get a reprieve before there is a risk of higher tax rates. This probably won’t have a positive effect on economic performance since current policy will continue, but at least it delays anti-growth policy for two years.

On a lesser note, Obama’s gimmicky and ineffective make-work-pay credit, which was part of the so-called stimulus, will be replaced by a 2-percentage point reduction in the payroll tax. Tax credits generally do not result in lower marginal tax rates on productive behavior, so there is no pro-growth impact.  A lower payroll tax rate, by contrast, improves incentives to work. But don’t expect much positive effect on the economy since the lower rate only lasts for one year. People rarely make permanent decisions on creating jobs and expanding output on the basis of one-year tax breaks.

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Janet Napolitano announced Monday an expansion of the Dpeartment of Homeland Security’s campaign “If You See Something, Say Something” to include hundreds of Walmart stores:

More than 230 Walmart stores nationwide launched the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign today, with a total of 588 Walmart stores in 27 states joining in the coming weeks. A short video message, available here, will play at select checkout locations to remind shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity.

The program:

The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—originally implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS’ Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

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Today, in 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. It was a colossal mistake.

While we certainly hope the possibility of multi-billion dollar fraud was enough to pique your outrage, what may be the most frightening revelation from our research is that Pigford may be the proverbial tip of the farmer scam iceberg.  Fox News published this report suggesting as much:

The congressional approval of a whopping $4.6 billion settlement for black and Native American farmers who claimed they were discriminated against has cleared the way for a similar pair of costly lawsuits — drawing complaints that the government may be buckling to pressure and rewarding dubious claims.

The so-called “Pigford” case involving black farmers who allege the Agriculture Department cheated them for decades drew to a close Tuesday when the House joined the Senate in approving the second settlement in the case to date. But the lawsuits don’t end there. Though Pigford has attracted the most attention, a separate set of cases filed by Hispanic and female farmers has been working its way through the courts since shortly after Pigford was filed more than a decade ago.

Those cases are set for a hearing in federal District Court in the nation’s capital on Friday, and once again a large pot of taxpayer money is on the line. The farmers were offered a $1.3 billion settlement back in May, but the plaintiffs have since then pushed for more. Some Democratic lawmakers argue they deserve it. (more…)

On April 14. 1999, Judge Paul Friedman signed a Consent Decree in the class action law suit PIGFORD, BREWINGTON v GLICKMAN and the US Department of Agriculture.

Following is a portion of the opinion written by Judge Friedman:

Forty acres and a mule. As the Civil War drew to a close, the United States government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide assistance to former slaves. The government promised to sell or lease to farmers parcels of unoccupied land and land that had been confiscated by the Union during the war, and it promised the loan of a federal government mule to plow that land. Some African Americans took advantage of these programs and either bought or leased parcels of land. During Reconstruction, however, President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to enlarge the powers and activities of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and he reversed many of the policies of the Bureau. Much of the promised land that had been leased to African American farmers was taken away and returned to Confederate loyalists. For most African Americans, the promise of forty acres and a mule was never kept. Despite the government’s failure to live up to its promise, African American farmers persevered. By 1910, they had acquired approximately 16 million acres of farmland. By 1920, there were 925,000 African American farms in the United States.

…

Most fundamentally, these objections result from a well-founded and deep-seated mistrust of the USDA. A mistrust borne of a long history of racial discrimination. A mistrust that is well-deserved. As Mr. Chestnut put it, these objections reflect “fear which reaches all the way back to slavery. . . . That objection, you heard it from many today, it really asks you to retain jurisdiction, over this case in perpetuity. Otherwise they say USDA will default, ignore the lawful mandates of this Court, and in time march home scot-free while blacks are left holding the empty bag again.” Transcript of Hearing of March 2, 1999 at 172, The Court cannot guarantee class members that they will never experience discrimination at the hands of the USDA again, and the Consent Decree does not purport to make such a guarantee. But the Consent Decree and the Court do provide certain assurances. (more…)

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.

After my nomination and subsequent unanimous confirmation as Secretary of USDA, I set about to learn as much about the Department as fast as I could.  One initial briefing was by the Under-Secretary for Civil Rights.

Included was a brief on several class lawsuits against the Department alleging discrimination against minority farmers.  Also, it was noted that there were allegations of the Department dragging its feet in getting claims accredited and processed for the court ordered settlement with black farmers in the Pigford class action litigation. I soon had several visits from organizations representing black farmers urging me to settle all claims quickly.

I was concerned about the Department’s handling of discrimination claims and asked that the paperwork be expedited.  It was then that I was made aware that there were possibly many claims that were fraudulent and much due diligence was warranted.  Understanding that validation and verification of the claims slowed down the process, it was felt that since taxpayers money was at stake that investigations into the propriety of claims were prudent and warranted. (more…)

I have 200 acres in Arkansas and have raised hogs.

Pigford is the biggest rip-off this country has ever known, and there are lots of people in positions of power that know it.  Politicians are using it to buy votes.  Trial lawyers are using it to get rich.

I personally know of people who have no connection to farming at all who got Pigford checks.  People with potted plants in their apartments claimed to be farmers and got paid.  I saw an instance where eight Pigford checks went to one house.   There are drug addicts and pushers who have received payments who have never farmed a day in their life.

There was discrimination at the US Department of Agriculture. It needed to be dealt with. I was suing the USDA before Timothy Pigford even filed suit.  I wrote to attorney Al Pires, who eventually filed a class action lawsuit against the USDA,  but he saw that there wasn’t going to be a huge amount of money for him.  So he passed. What he did find was a way to work a scam from inside the Star City, Arkansas USDA office by paying a USDA employee to process claimants.   This employee would take from $5,000 to $25,000 for each successful Pigford claim.  Pires was in this totally for the money.  He’s made far more money than any black farmer. (more…)

The whole Pigford affair brings up a host of issues that need to be addressed. Was there racial discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture? All the sources we talked to said yes. Was there a need to redress the issue when necessary? Again, all the sources we talked to said yes. Has there been massive fraud? Everyone we spoke with said yes. Estimates of how bad it is range from 50% of claims to 90%.

Recently Anderson Cooper on CNN reported and accepted Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s claim that there were only three cases of fraud in Pigford. Where did Vilsack get his numbers? He must have Googled for them. Obviously his office isn’t capable of even basic research. Nor apparently is CNN, which didn’t challenge him on the question. There are FBI files in Little Rock, Arkansas, which demonstrate instances of fraudulent claims. We’ve spoken with an FBI agent who say the files are there and available. Even black activist organizations that support Pigford have acknowledged that many of the people signing up and receiving Pigford checks never farmed. Eddie Slaughter, with the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, has looked at the USDA numbers which show that there are far more claims than there were black farmers in America. He has said, “What that means is that most of these people were never farmers, because the farmers had loans.” Another organization, Concerned Black Farmers of Tennessee, tracked 70 individual Pigford claims in Tipton County and found that 63 percent of those that were approved had no records to establish that they had ever even farmed. Yet, each of those individuals received a check from the USDA for $50,000. (more…)