Sherrod, Pigford, Gaming and Feeding at the Trough

[polaris93]

I just received the following email from a friend:

* * * * *"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 v. Glickman" and in 1999, the black farmers won

Comments

[mauser]

I HAVE seen this calculated out, including scans of charts in reports from the Dept of Agriculture on the breakdown of Farmers. Don't have the link in front of me but I'm pretty sure I posted this in my LJ. (Check the Politics tag to help cut down on the noise).

[polaris93]

Thanks. :-)

[polaris93]

I saw it, too. Somebody's getting away with a real crime here.

[polaris93]

I saw it, too. Somebody's getting away with a real crime here.

[brezhnev]

Fraud on this scale is not seen too often. Doesn't anybody, like, check to see who among those people actually applied for a government loan and got turned down?

[polaris93]

Not very often, I'd guess. Which is what you'd expect from enormous bureaucracies like that of the federal government. They have to work almost automatically -- otherwise they'd cost 10 times as much to operate as they already do (and Congressmen want to line their own pockets with that money, so . . .). So there's plenty of opportunity for something to slip by that shouldn't have. As witness. Same as with graft and huge corporations. This is the main reason why bureaucracies are step-up transformers for evil: lots of opportunities to exploit the system for personal ends open up in them, and parasites get in, and there you are.