Sad America

May 12th Obama proposed that the government give $1.25 billion to settle discrimination claims by Black farmers against the Agriculture Department. (Source Associated Press)

This is part of a 10 year old class action lawsuit against the government. Obama was quoted as saying “My hope is that the farmers and their families who were denied access to USDA loans and programs will be made whole and will have the chance to rebuild their lives and their businesses.”

Don’t stop reading yet… John Boyd, head of the National Black Farmers Association said this is a nice start but expects that additional funds would be needed. John feels this is a starting point in the negotiation process. He said that we need to make sure none of the Black farmers are left out.

So you have to look back in your history books to see how this all started. It was Obama who as a senator led the charge to pass a bill allowing black farmers to see new discrimination claims against the Agriculture Department. The deal is that this has already been addressed once before when in 1999 the government settled and paid out almost $1 billion dollars against almost 16,000 claims. That works out to be $62,500 each if you split the money evenly.

Why reopen the claims? Well some farmers (thousands of them) missed the deadline so they didn’t get paid. Obama reintroduced the Pigford legislation about six months into his presidential campaign. No doubt to boost his support by the black farmers community. Now you must fast forward to today, and the new 65,000 claims that have rolled in if you were to pay out the same amount as you did back in 1999 it would be over 4 billion dollars (not taking into consideration inflation)

Really you can’t make this stuff up. Now I do not know all of the details around this discrimination claim. I can say that both of my parents grew up very poor children of farmers, and they often would get turned away when going to get loans to buy seed etc. I think it is wrong to just say we are going to hand you some money because (a) you are black and (b) your job is a farmer. If someone was discriminated against and we have proof of the offense, then we should do the right thing. However you can not just say that all Black farmers were discriminated against just because they are black. And what about the Latino farmers, Asian farmers, Indian farmers where do we stop?