By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

Remember the Shirley Sherrod scandal?

On Tuesday, the House voted to give $4.55 billion to black and American Indian “farmers” who claim the Department of Agriculture or the Interior Department discriminated against them in some way. The word “farmers” is in quotation marks because, in one lawsuit alone, five times as many people filed for refunds than ever owned or operated a farm in any way.

Is this is part of Barack Obama’s plan to give minority groups that vote heavily Democratic — including blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and women – “stealth reparations?” The standard of evidence for discrimination is minimal, which fuels the number of applicants ready to cash in at the taxpayers’ expense. Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, is a maverick and an uncompromising patriot who urged his fellow Congressmen to vote against the funding and to “make investigation of Pigford fraud a top priority.”

Here is Steve King’s unfortunately unheeded speech on the House floor against this latest “guilt” scam.

This is the Communist Party USA take on the story – from today’s People’s World:

The bill sets aside $1.15 billion to settle claims of racist discrimination against Black farmers by the USDA. It sets aside an additional $3.4 billion to compensate American Indians who were cheated out of billions in royalties for oil, gas and timber harvested from their lands because of Interior Department mismanagement…

Meanwhile, Koch Oil admits stealing $31 million worth of oil from Indian tribes in Oklahoma by deliberately understating the quantity of oil they were pumping from wells on the reservations. The Interior Department would have been culpable in Koch’s theft since federal law mandates that they manage oil and gas leases on tribal lands. Koch stole additional billions from taxpayers over the past forty years by lying on how much oil and gas they were pumping from federal lands. Some of that stolen oil and gas paid for the billionaire Koch brother’s drive to steal the Nov. 2 midterm elections by secretly funding a campaign of lies and smears targeting Democratic incumbents. The Koch brothers have doled out at least $100 million to bankroll the Tea Party and a network of other rightwing extremist gangs.

Not content with gloating over a huge rip-off of taxpayer funds, the commies have to slander the Tea Party movement as well. Way to go comrades!