This is our fourth post this month that documents and identifies the massive political class insanity and incompetence of our ruling politicians. From idiotic programs and laws to massive fraud and wasteful spending, every month reveals a whole new set of antics that bankrupt the country and its taxpayers while leaving major issues of our times unresolved.
1) Our first piece of insanity today comes from News 11 television in Baltimore. One store in Maryland, that changed its name to “Second Obama Express,” was one of nine convenience/grocery stores in the Baltimore area involved in a massive food stamp fraud operation. The dishonest, store owners illegally scammed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP) out almost $7 million in cash.
Nine retailers have been arrested for conspiring with customers to redeem food stamps illegally for cash. The customers then got a cash kickback from the transaction. No actual merchandise, food or otherwise, changed hands. The indictment gives a brief overview of how the scheme worked:
The indictments allege that the defendants exchanged EBT benefits for cash, in violation of the food stamp program rules. The indictments allege that the defendants typically paid half the value of the EBT benefits in cash. To avoid detection, the defendants often debited the funds from the card in multiple transactions over a period of hours or days. As a result of unlawful cash transactions, the defendants obtained more than $6,898,000 in EBT deposits for transactions in which the stores did not provide food.
One of the retailers indicted was Abdullah Alijaradi, 51, who was running the scam in two of his stores, one called D&M Deli and Grocery, and the other rejoicing under the euphonious name of “Second Obama Express.” According to the indictment, “From October 2010 through July 2013, Aljaradi allegedly obtained more than $2 million in payments for food sales that never occurred.”
Mr. Alijaradi and his scamming friends each face up to 20 years in jail. Sadly for the taxpayers, though, the money they stole from us is gone forever. Additional sadness since this is merely a drop in the bucket of the overall food assistance program fraid over these [ast few years.
2) This local government piece of insanity is really a lulu. Detroit is broke. Detroit has declared bankruptcy. Detroit does not have enough police to properly respond to 911 calls. Detroit public schools are atrocious. Detroit’s population has plummeted and is still dropping. Detroit does not even have enough money to keep all of its street light lit. Many, many property owners have stopped paying property taxes on the Detroit property they own. But…Detroit is going to build a $140 million, 3.3 mile light rail system in the middle of the city.
Whoa, back up to that last item: building a light rail system when so many other basic functions need to be addressed? Definitely insanity. And even worse, the American taxpayer is chipping in about $25 million to make it a reality.
Although I am not a fan of giving Detroit any aid until they make the hard decisions on how they are going to turn the city around, I would much rather hire more police, improve the schools, buy them some street lights, etc. before throwing $25 million into a useless light rail system, the history of which of similar systems around the country is spotty at best. And those cities actually had people living in their cities and working in their cities. Insane.
3) We have often made the case in this blog that the Federal government has grown so large and so unwieldy that it basically looks like Jabba The Hutt from the Star Wars movies. A large, tyrannical blob of a being that absorbs resources without any societal benefit in return. Well, an early August report from the Washington Examiner proves our Jabba hypothesis again.
The Defense Department has admitted that over the years it continued to do business with some contractors even AFTER those same contractors had previously been found to be doing unethical or illegal activities, wasting billions of taxpayer wealth in the process:
- Although only 30 defense contractors were criminally convicted of fraud over a recent three-year period, 11 of those 30 contractors have been paid a total of $354 million FOLLOWING their convictions,
- This conclusion comes from a 2011 report by the Pentagon's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
- The Department debarred, or banned, 164 companies but paid $15 million to a dozen of these same companies afterwards.
- The Department also reached settlements with 120 other companies and THEN paid $46 million for additional work to nine.
- Apparently, misbehavior settlements do not prohibit companies from receiving future Department of Defense work.
Nice work if you can get it. Get a lucrative Defense Department contract and if you screw up, either with illegal or unethical behavior, you can still come back to the taxpayer trough for more anyway.
Despite being in business for a few hundred years, the Defense Department has gotten so large that its different systems and coding and company identification processes do not make it possible for one part of the Department to learn from the mistakes of another part of the Department. As a result, billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have probably been wasted over the years by incompetent or unscrupulous contractors.
And even when they try to fix the situation, their incompetence rises to the surface again. In 2008, Congress approved the creation of a “Panel on Contracting Integrity,” led by the Pentagon's Inspector General and which focused on this type of contractor fraud. That effort came up lame and short, with only the following pathetic “accomplishments” to discuss five years later:
- The panel created a Defense Acquisition University training module of Procurement Fraud Indicators.
- It updated a handbook
- It created a web site to "increase awareness of procurement fraud"
- It hosted a conference
- It created a podcast about fraud
- It published an article.
Nowhere do they acknowledge that the panel actually identified the root causes of the problem, e.g. too many different systems with too many different codings, and how they remedied those root causes. Pathetic.
4) Let’s stay with the Department of Defense for a bit since they are so good at finding different ways to waste taxpayer wealth. According to an Associated Press article from September 28, 2013, a recent audit that was done on the Army revealed that the it had paid out $16 million over a two and one half year period to soldiers who were either AWOL or were actual deserters.
Good work if you can get it. Run away from the Army for no good reason but still get paid. And this audit apparently was only for the Army, it does not include any similar, additional payment errors in the Air Force, Navy, or Marines.
The really sad part of this incompetence, besides the fact that the Army wasted $16 million that could have funded public White House tours for over 16 years, is that the Army was told a similar accounting mistake was done back in a 2006 audit. That audit found at least 68 soldiers, who were officially considered deserters, were wrongly paid a total of $684,000 AFTER they were designated deserters. Apparently, the Army learned nothing from this earlier wasteful spending.
Pathetic, and Nancy Pelosi seems to think that not one dollar should be cut from Federal government spending. Here is almost $17 million that could have been cut from the budget if only Congress and government bureaucrats were doing their jobs.
5) A few pieces of lunacy from the failed war on drugs. According to a National Review article that was summarized in the September 13, 2013 issue of The Week magazine, U.S. prisons hold about 100,000 American citizens who were arrested and convicted for using marijuana on a small scale. Not dealing, not growing, small scale usage.
This costs the American taxpayer about $15 billion a year to lock up people for getting a little high in their life without doing anything to anyone else. $15 billion.
6) A similar article appeared in the Briefing section of The Week magazine on September 20, 2013. According to the article, since mandatory jail sentencing was introduced back in the 1970s, the U.S. jail population has quadrupled in size to 2.4 million citizens. We now hold the dubious honor of jailing a higher percentage of our citizens than every other country in the world including the dictatorships in China and Iran.
The cost of this prison population comes out to $80 billion a year of taxpayer wealth. I am not saying that evil and bad people should not be locked up forever. However, at a cost of $80 billion a year and having the highest incarceration rate in the world, maybe we should force the political class to reconsider some of the laws that it has put on the books at such a high cost, both financially and humanely.
7) Several months ago President Obama okayed the shipment of a about a billion dollars worth of taxpayer wealth in the form of F-16 jet fighters and many, many Abrams tanks to the government of Egypt. Many of us found this expense to be atrocious, why do we need to arm the Egyptian armed forces with a billion dollars worth of goods when there was such an economic mess in this country?
We were told at that time by the political class that we needed to send this billion dollars worth of arms to continue to have “leverage” over present and future Egyptian leaders. What makes that strategy so stupid is the news that appeared in the September 6, 2013 issue of The Week magazine. The current leader of Egypt had recently accepted a $12 billon aid package from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.
Thus, who believes that we will have any leverage in Egypt in crunch time when others have given them twelve times as much in financial support? Another billion dollars wasted for no leverage, no benefit, and not loyalty in return. Are you listening, Nancy Pelosi, another billion dollars wasted.
The waste and ineptness rolls on. More tomorrow and probably another day or so afterwards is required to get it all in.
Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:
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http://www.robertringer.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w
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