Posts Tagged ‘fraud’

Judicial Watch today released documents detailing how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is working with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal aliens in the U.S. food stamp program.

The promotion of the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance.  Emphasized in bold and underlined, the statement reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”

Read more at Judicial Watch

Noam Neusner, a former White House speechwriter for President George W. Bush, thought he had given $250 to Ohio GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel.

He hadn’t.

Instead, Neusner was one of nearly 3,000 donors who stumbled onto a network of look-alike campaign websites that have netted more than $570,000 this year in what some are calling a sophisticated political phishing scheme.

The websites have the trappings of official campaign pages: smiling candidate photos and videos, issue pages, and a large, red “donate” button at the top. Except that proceeds from the shadow sites go not to the candidates pictured, but to an obscure conservative group run by an Arizona activist.

Read more by Shane Goldmacher at National Journal

The Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs in a financial-fraud probe is another sign of the cronyism that has kept Attorney General Eric Holder from taking action against other big Wall Street firms, says Peter Schweizer.

On Thursday the Department of Justice announced it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or any of its employees in a financial-fraud probe.

The news is likely to raise the ire of the political left and right, both of which have highlighted one of the most inconvenient facts of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department: despite the Obama administration’s promises to clean up Wall Street in the wake of America’s worst financial crisis, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.

Why is that? In a word: cronyism.

Read more by Peter Schweizer at The Daily Beast

At least 79 elected officials have been convicted of wrongdoing since 1972

Illinois’ official slogan is the “Land of Lincoln,” but an equally apt descriptor would be the “Land of Greased Palms.”

The state, Cook County and its governmental seat, Chicago, have a long history of corruption by elected and appointed officials.

Read more at MSNBC.com

–SNIP– In the notorious Hudson transaction, for instance, Goldman claimed, in writing, that it was fully “aligned” with the interests of its client, Morgan Stanley, because it owned a $6 million slice of the deal. What Goldman left out is that it had a $2 billion short position against the same deal.

If that isn’t fraud, Mr. Holder, just what exactly is fraud?

Still, it wasn’t surprising that Holder didn’t pursue criminal charges against Goldman. And that’s not just because Holder has repeatedly proven himself to be a spineless bureaucrat and obsequious political creature masquerading as a cop, and not just because rumors continue to circulate that the Obama administration – supposedly in the interests of staving off market panic – made a conscious decision sometime in early 2009 to give all of Wall Street a pass on pre-crisis offenses.

No, the real reason this wasn’t surprising is that Holder’s decision followed a general pattern that has been coming into focus for years in American law enforcement. Our prosecutors and regulators have basically admitted now that they only go after the most obvious and easily prosecutable cases.

If the offense committed doesn’t fit the exact description in the relevant section of the criminal code, they pass. The only white-collar cases they will bring are absolute slam-dunk situations where some arrogant rogue commits a blatant crime for individual profit in a manner thoroughly familiar to even the non-expert portion of the jury pool/citizenry.

Read more by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone

After a long summer of high-profile scandals — JPMorgan Chase trading, Barclays rate-fixing, HSBC money laundering and more — the debate about the financial sector is becoming livelier.

Why has it become so excessively dominated by relatively few very large companies? What damage can it do to the rest of us? What reasonable policy changes could bring global megabanks more nearly under control? And why is this unlikely to happen?

Read more by Simon Johnson at NY Times

Obama’s College Classmate: ‘The Obama Scandal Is at Columbia’

I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia- and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years since graduating Columbia.

Read more by Wayne Allyn Root at TheBlaze.com

What is Barack Obama hiding?

GDP Growth More Strongly Correlated with Rule of Law than Anything Else …

Economist Woody Brock says that a nation’s GDP growth is based mainly on whether or not it follows the rule of law.

–SNIP– Economists have thoroughly documented that failure to enforce the rule of law leads to a loss of trust … which destroys economies.

This is true whether it is in the West, in Nigeria or any other country.

Read more at WashingtonsBlog

Economists, Military Strategists and Others Warned Us … Long Ago

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that rampant inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands is dangerous for free markets.

Read more at WashingtonsBlog.com

I’m sorry to report that the substantive findings of the latest press conference held by Maricopa County (Ariz.) Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse will not be appearing on Fox, on CNN or in The Washington Post. They will not be appearing in the media, period. I guess the nation’s press corps is too busy submitting its work to Obama and Romney campaign officials for “quote approval” — as The New York Times recently confessed, in an outbreak of candor — to report on anything.

To remain a free people, a new kind of do-it-yourself journalism is in order. For starters, I recommend every American seek out and watch the two Cold Case Posse press conferences on YouTube. You report and you decide. It’s better that way.

The bottom line is this: The posse investigation has amassed extensive computer forensics and other evidence that the Barack Obama birth certificate posted on the White House website is a forgery. Again, I urge readers to review the case for themselves. What I want to focus on today is something at least as bad as document fraud. I want to focus on document fraud cover-up.

Read more by Diana West at Jewish World Review

The world is replete with double-standards, instances where a set of facts are reported one way based on the biases of those doing the reporting while a nearly identical set of facts is presented differently, again based on the biases of those telling the story.

We see them everywhere, but they are most present perhaps where politics and the media intersect. As one example, consider how the media handled two stories, each involving powerful and politically well-connected CEOs who tanked their companies, causing shareholders to lose billions.

Read more by Peter Roff at USNews.com

Those wondering why the Department of Justice has refused to go after Jon Corzine for the vaporization of $1.6 billion in MF Global client funds need look no further than the documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Institute that reveal that the now-defunct MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s former law firm, Covington & Burling.

There’s more.

Records also reveal that MF Global’s trustee for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy retained as its general bankruptcy counsel Morrison & Foerester–the very law firm from which Associate Attorney General Tony West came to DOJ.

And more.

–SNIP–
As Richard Eskow of the Huffington Post recently wrote:

More and more Washington insiders are asking a question that was considered off-limits in the nation’s capital just a few months ago: Who, exactly, is Attorney General Eric Holder representing? As scandal after scandal erupts on Wall Street, involving everything from global lending manipulation to cocaine and prostitution, more and more people are worrying about Holder’s seeming inaction — or worse — in the face of mounting evidence.

This isn’t going away.

Read more by Wynton Hall at Breitbart.com

Susan Daniels (70), a private investigator from Ohio, has a very extensive background vetting Social Security numbers for thousands of clients. Monday, July 2, she filed suit in Geauga County (Ohio) Common Pleas Court demanding that Jon Husted, Ohio Secretary of State, remove Obama’s name from the ballot until Obama can prove the validity of his Social Security Number. In her filing, she thoroughly documents her contention “that Barack Obama has repeatedly, consistently, and with intent misrepresented himself by using a fraudulently obtained Social Security Number.” Daniels started her investigation in August of 2009. She checked all the records she could without a court order. She discovered that the prefix 042 is a Connecticut Social Security card issued between 1977-1979. Obama’s number was issued in March 1977. There are three birth dates on file. One is 1890 and the other two are 8/4/61 and 4/8/61. Obama was living in Hawaii at age 15 when the card was issued in March 1977.

Read more by Randy Rose at The Guardian Express

This week, Ohio private investigator Susan Daniels filed suit in the Geauga County, Ohio Court of Common Pleas to petition the Ohio Secretary of State to remove Barack Hussein Obama’s name from the ballot based on alleged inconsistencies with his social security number. If the controversy surrounding Obama’s social security number (SSN) is new or perhaps confusing to you, the explanation regarding the issuance of social security numbers is quite simple, but critical to understanding the issue as it pertains to his identity. As I’ve been an investigator for the last 27 years, I have a lot of experience in dealing with SSNs, identifying anomalies and outright forgeries, and possess the same documents, proprietary database results and associated investigative documents as Ms. Daniels.

Read more by Doug Hagmann at CanadaFreePress.com

Upwards of 10% of all Medicare spending every year may be fraudulent, says the GAO. That’s $50 billion dollars in wasted taxpayer money.

The schemes to defraud Medicare are now being run by huge criminal operations who steal billions at a time. And one or more of those operations may originate in Cuba.

Read more by Rick Moran at American Thinker