Tag: fraud

Biden Labor Candidate Oversaw Fraudulent Payments to California Prison Inmates

A frontrunner to be president-elect Joe Biden’s labor secretary oversaw the payment of nearly $1 billion in fraudulent benefits to California prison inmates.

Julie Su is the secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which operates the state’s pandemic unemployment system. The system paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment payments to prison inmates and convicts, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.

The fraud involved over 35,000 unemployment claims filed between March and August under the names of California state prison inmates. The inmates included two serial killers responsible for the deaths of at least eight people, as well as the well-known murderer Scott Peterson, who was convicted in 2004 for killing his pregnant wife. The Sacramento County district attorney called the scandal “one of the biggest fraud of taxpayer dollars in California history.”

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How Universities Cover Up Scientific Fraud

One in fifty scientists fakes research by fabricating or falsifying data. They make off with government grant money, which they share with their universities, and their made-up findings guide medical practice, public policy and ordinary people’s decisions about things like whether or not to vaccinate their children. The fraudulent science we know about has caused thousands of deaths and wasted millions in taxpayer dollars. That is only scratching the surface, however—because most fraudsters are never caught. As Ivan Oransky notes in Gaming the Metrics, “the most common outcome for those who commit fraud is: a long career.”

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Texts Reveal Supervisor Instructed Census Workers to Use Fake Data: Report

A census supervisor in Alabama sent text messages to census takers instructing them to use fake data for households they were not able to get in touch with, marking down that such homes were occupied by a single resident despite not knowing how many people actually resided in the home, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

According to the report, the purpose of using the false data was part of an effort to “check off as many households as possible” before the deadline regardless of whether census workers were able to interview occupants in homes that failed to return questionnaires through the mail.

The texts—which reportedly had an “urgent tone”—came as the Trump administration was engaged in ongoing litigation to end the process early and enforce a presidential order to exclude undocumented immigrants from the apportionment data used to allocate congressional seats and distribute federal funds.

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Census takers say they were told to enter false information

Two census takers told The Associated Press that their supervisors pressured them to enter false information into a computer system about homes they had not visited so they could close cases during the waning days of the once-a-decade national headcount.

Maria Arce said her supervisor in Massachusetts offered step-by-step instructions in how to trick the system. She said she felt guilty about lying, but she did not want to disobey her supervisors, who kept repeating that they were under pressure from a regional office in New York to close cases.

“It was all a sham. I felt terrible, terrible. I knew I was lying. I knew I was doing something wrong, but they said, ‘No, no, we are closing. We have to do this,’” Arce said.

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Struggling Bar Owner In Biden Ad Revealed To Be Wealthy Angel Investor

A Michigan bar owner featured in a Joe Biden campaign ad saying his business may fail because of President Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response is a wealthy tech investor who made it big after receiving a large family inheritance.

Joe Malcoun, the co-owner of The Blind Pig, said in the ad his bar was nothing more than an empty room because of Trump’s inaction against the virus. “This is the reality of Trump’s COVID response,” Malcoun said.

“We don’t know how much longer we can survive not having any revenue. A lot of restaurants and bars that have been mainstays for many years will not make it through this,” the bar owner said. “My only hope for my family, this business and my community is that Joe Biden win this election.”

However, the Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that the odds that Malcoun falls under financial hardship are slim.

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The New York Times and Nikole Hannah-Jones abandon key claims of the 1619 Project

The New York Times, without announcement or explanation, has abandoned the central claim of the 1619 Project: that 1619, the year the first slaves were brought to Colonial Virginia—and not 1776—was the “true founding” of the United States.

The initial introduction to the Project, when it was rolled out in August 2019, stated that

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

The revised text now reads:

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

A similar change was made from the print version of the 1619 Project, which has been sent out to millions of school children in all 50 states. The original version read:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.

The website version has deleted the key claim. It now reads:

In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

It is not entirely clear when the Times deleted its “true founding” claim, but an examination of old cached versions of the 1619 Project text indicates that it probably took place on December 18, 2019.

These deletions are not mere wording changes. The “true founding” claim was the core element of the Project’s assertion that all of American history is rooted in and defined by white racial hatred of blacks. According to this narrative, trumpeted by Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, the American Revolution was a preemptive racial counterrevolution waged by white people in North America to defend slavery against British plans to abolish it. The fact that there is no historical evidence to support this claim did not deter the Times and Hannah-Jones from declaring that the historical identification of 1776 with the creation of a new nation is a myth, as is the claim that the Civil War was a progressive struggle aimed at the destruction of slavery. According to the New York Times and Hannah-Jones, the fight against slavery and all forms of oppression were struggles that black Americans always waged alone.

The Times’ “disappearing,” with a few secret keystrokes, of its central argument, without any explanation or announcement, is a stunning act of intellectual dishonesty and outright fraud. When it launched the 1619 Project in August 2019, the Times proclaimed that its aim was to radically change what and how students were taught about American history. With the aim of creating a new syllabus based on the 1619 Project, hundreds of thousands of copies of the original version of the narrative, as published in the New York Times Magazine, were printed and distributed to schools, museums and libraries all across the United States. A very large number of schools declared that they would align their curricula in accordance with the narrative supplied by the Times.

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