Tag: taxes

Palisades Fire Fraud: Man Headed To Prison After Scamming $64K Out Of FEMA

An East Hollywood man is headed to federal prison for a year and a day after collecting more than $64,000 in wildfire disaster relief on a Pacific Palisades home he had no connection to whatsoever.

Delvonne Dashon Johnson, 32, was sentenced on July 31 in Los Angeles and ordered to repay $64,148 to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He pleaded guilty last year to fraud in connection with major disaster or emergency benefits – a charge that carries a statutory maximum of 30 years.

In February 2025, weeks after the Palisades Fire tore through the coastline, Johnson filed a FEMA claim listing a Pacific Palisades address as a home he owned. FEMA wired him $64,138 later that same month – except, he didn’t own the house. Someone else did, and she was living in it.

The fraud unraveled only when the actual homeowner tried to file her own claim. FEMA told her someone had already submitted one on her property’s behalf. When investigators interviewed her on April 2, 2025, she told them she had lived at the address since 2015, that it was her primary residence, that she was there when the fire hit, that she had never rented the place to anyone, and that she had never heard of Delvonne Johnson.

Johnson was not working alone – he was one of several people federal prosecutors swept up for running the same play on the same disaster. Deanniah Hogan, 32, of Compton, allegedly posed as a renter at a Palisades home and drew roughly $17,351. Zenalyn McIntre, 38, of Sherman Oaks, allegedly submitted a fabricated utility bill and a driver’s license listing a different address, and received about $25,229. Hedeshia Robertson, 36, of Lakewood, pleaded guilty after obtaining some $24,899. Another defendant allegedly claimed a nonexistent Altadena address as her destroyed primary residence and collected $23,441, plus two FEMA-booked hotel stays. Jaime Arturo Carrillo, 48, pleaded guilty after claiming property damage and utility disruption at a South Los Angeles address roughly 20 miles from either fire.

The pattern extends well beyond Los Angeles County. In June, a Honolulu man was sentenced to two years for conspiring to submit false FEMA claims tied to both the Lahaina fire and the Pacific Palisades fire, with a co-defendant posing as his Maui landlord before turning around and claiming to have lived in Pacific Palisades herself. The pair collected more than $60,000. He then filed fabricated flight records with the court and picked up an obstruction charge on top.

Victims of the Eaton and Palisades fires could qualify for a one-time $750 FEMA payment, up to $43,600 in other-needs assistance covering personal property, transportation and medical costs, and housing assistance for as long as 18 months. Homeowners were eligible for up to another $43,600 in repair money. Money that moves fast enough to help people who just lost everything moves fast enough to reach people who lost nothing.

The two fires ignited on Jan. 7, 2025, burned close to 60,000 acres, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, and killed 30 people.

For claiming a slice of the recovery money set aside for those people, Johnson drew 12 months and one day.

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Mamdani admin. denies that shoppers will need state photo ID or face mandatory door checks to buy food at upcoming city-run grocery stores

A national political firestorm erupted on Monday following viral social media claims that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani would require shoppers to present identification to purchase food at proposed municipal grocery stores, prompting sharp criticism from conservative leaders, left-wing New Yorkers and a subsequent clarification from City Hall.

The controversy stems from comments made during a press conference addressing the Mamdani (D-N.Y.) administration’s new flagship “food affordability program.” Last week, Mamdani announced a $70 million initiative to open five city-owned, publicly subsidized grocery stores — one in each borough — offering a 30% discount on essential kitchen staples like meat, produce, and pantry goods.

During the press conference, which transpired in late July, a reporter asked the mayor, “How are you going to keep people from taking advantage of that deal, basically? And is there going to be a limit on the number of items that someone can take that are discounted at that level from that essential basket?”

“So our RFP (Request for Proposal) makes very clear this is a program for New Yorkers to be able to put food on the table, not a program for people to be able to make a quick buck through reselling,” Mamdani responded.

Jeanny Pak, the CFO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, then floated the idea of a residency verification mechanism, mentioning a potential “library card-esque thing” or looking into state IDs to manage buyer eligibility and target local New Yorkers.

However, following the social media buzz, Mamdani’s office later issued a statement denying that shoppers will need to present a state photo ID or undergo door checks to enter or buy food at the proposed city-owned grocery stores.

Regarding the current official status, the Mamdani administration has not formally enacted a mandatory ID policy. They stated they are “still exploring options” to verify local residence, but no final decision has been made ahead of the planned 2027 opening in the Bronx, New York officials emphasized.

Nonetheless, prior to the clarification, video clips of the exchange circulated rapidly across political circles online, sparking immediate accusations of political hypocrisy. Prominent Republican figures seized on the clip to draw comparisons between food access policies and federal election laws.

Billionaire Elon Musk posted to X calling the situation ironic, while Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) labeled it hypocritical, arguing that advocating for residency verification at city grocery stores while opposing mandatory voter ID bills was inconsistent.

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The Pentagon’s Hidden Housing Scandal: Outsourcing Duty Of Care

Sen. Jon Ossoff released a report on July 8 documenting lead exposure in a newborn, mold-related emergency room visits, and a cockroach infestation living inside a family’s oven, all in privatized military housing at Fort Benning and Fort Stewart. Read it and you’d think it was written in 2022. It wasn’t. That’s the scandal: the Pentagon outsourced a duty of care to private landlords and never enforced the contracts meant to keep it intact.

I’ve spent thirty years in institutional investment management and now serve as an expert witness in fiduciary litigation. The pattern is one I recognize immediately: an institution hands a core obligation to a private operator, collects a fee for oversight it doesn’t actually perform, and treats the delegation itself as if it discharged the duty. It didn’t. Outsourcing a duty of care doesn’t outsource the duty.

Congress created the Military Housing Privatization Initiative in 1996 to fix decrepit on-base housing without loading the capital cost onto the Pentagon’s books. Private companies would own, renovate, and maintain the homes under leases running as long as fifty years, with servicemembers’ Basic Allowance for Housing flowing straight to the landlord as rent. The Pentagon would keep oversight, backed by incentive fees for good performance and penalties for bad. On paper, a clean alignment of interests. In practice, a guaranteed revenue stream with an oversight function nobody actually staffed.

Fort Stewart’s housing has been run by Balfour Beatty Communities since the base was privatized. In December 2021, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to one count of major fraud against the United States, agreeing to pay more than $65 million in criminal fines, restitution, and a related civil settlement. The company’s employees falsified maintenance records and destroyed resident comment cards between 2013 and 2019 to fraudulently collect incentive fees they hadn’t earned. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said the fraud was “a consequence of BBC’s broken corporate culture” that put profit ahead of servicemembers’ welfare.

Four months later, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found the conduct hadn’t stopped. Its bipartisan staff report on the mistreatment of military families in privatized housing documented that Balfour’s post-2019 behavior mirrored the misconduct behind its guilty plea; in the same period the company was under active federal investigation. A company can plead guilty to defrauding the government over housing conditions and keep collecting Basic Allowance for Housing checks from the families living in the homes it failed.

Fast-forward to this month. Fort Stewart is still Balfour Beatty’s. Fort Benning’s housing is run by a different company, the Michaels Organization’s Villages of Benning. Ossoff’s report found nearly identical failures at both: mold, lead, cover-ups, families told their complaints were handled when they weren’t. That detail should stop anyone from treating this as one bad company. Two operators, two installations, the same pattern. The failure sits in the oversight structure, not the logo on the leasing office.

The government’s own auditors have said as much. In an April 2023 report, the Government Accountability Office made 19 recommendations to improve DOD’s oversight of privatized housing, including a priority recommendation that the Pentagon set clear, consistent, department-wide home inspection standards, after finding that comparable maintenance problems were getting graded differently depending on who held the clipboard. As of GAO’s most recent public status update, that priority recommendation was still open, with DOD not expecting signed guidance until mid-2025 at the earliest. Congress had to legislate the fix GAO had already recommended.

This is the same structural failure I’ve written about previously in public pension governance, wearing a uniform instead of a suit. A pension trustee who delegates asset management to an outside manager doesn’t delegate away fiduciary responsibility for the outcome; the law is explicit that the duty stays with the trustee. The Pentagon’s relationship with its housing contractors works the same way as a matter of principle, even though the enforcement mechanism is a lease rather than ERISA. Both share the same defect: an incentive-fee structure that pays out on paperwork instead of results, and an oversight office too thin to catch the difference until a senator’s staff does the job for it.

That fix is now in the books. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, signed in December, directs the Secretary of War to establish a standard inspection and audit program for privatized and government-owned housing using independent, qualified inspectors, and separately tightens the rules on when a housing company may close a maintenance work order. Falsified paperwork closed BBC’s work orders and inflated its bonuses for six years before anyone with subpoena power looked at the underlying data; an inspector who doesn’t answer to the landlord closes that loophole.

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Newsom’s tax returns show annual income between $1.7M and $2M

The long-awaited release of California Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s tax returns has been heavily criticized after it was revealed that he and his wife made $1.7 million to $2 million annually from 2022 through 2024 and paid half a million a year in federal and state taxes, according to the tax returns released by his office.

The criticism surrounding the release of Newsom’s (D-Calif.) tax returns stems primarily from the tightly controlled manner in which the documents were disclosed, the lack of itemized details regarding his business holdings, specific deductions, and the omission of his most recent tax filing.

Together, these factors have led political opponents, media commentators and other transparency advocates to argue that the release fell short of genuine public disclosure.

First, the method of release drew immediate pushback from media commentators and political watchdog groups. Rather than publishing the tax documents online for direct public inspection, the governor’s office restricted access to a select group of journalists inside a controlled environment. Reporters were required to review the 700-page filing using only pen and paper, without the ability to take photographs, make digital copies or release the raw files.

Second, the structure of the returns obscured important financial details about Newsom’s business empire. While the filings showed that the bulk of the couple’s multimillion-dollar income flowed from hospitality, restaurant and winery enterprises held in a blind trust, tax returns only report aggregate income.

Third, opponents highlighted major personal deductions revealed in the returns, including tens of thousands of dollars spent on high-end designer apparel and nearly two hundred thousand dollars allocated for his own personal household staff.

Finally, the pages provided to reporters covered only tax years 2021 through 2024, as the governor and his wife filed for an extension on their 2025 returns through October. While requesting an extension is standard tax procedure, political adversaries pointed out that the omission leaves his most recent financial activity unexamined as he lays the groundwork for a prospective 2028 presidential campaign.

Reporters from outlets like The New York Times and Politico were reportedly permitted to view the documents using only pen and paper, agreeing to hold their reports until Friday morning, as Newsom faced increasing pressure to publicize the records.

These disclosures mark Newsom’s first tax release since 2022. While his salary as governor pays around $200,000 per year, the bulk of his income is generated by winery and hospitality businesses he placed into a blind trust upon taking office.

The only exception occurred in 2021, when the family earned about $800,000 by selling a Marin County home for nearly $6 million. Their total earnings reached $4.2 million that year, resulting in over $1 million paid in combined federal and state taxes. In 2022, their income dropped back to approximately $2 million.

Noethelsss, the governor’s office later argued that there was nothing unusual in the filings.

U.S. Representative James Gallagher (R-Calif.) told The Post, “Newsom’s transparency is a lot like his homelessness policy — it leaves a lot to be desired … He talks big about things about never actually delivers. This is another instance of that — only allowing select people and only pen and paper. This isn’t real transparency. There are still a lot of questions where Gavin’s money comes from,” he declared.

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Watch Pete Buttigieg Fantasize About Finding Newer Ways to Tax People

Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg recently spoke to podcaster named Steve Bartlett and spent part of the time talking about new ways to tax people after lamenting that people keep finding ways to hide their wealth from the government.

This really is a window into the mind of a Democrat politician. This is the way they think. They fantasize about what they could do with your money.

The government already takes in trillions of dollars and a huge portion of it is stolen through fraud. Instead of trying to figure out how to spend that money more responsibly, they just think about ways to get more of it.

Quotes via Kanekoa the Great:

“If we had a more reasonable rate of taxation on capital gains and corporate income, and made it harder to pass along inherited wealth…”

“We’d be out of this doom loop we’re in saying… We can’t possibly do something like fast trains here in the United States. Of course we can. This is the wealthiest economy in the world.”

“If we aren’t collecting a fair level of taxes, then of course we’re going to come up short when we’re trying to fund those things.”

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SURPRISE! Zohran Mamdani’s Universal ‘Free’ Childcare Program Projected to Cost Billions More Than Planned

Zohran Mamdani’s universal and ‘free’ childcare program in New York City is now being projected to cost billions more than originally planned.

Who could have predicted such a thing?

Only a leftist could devise a government-run program that costs billions of tax dollars and have the nerve to call it free. It’s a concept that is completely lost on the media.

In this case, no one should be surprised that the price tag keeps going up.

The New York Post reports:

Mamdani’s universal childcare plan will cost taxpayers billions more than planned as costs balloon: report

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s universal childcare plan will cost 50% more than he advertised, according to a new study.

The proposed program is estimated to cost a whopping $9 billion annually, approximately with an average cost per child roughly $27,000, according to the report from the Center for New York City Affairs, a nonpartisan research organization affiliated with the New School.

“An estimated $8.7 to $9.3 billion would be needed annually to fund universal child care in New York City,” the report, which was released on Monday, states.

That’s $3 billion more than the mayor previously said his ambitious universal free childcare program would cost.

Hizzoner promised on the campaign trail that his plan to make childcare free for children from 6 weeks old to five years old regardless of family income would cost about $6 billion per year and be paid for by taxing the state’s wealthiest earners.

The $3 billion gap identified in the study was largely tied to teacher pay, with the Center for NYC Affairs estimating some 23,000 new childcare workers will need to be hired, mainly for infants and children under three years old.

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Scamdani and the Truth About City-Owned Grocery Stores

Some of my earliest memories are from a grocery store.

My mother, and later her sister, worked at a locally owned Key Market running the deli department. Baked goods, hot meals, sliced meats and fresh salads, and the best donuts you ever tasted made from scratch every day — it was a kid’s paradise. She would sometimes take me to work on Saturdays, and I’d help, doing everything but slicing the meat (age-restricted because it’s dangerous). It was fun for me, and I learned things I would not have learned watching cartoons.

Later, just before I married and became a military wife, I worked at my local Kroger regional office supporting loyalty card and marketing issues for, gosh, I guess it was about 200 stores. I learned a lot about the grocery business.

All this is to say: I know the difference between grocery economics and political theater.

Scamdani’s ever-evolving store plans

Zohran Mamdani, New York’s newest Hizzoner, ran largely on a pledge to create city-owned grocery stores, and today he’s working to fulfill that promise. Sort of. The idea was to decrease prices for consumers by removing the “gouging” profit model.

Some of his campaign promises included:

  • “Grocery prices are out of control. The cost of eggs and milk has skyrocketed. Some stores are even using dynamic pricing, jacking up the cost over the course of the day depending on what they can get away with. It doesn’t need to be this way. I’m Zohran Mamdani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores. It’s like a public option for produce. We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores, whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.”
  • “I’m Zohran Mamdani, and as mayor, I will create a network of city-owned grocery stores. It’s like a public option for produce.”
  • “We will redirect city funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores, whose mission is lower prices, not price gouging.” (This one is especially rich, as you’ll see.)
  • “Last month, we announced that we would fulfill a campaign promise: that we would lower prices by creating a network of city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough. In these stores, prices will be cheaper.”

Sounds great. So last month, he announced the reality: a limited core basket including produce, meat, seafood, milk, bread, yogurt, and a few other things to be priced 30% below “typical retail,” whatever that really means, in city-owned and subsidized stores run by private for-profit operators. Operators are entitled to price everything outside the core basket at whatever they like. The discounted “basket” will be subsidized by the city. The city covers capital, rent, and property tax. And users, as announced today, will be required to prove residency with a “library card” style identification.

As Darth Vader said, the deal has been altered. Pray he does not alter it further.

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California Democrats Overwhelmingly Back Billionaire Tax Ahead of High-Stakes November Ballot

California’s proposed billionaire tax cleared a major political hurdle on Sunday after winning the endorsement of the California Democratic Party.

The endorsement provides fresh momentum to the initiative just months before voters decide the measure at the ballot box.

The proposal secured the 60 percent threshold required for the party’s endorsement during a meeting of hundreds of Democrat officials in San Diego.

The approval came despite fierce opposition from some of the state’s most prominent Democrats.

If endorsed by voters in November, the measure would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on Californians with a net worth of at least $1 billion, affecting roughly 200 of the state’s wealthiest residents.

The endorsement is a significant victory for supporters after months of infighting within the Democratic Party.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra have both publicly opposed the proposal, warning it could encourage wealthy taxpayers to leave the state.

The initiative was placed on the ballot by the Service Employees International Union United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), which claims the tax will raise an estimated $100 billion.

The money will be primarily used to offset healthcare funding reductions enacted by the Trump administration.

“This endorsement puts to rest the idea that California Democrats are not united by the billionaire tax—they are,” said Dave Regan, president of SEIU-UHW.

The measure has drawn support from far-left Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna, who argue California’s wealthiest residents should contribute more to fund healthcare programs.

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Crack Pipes, Get Yer’ Crack Pipes! Free Crack Pipes!: California Taxpayers Fund Drug Paraphernalia

As governor of California, Gavin Newsom has repeatedly supported “harm reduction” policies, which enable drug use in the name of making it “safer.” He created the state’s Harm Reduction Initiative, which funded “syringe services programs” for “people who inject and smoke fentanyl and/or methamphetamines.” His Department of Public Health has endorsed distributing syringes, glass pipes, and “[c]ontainers for mixing injectable drugs” to drug users. Newsom argued earlier this year that harm-reduction tactics “increase the likelihood of people entering substance use treatment.”

But do California’s harm-reduction programs encourage addicts to enter treatment? We visited the Skid Row Care Campus, a homeless-services site in Los Angeles County, to witness “harm reduction” in action. We discovered that, instead of directing addicts to get clean, the taxpayer-funded program doles out free paraphernalia, enabling addicts to get high – no questions asked.

We arrived at Skid Row in the morning. The campus, bounded by pastel-colored buildings and a metal gate, looked like an apocalyptic wasteland. Homeless people and addicts were splayed across the common areas, with some smoking what seemed to be hard drugs with impunity.

We stepped onto the courtyard connected to the street. No one stopped us, asked for identification, or searched us for weapons or drugs. This is apparently by design, judging by the Skid Row Action Plan and its implementation outline, which, singly or together, inspired the creation of the campus, denounced the “racist and classist war on drugs,” and called on local officials to create hubs “free from monitoring by law enforcement” and staffed by people with histories of “substance use and sex work.”

We entered campus and found a walk-up counter, where an attendant sat before shelves of drug paraphernalia. Users come to this counter to get free needles and crack pipes, with which they can inject or smoke hard drugs.

“What can I get you?” he asked. “We have oil burners, we have spray shooters, we have socks, we have petroleum jelly.”

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SpaceX Purges Chinese Personnel And Parts From Supply Chain as Space Force Awards $1.6 Billion Launch Contract

SpaceX is conducting what sources close to the company describe as an unprecedented supply chain purge — systematically removing Chinese nationals and Chinese-manufactured components from every facility that touches its hardware. The move, first reported by Nikkei Asia, represents the most aggressive decoupling of a major American defense contractor from the Chinese Communist Party’s industrial ecosystem in recent memory.

According to Nikkei’s reporting, SpaceX is instructing its suppliers in writing not to assign Chinese nationals to any facility producing SpaceX hardware and to prohibit equipment manufactured by Chinese companies — including surveillance cameras and routers — from those production floors. Audit teams dispatched by SpaceX are actively verifying compliance. The company is simultaneously building what it internally calls an “NCNT” supply chain — Non-China, Non-Taiwan — to insulate production against any potential disruption in the Taiwan Strait. “We work hard to adhere to the requests and it is understandable,” one supplier source told Nikkei. “The technology is a matter of national security, especially as SpaceX also has commercial partnerships with NASA.”

The timing could not be more significant. On Thursday, the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command awarded SpaceX two task orders totaling $1.6 billion to execute 18 Falcon 9 launches under the National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program. All 18 missions will lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and are designed to deliver Space Based Sensing and Targeting capabilities — satellites providing real-time tracking of airborne threats and near-instantaneous data relay to joint warfighters. Space Force Col. Eric Zarybnisky called the two-month acquisition timeline from requirement identification to award “unprecedented,” emphasizing that “the speed our warfighter demands” drove the compressed schedule.

This is what economic nationalism looks like when it has teeth. For years, Washington demanded that defense contractors clean up their China dependencies while quietly tolerating the status quo. SpaceX is doing what the Pentagon has talked about endlessly but rarely enforced: hard-wiring the CCP out of systems that underpin American military supremacy in space. The Space Force contract ceiling for Lane 1 was raised from $5.6 billion to $17 billion just weeks ago — a signal that the U.S. military’s appetite for sovereign, China-free launch capacity is accelerating fast.

The broader context matters too. SpaceX already holds a $2.29 billion contract to build the Space Force’s low Earth orbit satellite communications backbone for low-latency warfighter data relay. Rocket Lab last week landed a parallel NSSL contract for up to 18 missile defense launches. America is rebuilding its space arsenal at speed — and the new rule is simple: no Chinese hands, no Chinese chips, no exceptions. The establishment media will frame this as xenophobia or Musk politics. What it actually is, is industrial policy that matches the threat.

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