Tag: taxes

Hochul running mate Adrienne Adams funneled $435K to migrant shelter tied to federal probe

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s running mate – former NYC Council Speaker Adrienne Adams – dished out $435,000 in taxpayer-funded political pork to a shady migrant-shelter provider at the center of a federal corruption probe, The Post has learned.

The Democratic lieutenant governor candidate gave Brooklyn-based nonprofit BHRAGS Home Care Inc. $375,000 in discretionary funds through her speaker’s pot from 2022 to 2025, Council records show. The taxpayer’s dough was earmarked for the group’s senior and youth after-school programs.

The Queens-based pol also directly tacked on another $60,000 to help it assist the mentally ill, the records show.

In all, the Council under her leadership doled out $544,900 to BHRAGS since 2021, according to the records.

Councilwoman Farah Louis kicked in another $72,000, and other council members chipped in the remaining $37,900, records show.

The feds are looking into whether Louis; her sister, Deborah Louis, who serves as Hochul’s assistant secretary for NYC intergovernmental affairs; Edu Hermelyn, husband of state Assemblywoman and Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn; and others accepted bribes or kickbacks to boost BHRAGS.

The Flatbush-based nonprofit has received $185.4 million in no-bid city contracts since 2022 to provide emergency shelters for migrants and other homeless people, according to NYC Comptroller’s Office records. 

The nonprofit’s executive director, Roberto Samedy, its former board chairman, Jean Ronald Tirelus, and two others connected to BHRAGS were arrested Tuesday as part of the corruption probe for allegedly pocketing more than $1 million in kickbacks linked to city-run migrant shelters.

BHRAGS reps have said it’s “fully cooperating with law enforcement” and that Samedy was placed on administrative leave.

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Artemis II’s titanium toilet cost taxpayers $23M — the 2nd most expensive potty in history

Flushed.

The malfunctioning toilet on board the Artemis II, the second most expensive commode ever built, cost American taxpayers $23 million.

NASA scientists took six years to create two of the 3D-printed titanium thrones, officially named the Upper Waste Management System.

The first model, which cost $11.5 million, was installed on the International Space Station in 2020.

The lavish loo improved upon less hygienic designs of previous spaceships, replacing plastic bags with a suction system that keeps waste stored safely and cleanly.

Despite its pricetag, the urine hose of the Upper Waste Management System malfunctioned after take-off on Tuesday.

The problem was quickly addressed by the astronauts on board.

The moon-destined crapper falls just a little short of being the most expensive toilet system ever constructed.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Waste Collection System, which debuted in 1992, cost roughly $30 million to create and install, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Adjusted for inflation, that would be just under $70 million in 2026.

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MUCKRAKER INVESTIGATION: Taxpayer-Funded NGO Caught Busing Non-Citizens to Radical “No Kings” Protests

According to a report by Muckraker, a shocking undercover investigation has revealed that the radical left’s “organic” protest machine, specifically the NGO Make the Road New York (MRNY), is allegedly funneling millions of federal taxpayer dollars to mobilize and bus non-citizens into Manhattan for the “No Kings” demonstrations.

For weeks, the mainstream media has portrayed the “No Kings” demonstrations as a grassroots movement against the Trump administration.

But as usual, they were lying to you. New evidence proves this is a coordinated operation designed to manufacture the appearance of public consensus using people who aren’t even legal citizens of this country.

An explosive report from Muckraker’s Anthony Rubin reveals the inner workings of this shady operation. Undercover footage captured Make the Road New York staff members in Brentwood, Long Island, loading groups of individuals, many of whom were confirmed to be non-citizens, onto buses bound for the massive March 28th protest in Manhattan.

Muckraker wrote on X:

“The NGO Make the Road NY has received millions of dollars from the federal government.

Our undercover investigation reveals that Make the Road New York was responsible for mobilizing and busing non-citizens into Manhattan to join the recent No Kings protest.

We are calling for an immediate investigation into how Make the Road New York is spending taxpayer money.”

Hidden camera footage shows Angel Vera, identified as a Make the Road NY Community Organizer, admitting that the majority of their members are illegal aliens.

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What Exactly Is the Purpose of NATO in the Year 2026?

One month into Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic of Iran, a long-overdue conversation has finally broken into the open: What, exactly, is the enduring rationale for NATO? For decades, this question has been treated in Washington foreign policy circles as heretical. But it isn’t. And to their credit, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are now saying so plainly.

As Trump recently put it, “They haven’t been friends when we needed them. We’ve never asked them for much. … It’s a one-way street.” Rubio has been similarly blunt: “If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked but then denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement. … So all that’s going to have to be reexamined.”

They’re spot-on.

At best, America’s European “allies” have spent decades free-riding on the U.S. security umbrella. Despite repeated commitments to meet baseline defense spending targets, many NATO members still under-invest in their militaries and outsource their national defense to American taxpayers. The imbalance is staggering: The United States accounts for the overwhelming majority of NATO’s military capabilities, logistics, and strategic lift. Overall, American taxpayers contribute about 60% of total spending on NATO defense.

At worst, some of these same European allies actively undermine U.S. operations at critical moments. Major Western European countries such as Spain and France have restricted or complicated U.S. use of their airspace during Operation Epic Fury. That is farcical. A so-called alliance in which members obstruct one another’s ability to wage war is not actually an alliance — it is a liability.

This raises the core question: Why, exactly, does NATO exist in the year 2026?

Let’s recall its origins. NATO was founded in 1949 with a clear and urgent mission: to contain and, if necessary, defeat the Soviet Union. That mission was compelling — indeed, existential. Western Europe lay devastated after World War II, and the Soviet threat was real, immediate, and hegemonic.

But that world quite literally no longer exists.

The Soviet Union collapsed three and a half decades ago. The Berlin Wall fell the year I was born. The Cold War is now a relic of history. By any reasonable metric, NATO achieved its raison d’etre by the early 1990s. But instead of declaring victory and recalibrating, the alliance drifted. It expanded ever further into Eastern Europe and shifted its ostensible mission into… well, something.

Simply put, NATO is today an organization in search of a purpose.

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Trump says workers must pay for imperialist war with cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and daycare

Speaking at a closed Easter lunch at the White House on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump declared that the federal government should stop paying for daycare, Medicare and Medicaid, all of which, he indicated, must be sacrificed for imperialist war.

“Don’t send any money for daycare,” Trump said, because “we’re fighting wars.” He went on, “You gotta let states take care of daycare and they should pay for it too … Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” insisting that Washington had to concern itself with only “one thing, military protection.”

He added that the federal government’s role was to “guard the country,” before dismissing Social Security, which serves more than 70 million people; Medicare, which covers about 68 million; and Medicaid and CHIP (the Children’s Health Insurance Program), which together cover more than 75 million people, including about 36 million children, as “little scams.”

The remarks, delivered in a setting where Trump evidently felt free to speak more openly than usual, were a blunt threat against programs on which millions of workers and their family members depend. Capitalist politicians generally avoid such direct attacks on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security because these programs remain deeply embedded in the lives of working people who have paid into them for decades. Trump, however, stated with unusual candor the real priorities of the ruling class.

The significance of the remarks lies not only in their content but in the circumstances under which they were made. The Easter lunch was closed to the press, and video of the event was briefly posted by the White House and then deleted. In contrast to Trump’s later scripted primetime address on Iran, the lunch exposed a more direct statement of policy: Social spending is to be gutted, while war spending is treated as the only indispensable function of the state.

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Forget Minnesota – The Amount Of Fraud Uncovered In California Is Staggering

California is a cash machine. The state collects some of the country’s highest income, business, and fuel taxes, and now spends more than $300 billion per year. And yet, everywhere you look, California seems to be falling apart.

The roads are crumbling. Mismanaged wildfires have turned neighborhoods into ash. Drug addiction and homelessness have metastasized, turning parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco into no-go zones. And the cost-of-living crisis is pricing middle-class taxpayers out of basic necessities like groceries and gas, even as the state spends billions on welfare programs that never seem to lift anyone out of poverty.

Californians are beginning to ask: Where is all this money going? On paper, it funds hospitals, universities, schools, prisons, infrastructure, and other public services. But beneath the surface, something else is happening that California Governor Gavin Newsom does not want you to see: massive, systematic, brazen fraud.

We conducted interviews with public officials, fraud experts, and political figures, and reviewed hundreds of pages of government reports, state audits, criminal indictments, and other public records on California fraud. From unemployment insurance and Medicaid to failed homeless initiatives and welfare programs, seemingly every state program has been compromised by criminals. The best estimates suggest that, on the governor’s watch, fraudsters, scammers, and organized crime rings have stolen at least $180 billion from taxpayers.

Welcome to Gavin Newsom’s empire of fraud.

Fourteen months after Newsom began his first term as governor of California, the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world. Roughly 2.7 million Californians eventually lost their jobs. The state’s economy went into freefall as its leaders imposed some of the country’s most restrictive public-health measures. In response to the crisis, Newsom sought to dump pallets of cash across the state—as quickly as possible.

One way to inject money was through California’s massive unemployment insurance program (UI). Unemployment insurance is administered by the state’s Employment Development Department (EDD), which can process billions of dollars in payments monthly. Before the state turned on the cash machine, however, experts had warned that the system was ripe for fraud.

Haywood Talcove, one of America’s leading fraud specialists and CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, was one such expert. “I was begging [federal officials] not to let the money go out like that, because it was going to be the biggest fraud in the history of our country,” he said. “Obviously, I wasn’t successful.”

For many reasons, California was particularly susceptible to the large-scale fraud schemes Haywood Talcove saw on the horizon. Not only did the state have some of the most generous welfare programs in the country; its bureaucrats had also failed to implement some basic fraud controls during Newsom’s tenure.

“They literally suspended all of the rules for the [unemployment insurance] program,” Talcove said. “[That made] it possible for anyone to get that benefit even if they weren’t entitled to it. It was very intentional. They knew what they were doing. But it caught up to them because it just got so out of control.”

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One of the California Hospices Targeted in Fraud Sting Had a Survival Rate of 97 Percent

One of the hospices targeted in ‘Operation Never Say Die’ today had a survival rate of nearly 100 percent. It’s amazing that these people got away with this for as long as they did.

People check into hospices to die. It’s extremely rare that someone leaves on their feet. At this place, 97 percent of the patients lived. That is a statistical impossibility.

Just imagine how much more of this there is out there.

CBS News reports:

Hospice with 97% survival rate accused of defrauding Medicare for $7.45M

The FBI arrested a married couple Thursday accused of fraudulently billing Medicare for $7.45 million while running a hospice with a survival rate reported to be more than 97% after five years. They were the first in a series of arrests planned Thursday, federal officials told CBS News.

A high survival rate at a hospice provider is one of a series of red flags identified by state auditors for fraud because most people enter hospice care in the final stages of a terminal illness. In past cases of fraud, operators were found to be using false or stolen identities to collect federal reimbursements for palliative care.

The targets of the early morning operation were Gladwin and Amelou Gill, a doctor and psychologist who co-own 626 Hospice, which does business as St. Francis Palliative Care, according to the FBI.

The FBI raid took place in the residential neighborhood of San Dimas, California, as FBI SWAT personnel announced over a loud speaker they have an arrest warrant. CBS News was at the Southern California location when the FBI agents executed the first early morning arrests. Also on the scene was Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Trump-appointed official who oversees the federal Medicare system.

The Justice Department later announced that eight people, including the Gills, had been arrested and federally charged in connection with a health care and hospice fraud investigation.

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RFK Jr. Announces Investigation Into Removing Microplastics From the Human Body

The federal government will spend $144 million to investigate microplastics and figure out how to remove them from human bodies, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials announced on April 2.

The program—Systematic Targeting Of MicroPlastics (STOMP)—is tasked with measuring, researching, and removing microplastics and nanoplastics from humans.

Tests reveal that microplastics, or small pieces of plastic, have been found in many people and have been associated with health problems. Ingestion can occur through consumption of food and water, as well as contact with the air.

“We are not dealing with a distant or theoretical risk,” Kennedy said during a news conference in Washington. “We are dealing with a measurable and growing presence inside the human body.”

However, officials said more data are needed, including ways to safely remove the microplastics.

“We cannot treat what we cannot measure,” Kennedy said. “We cannot regulate what we don’t understand.”

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Newsom spends $20M on consultants in struggling DOGE-inspired plan to cut waste

Gov. Gavin Newsom has paid upwards of $20 million to a consulting firm that employs his former cabinet secretary to eliminate wasteful spending — but the effort has come up well short of the goal as state lawmakers blasted the move.

Newsom — who signed an executive order to cut spending in the state, à la Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficienc is hitting roadblocks with the plan amid a multibillion-dollar state budget deficit.

California contracted with one of the world’s largest consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group, for up to $20 million in an effort to cut $2 billion in spending from the departments of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Social Services, and Health Care Services by the 2028-’29 fiscal year.

But the group — which hired former Newsom cabinet Secretary and Department of Finance Director Ana J. Matosantos — is now expected to only find $810 million in savings, according to legislative analysts.

That number may even go down later in May, analysts added, as indicated by the Newsom administration.

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