Crony Capitalism

Massive Fraud Has Been Unveiled at the EPA (Again)

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While I doubt anyone reading this will be shocked by major fraud at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the potential extent of the fraud is huge, and we still have no idea how big it is.

A report released by the EPA’s Inspector General found that over 90% of sampled transactions were for “prohibited, improper, or erroneous purchases.” Worst of all, the sample size was extremely small at only 80 transactions out of 67,000 transactions during the sample period. Considering EPA cardholders spent $29 million in taxpayer dollars in 2012 with a potential 90% fraud rate, you do the math.

Oh, but the story gets even better (or worse, depending on your perspective). Examples of egregious fraud at the EPA have been well documented in the past, in fact as recently as in 2008. Absolutely nothing was done about it.

More from Americans for Tax Reform:

A report released by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Inspector General has found that EPA employees have improperly used federal charge cards to purchase everything from gym memberships to gift cards. The report indicated that over 90 percent of the sampled transactions were for prohibited, improper, or erroneous purchases, all paid for by American taxpayers. Ironically, Senate Democrats Monday night carried on an all-night filibuster in the hopes of generating even more power and funding for the EPA.

The report outlined nine specific internal control oversight issues, ranging from the approval of prohibited transactions by EPA officials to the outright failure to maintain transaction records.

Some specific instances of EPA employee misconduct were so egregious they are worth mentioning. In three instances, cardholders purchased gym memberships totaling $2,867. Two of those purchases were not even for EPA employees but for family members.

The report also found that the purchase of gift cards by EPA cardholders was also a problem in seven transactions. For example, in one transaction 20 American Express gift cards were purchased totaling $1,588. Additionally, the report highlighted an instance where EPA employees blatantly violated records keeping requirements in that:

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The True State of the U.S. Economy: Caviar Facials and Desperate Fire Sales on Craigslist

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By now, it must be completely obvious to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention that the so-called “recovery” we have supposedly been witnessing for the past several years is nothing more than a wealth transfer to a handful of oligarchs and their political minions. While I am intimately familiar with the process in the U.S., it appears to be a global phenomenon as well.

Domestically, this process has been driven by the complete corruption and insanity of those calling the public policy shots in Washington D.C. At the heart of that process, resides a group of unelected economic Central Planners known as the Federal Reserve, or the lender of last resort for oligarchs and cronies who make bad business decisions.

Before I get to the title of this post, I want to highlight a very important article published last week that demonstrates how college graduates are forcing their lesser educated peers out of the workforce by taking jobs that do not require secondary education. If you read this and still can’t be honest that this economy is a total distorted shitshow, I don’t know what to tell you.

From Bloomberg:

Recent college graduates are ending up in more low-wage and part-time positions as it’s become harder to find education-level appropriate jobs, according to a January study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The share of Americans ages 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree in jobs that don’t require that level of education was 44 percent in 2012, up from 34 percent in 2001, the study found.

The New York Fed researchers said it isn’t clear whether two decades of increasing underemployment for recent graduates “represent a structural change in the labor market, or if they are a consequence of the two recessions and jobless recoveries in the first decade of the 2000s.”

Two “jobless recoveries.” I’m still trying to figure our how you can have a “jobless recovery.” Perhaps they aren’t recoveries in the first place. Bear in mind that these are the unelected people running the economy.

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Meet “Goldfinger” – The $850k Motorcycle with “Many Buyers Interested”

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Welcome back to pre-financial crisis insanity levels. I recall one of the wildest stories from back in early 2008 near the height of the oil price bubble was about how the wealthy in the UAE were spending tens of millions of dollars buying and selling license plates. Yes, just regular aluminum license plates. The most … Read more

An Open Letter to Sam Zell: Why Your Statements are Delusional and Dangerous

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The 1 percent are being pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so. The problem is that the world and this country should not talk about envy of the 1 percent. It should talk about emulating the 1 percent. The 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.

– Sam Zell yesterday on Bloomberg Television

Mr. Zell,
I’ve seen clips of you on television several times in the past. I can’t say those appearances elicited strong reactions from me. I can recall being offended at things you have said, and I can remember agreeing with you on other occasions. However, yesterday I found your statements on “class warfare,” “envy” and the “1%” delusional and dangerous. I will address these two points separately.

Why Your Statements Are Delusional

Individuals, social classes, even cultures and nation-states develop storylines and so-called “myths” about themselves and how they fit into the bigger picture of current events and human history. We all see ourselves and whatever group(s) with which we identify within a particular social, political and economic context. This is obvious, yet it is much more difficult to look at your owns myths and question them. It is far easier to look at other groups’ myths and heap criticism on them. That is basically all you do.

For the purpose of this letter, I will focus on socio-economic groups that people are now using in these contemporary United States. Ever since Occupy Wall Street popularized the terms, many people have divided themselves into two overly-simplistic groups, the so-called 99% and the 1%. However, this isn’t the real struggle. I was always against the 1% label, because the true cancer, the true problem comes from a much smaller slice of the population. It comes from what I call the “oligarchs,” the 0.01%, and the politicians that do their bidding. This is your class Mr. Zell, so let’s get that straight right off the bat. That doesn’t mean everyone in the 0.01% should be vilified. I am certain there are many well meaning, decent and honestly good people in that bucket. Nevertheless, what the past five years have proven without a shadow of a doubt is that this class collectively represents the most destructive, delusional and counter-productive members of our society.

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State of the Union Preview – What to Expect from the Propagandist in Chief

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Tonight, the Propagandist in Chief for the USSA will take the stage and say absolutely nothing meaningful. He will employ trite clichés to appeal to the increasingly small section of the lobotomized population which still somehow supports his oligarch coddling criminality. He will preen and posture and threaten to legislate via executive order like the petty … Read more

Wanna Be Dictator Obama Claims “I’ve Got a Pen” as He Vows to Legislate via Executive Order

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If this isn’t one of the creepier things you’ve seen in a while, then I don’t know what to tell you. Obama’s emotional expressions in this clip are one of a man who has been utterly defeated following several years of rampant cronyism and epic public failures. As such, it seems as if he is … Read more

Revolving Door 2014: Former Head of the Federal Communications Commission Joins Carlyle

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What better way to kick off 2014 than with the first (and most certainly not last) egregious example of USA banana republic revolving door crony capitalism. In this case, the crony in question is former head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Julius Genachowski, who was earlier today named Managing Director and partner in the U.S. Buyout team … Read more

Ron Paul Says Bitcoin Could be the “Destroyer of the Dollar”

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Personally, I wouldn’t put it that way. The dollar is being destroyed by the Federal Reserve. Bitcoin is merely a preferred conduit through which fed up citizens decide to express their displeasure with the incredibly corrupt corporatist-facist state being shoved down our throats by a handful of insane and greedy oligarchs. Interesting comments nonetheless. From CNN Money:

Imagine a world in which you can buy anything in secret. No banks. No fees. No worries inflation will make today’s money worth less tomorrow.

The digital currency Bitcoin promises all these things. And while it’s far from achieving any of them — its value is unstable and it’s rarely used — some have high hopes. 

“There will be alternatives to the dollar, and this might be one of them,” said former U.S. congressman Ron Paul. If people start using bitcoins en masse, “it’ll go down in history as the destroyer of the dollar,” Paul added.

It’s unlikely that Bitcoin would replace the dollar or other government-controlled currencies. But it could serve as a kind of universal alternative currency that is accepted everywhere around the globe. Concerned about the dollar’s inflation? Just move your cash to bitcoins and use them to pay your bills instead. Tired of hefty credit card fees? Bitcoin allows transactions that bypass banks.

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How Washington D.C. is Sucking the Life Out of America

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The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
– Tacitus

Ever since I started writing about what is happening in the world around me, my primary theme has been that the root cancer at the core of the U.S., and indeed global economy, is cronyism and an absence of the rule of law when it comes to oligarchs. In the U.S., this cronyism is best described as an insidious relationship between large multi-national corporations and big government to funnel all of the wealth and resources of the nation to themselves at the expense of everyone else. In a genuine free market defined by heightened competition and governed by an equal application of the rule of law to all, the 0.1% does not aggregate all of a nation’s wealth. This sort of thing only happens in crony capitalism, which is basically nothing more than complete and total insider deals to aggregate newly created money into the hands of the few.

The following profile of Washington D.C.’s so-called “boom” from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pretty much tells you all you need to know. While I think the tone of the article is absurd considering this is no “economic boom,” but merely parasitic wealth extraction on a unprecedented scale, it is still quite telling. It is no coincidence that as D.C. has grown wealthier, the nation has become much, much poorer. Key excerpts below:

The avalanche of cash that made Washington rich in the last decade has transformed the culture of a once staid capital and created a new wave of well-heeled insiders.

The winners in the new Washington are not just the former senators, party consiglieri and four-star generals who have always profited from their connections. Now they are also the former bureaucrats, accountants and staff officers for whom unimagined riches are suddenly possible. They are the entrepreneurs attracted to the capital by its aura of prosperity and its super-educated workforce. They are the lawyers, lobbyists and executives who work for companies that barely had a presence in Washington before the boom.

At the same time, big companies realized that a few million spent shaping legislation could produce windfall profits. They nearly doubled the cash they poured into the capital.

Sorry these aren’t “entrepreneurs,” they are parasitic opportunists.

At Cafe Joe, a greasy spoon near the National Security Agency in suburban Maryland, software engineers with top-secret clearances merely have to look at the place mats under their fried eggs to find federal contractors trying to entice them away from their government jobs with six-figure salaries and stock options. The place-mat ads cost $250 a week. They are sold out through 2014.

During the past decade, the region added 21,000 households in the nation’s top 1 percent. No other metro area came close.

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Tim Geithner in January 2013: “Extremely Unlikely Will Take a Job in the World of Finance”

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So over the weekend, the world learned that Tiny Turbo Tax Timmy Geither had accepted a job with private equity giant firm Warburg Pincus. The news was about as much of a surprise as a lie popping out of Barack Obama’s mouth every time he opens it. Nevertheless, the move is particularly hilarious in light … Read more