John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he took the oath of office, and delivered an extraordinary inaugural address.
The moment represented generational change. Kennedy had been a PT boat skipper and wounded combat veteran from the Pacific theater of the Second World War. His older brother was killed in combat over the skies of Europe. He was accepting the torch of leadership from the Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower, who was leaving the presidency after two terms.
Do you remember his call and charge to the country? It was simple, elegant and profound:
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Let that settle for a second as you absorb these two flabbergasting paragraphs from a Rolling Stone magazine expose written by the outstanding journalist Sean Woods:
By the government’s own accounting, we potentially dished out some $16.2 billion to folks with “suspicious” emails; $267 million was sent to the identities matching current federal prisoners, some on death row; another nearly $29 billion to people living in multiple states; we even sent out more than $139 million to dead people. California alone accounts for a whopping $20 billion in pandemic unemployment-insurance fraud.
Factoring in President Biden’s and Trump’s relief efforts, the U.S. released more than $5 trillion into the economy — the biggest bailout in history. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz told congress that more than a $100 billion in Covid aid money may have ended up misappropriated, but many experts and members of law enforcement think the number is much higher. The AP estimates $280 million went to fraudsters and another $123 billion was misappropriated, some 10 percent of the relief money. For his part, Talcove estimates the actual losses blow past the tallies being thrown around. “The real number is much higher. I think the government lost a trillion dollars due to fraud in the pandemic,” he says. “One trillion.”
Ponder those numbers. They are staggering. One trillion dollars of taxpayer money was stolen during the greatest crime spree in American history. The age of Trump has become the age of taking. John Kennedy’s nobility has dissolved into a fetid sewer of selfishness. Today, the reality for startling numbers of us is: how much can I take from my country? How much can I get? It is disgusting.
American power is not derivative from the size of its vast arsenals of weapons. American freedom powers American culture and a sick culture cannot be a powerful one. Are we a country of grifters and takers? Obligation and responsibility have no seat at the table for the rapacious feast of American locusts who try to devour anything they see. This is the philosophy of Trump, and make no mistake it is a cancer. Character and integrity face extinction-level challenges in our malicious era. It does matter. Nations without character perish. They collapse.
Consider for a second the magnitude of the fraud. The high estimate of over $1 trillion stolen comes from Haywood Talcove the CEO of Lexis Nexus Risk solutions.
Here is how he is introduced by Sean Woods:
In late March 2020, Haywood Talcove, a CEO at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, was packing up his office, having sent his employees home. He was worrying about laying off his staff, his family’s health, and how he was going to manage two young kids at home during the pandemic.
But when President Trump announced an initial $2.2 trillion relief package to bail out the millions of Americans desperate for cash during the national lockdown, his concern turned away from the coronavirus. An expert in cybersecurity, Talcove has worked in both the private and public sectors, and has been raising the alarm about the government’s exposure to scams for many years. And now, it was like all of his prior analysis and warnings about fraud had just become real.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to allow anyone to get unemployment-insurance benefits,” he recalls. “The systems are vulnerable. All you needed was a name, a date of birth, an address, and a social security number.”
Talcove’s a proud Boston guy who moved to Washington, D.C., in 1990, and went on to help an anti-government-waste-style Republican become governor of New Hampshire. He knew the relief plan would be irresistible to scam artists and especially tempting to organized transnational criminal groups. “As soon as the CARES money was announced, we started seeing squawking on the dark web, criminal groups in China, Nigeria, Romania, and Russia — they see our systems are open,” Talcove says. He estimates that “the United States government is the single largest funder of cybersecurity fraud in the world.”
There are no words for the incompetence at hand here. It is also completely inexcusable, like this story from Rolling Stone about the consequences that have fallen on good, honest and hardworking people.
There must be thousands of stories of people who were unknowingly burned during the era of pandemic fraud. Steven and Gloria Clark’s stands out as a particularly maddening tale, a bureaucratic nightmare worthy of Kafka. The Des Moines, Iowa, family of four, with two daughters now ages four and seven, were looking to buy their dream house in 2021. They are a Black family from the heartland who’d been renters their whole lives. Home ownership was a big step to feeling more secure. They had saved the money that Steven earned working as a customer-service rep, watched their credit, and everything seemed good to go — until they got hit with an IRS bill that said they’d received $30,000 in unemployment funds from the state of California, a place they’d never lived or visited. The IRS claimed they now owed more than $5,000 in taxes. Thus began an ordeal that’s still ongoing two years later.
It’s hard to fathom the behemoth that is the American tax system on a good day, but when it comes down on your head, it’s pure misery. It’s one thing for Trump and his army of accountants. It’s another for a working family stretching like the Clarks. The IRS threatened to garnish their wages and is even now, two years later, continuing to charge them interest despite news stories and elected officials pleading their case. Not to mention the fact that they say they never received any of this money that they are being taxed over.
It’s been an ordeal,” Gloria says. “You just get so frustrated. You’re online sending emails about it or on the phone and then your call gets disconnected. And the IRS says there’s nothing they can do. It’s just a lot of time spent trying to fix this. There have been many tears.”
(Reached for comment on the case, an IRS spokesperson said that “under federal law, federal employees cannot disclose tax returns of individuals.”)
The couple has no idea how their identities were stolen, but now they are incredibly careful in every transaction. Steven thinks one thing the government could focus on is helping victims as much as it has on enforcing the law. “They should set up a task force to help people like us navigate the system and get through this,” he says. “Because not until this is done, are we going to be good.”
Gloria adds, “For us, trust is just broken, big time.”
There you have it. What is the price of bureaucratic idiocy, incompetence and abuse? The collapse of trust. When trust collapses completely what happens? Demagogues rise. It is all connected.
This Rolling Stone expose is a great piece of political journalism. Read it. If it doesn’t enrage you then it may well be too late to stop the trip to the destination to which our nation is headed. Extremism plus apathy can make a majority in this country. If they pick the demagogue, it’s all over. Think about that for a second. We are drifting closer to the abyss every day. Don’t believe me? Look at Elon Musk’s Twitter. The decay is real. Can you smell it yet?
Listening to President Kennedy's inspirational speech made me think of the comparison with Trump's horrific "American Carnage" speech.
In my 73 years, I can't recall despising anyone more than I do Trump. The destruction he has caused in America is equalled by the mental, and physical, illness he inflicted on the American people.
I, for one, have, and do, feel these affects; however, I cannot bury my head in the sand, in apathy. I (we) must stay involved in this battle for democracy! I'm not alone in my belief that the 2024 election IS our final chance to retain our democractic form of government.
How we will ever repair the damage Trump has done to our society is still unknown. However, we DO know that to retain our democracy, we must get involved, make sure we know the TRUTH from "alternate facts" and help make sure there's a massive turnout of voters!
Please join the fight🙏🏻
https://time.com/4641547/inauguration-2017-donald-trump-america-first/?amp=true
“If they pick the demagogue, it’s all over.” I used to think if a law required politicians to write their own speeches, like Lincoln at Gettysburg, we’d see the candidates’ real intelligence and character. But we don’t need that. Trump, Tuberville, Greene, Gosar, etc are right in front of us, going full moron. And were elected. And may be reelected. “They” do pick the demagogue.