For a mayor who claims that the migrant influx is going bankrupt his city, he sure has a funny way of responding to it.
According to Nicole Gelinas at the New York Post:
Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Eric Adams is giving out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.
Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and his administration for nearly a month has failed to correct several public misperceptions about it.
One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50 million to migrants.
No wonder the mayor has been reticent.
This debit card program — if you read the actual contract — has the potential to become an open-ended, multibillion-dollar Bermuda Triangle of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.
It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID check, no restrictions and no fraud control.
What could go wrong?
Just on the surface, the plan stinks, as the $53 million to be spent was doled out by a no-bid contract.
It gets worse when one learns from the Gelinas report that the $53 million is just the set-up fee. The money to be doled out to the migrants is extra.
Worse still, the migrants will be entitled to as much as $10,000 a month at city expense, the pre-loaded debit cards to be doled out on the honor system that migrants will spend that free cash only for food and baby supplies. The idea of handing out cash was based on news that migrants were throwing out their food and the food handed out on a no-bid contract was spoiled and rotten.
Instead of assuring that its existing no-bid “emergency” contractor fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid “emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for waste, fraud and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.
It's a grotesque sump of potential corruption, and one can almost just hear the Venezuelan gangs getting up on the details of these cards to find some way to steal a lot of them, either through helpless Venezuelan migrants, or through their own gang activity.
The company has no experience in this kind of distribution, Adams apparently met the guy who runs the company at a party, and fraud is all but certain under this plan.
With nobody checking for fraud, it's a golden opportunity to draw a massive amount of money with which to extend their crime and thuggery through every aspect of the city. We all know that much of the COVID funding went to fraud because government is not good at distributing large amounts of money quickly. The fraud in this one wll be through the roof.
Which tells us a lot about where this migrant crisis is going -- like with wars, to consultants and NGOs to service the migrants, entrenching themselves as special interests -- and the costs are going to get big.
With no end in sight to the migrant invasion, it is starting to outline itself like warfare such as it's practiced in the U.S.
We don't need this crisis any more than we need more wars.
But by the strangest of coincidences, big funding packages are being debated in Congress on the border and on wars, and they are attached to each other.
They are pretty much the same thing. The NGOs gain and the swamp grows. The only losers are the taxpayers.
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