Musk Chainsaw IV: Frauds and “fraudsters”

You may have heard or read that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said shutting down Social Security was a good thing because that would sort out the “fraudsters” from those who trust the government. According to him, those who scream, call (though the phone service has been dismantled), and complain are those who are stealing or getting money inappropriately. That sort of makes complaining impossible unless you want to lose your Social Security check; so, I guess a phone service really was wasteful. To drive his point home, Lutnick said his 90’s something year old mother-in-law would not complain and simply wait for the missing check the next month.

There are several comments that could be made. One was posted on X by pensions and taxation specialist Richard Phillips, who noted “Nearly 40% of seniors rely on Social Security for a majority of their income and nearly one in seven rely on it for more than 90% of their income. These people would call due to missing checks because their very survival depends on it.” Speaking locally, we should note that a very large portion of the local residents (a fourth, a fifth?) depend on Social Security arriving regularly and that all local businesses depend on the regularity of this income flow. So, we can conclude that our Commerce Secretary doesn’t feel much of a responsibility to keep in mind Sierra County or the thousands of similar, small, rural, low-income communities that elected his “boss.”

We should also wonder why Lutnick’s mother-in-law is on Social Security to begin with. This may be perfectly legal, but since Lutnick says that inappropriately getting Social Security is “stealing,” isn’t her government handout questionable as inappropriate? Her daughter is a very highly paid associate of a major, national law firm. Her grandsons, Lutnick’s sons, managed Lutnick’s personal estate which brings in about $3,000,000 a month income (my estimate of a 5% annual income from his declared $806,000,000 investments). That is every month. It should be enough to cover that measly Social Security check. I don’t think T or C’s infrastructure and debt problems mean much to the government by billionaires.

Lutnick, of course, was speaking to support Dog-e’s dismantling of Social Security (a Ponzi scheme, Musk called it) on the pretense that it was full of fraud. This charge is mighty peculiar coming from a person whose “boss” was convicted of fraud in New York last year and was barred for three years from heading a New York business corporation: “The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” stated the court. And, that conviction was only the latest case of fraud for the boss. In 2022, his employee Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 charges of tax fraud and falsifying business records for the Trump Organization. At the same trail, that court found the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and the Donald Trump Holdings guilty of 17 counts of tax fraud and falsifying business records. In the same year, the boss settled claims of fraudulently passing “fees” from his Inaugural Committee to his Old Post Office corporation. In 2018, the Donald J. Trump Foundation was dissolved as a settlement of fraud charges. In 2013, the so-called “Trump University” settled charges of marketing fraud.

Significantly, in that 2024 conviction, the court wrote with dismay that the defendants continued to deny wrongdoing in spite of all the evidence amassed in court testimony and documents (with the one exception that Trump admitted to tripling the size of his apartment in order to aggrandize his assets when seeking loans from a bank). The defense was that all these “fraudulent” practices were normal and usual in business.

This point of view is now the accepted government’s view as Lutnick and Musk go after “fraudsters,” who turn out only to be harmed people who complain. Thus, the drastic change in the meaning of the word “fraud,” follows our boss’s commitment to fraudulent business practices demonstrated last month when he ordered the Department of Justice not to prosecute cases under the Foreign Corruption Practices Act and then defended his order by saying that it hampered American businesses.

Bribery is now normal, in “government” as well as in business, as we see in the way the feds dealt with Columbia University or as we see in the $40,000,000 bribe that Paul, Weis gave to find favor with the boss. Threats, bribery, coercion, falsification of evidence, corruption, fraud are now simply the art of making a business “deal.” And the people who hold the cards hold all the cards because 32% of us gave them the whole deck. Forget about empathy, equality, or law; these are aspects of what we used to call government. We voted to get rid of government and put a corrupt business in its place. We can hardly complain if that corruption is used to to fleece us.

If you still think that businessmen have the know-how to run a government for the people when their whole lives have been devoted to making a profit off the people, or if you still believe that the boss’s Dog-es are really “cost-cutting” when they cut services for your needs, try to remember that dishonesty and lying are only “alternative facts.” If you still think that we were so smart and free in our choices, look around and see how anyone can be made to do anything. We are so addicted to money, to the lives money buys us, that we will do anything to keep away deprivation. For Americans, it has all been about money, but behind that is the constant reminder of physical violence, of police, and ultimately, of military might. And keep in mind that complainers are, by definition, fraudsters.