I’ve been hearing about corruption in Minnesota for many years. The short summary, since I’ve been regularly seeing articles about it in our newspapers since at least the start of the COVID pandemic, is that the state exercised poor regulatory oversight of charitable foundations, and some bad actors moved in to exploit that. The problem exploded during COVID as state and federal services were expanded to cope with the social disruption caused by the disease, and a few people figured out that founding phony charities was a good strategy for siphoning off tax dollars…a lot of tax dollars.
Honestly, I was tuning out all the news about the Feeding Our Future scam back in 2020, because it was all about the state slowly stamping out all the scammers. We’ve had a steady throb of stories in this state about crooks getting arrested for lying about these fake charities, slowly getting prosecuted, and typically getting convicted — the justice system grinds slowly, especially when hundreds of millions of dollars are involved, and while many have been convicted, even today most of them haven’t been sentenced. When your local news is a steady drip of incremental stories about infamous con artists getting court dates, it’s hard to sustain focus. It’s been a slow cleanup of a ghastly mess, where frauds were claiming to set up meal delivery for schools, getting paid by the state, and then not actually delivering anything.
Except now it’s blowing up again because Republicans have discovered a racist angle to it. A lot of the schools not-served by these services were in poor Somali communities, with the complicity of Somali con artists, because as usual poor people are ripe for the picking with promises of free money. So now there’s a story Republicans can seize upon: poor black people were stealing our money! Never mind that state officials were aware of the problem and have been trying to do cleanup and improve regulatory oversight for over a decade and that it’s not just a Somali problem.
For instance, here’s the organizer of the scheme, Aimee Bock:
Whoops. I guess we’re going to have to round up all the white women and deport them. Just can’t trust ’em.
Keep in mind that Minnesota has a population of 80,000 people of Somali descent. Something like 80 were involved in the crime, so sure, indicting over 3 million white women in the state because Aimee Bock stole millions of dollars seems fair.
For a more thorough overview of the scheme, here’s a fast-talking white woman to compress the whole convoluted mess into 24 minutes.
One of the more crazy accusations coming out of the demented Right is the claim that the Minnesota state flag, which is blue and has a star on it, was designed to resemble the Somali flag, which is blue and has a star on it. You be the judge.
well, i am convinced by the flag comparison:
-they are both rectangular with the same aspect ratio
-they both reflect light in the blue range of the electromagnetic spectrum at what looks to be 461, 474 and 483 nm
-if you add up 461+474+483 you get 1418 which is how many billions of dollars trump says was stolen, within a factor of about 1000, which can’t be coincidence
slam dunk libtards!
So, rich thieves are angry that poorer thieves stole the money they were planning on stealing?
The fascists are targeting poor black immigrant populations!? I’m shocked, shocked that they are attempting to demonize all Somalian immigrants as criminal fraudsters. Nevermind that the 8 Somalians were victimizing hundreds of other Somalians by stealing their identities in order to steal public funds, the only information necessary to condemn an entire community is their race, and immigration history. /s
I really wish the star on the new State flag was a proper compass rose, which represents Minnesotas nickname of the North Star State. That eight pointed thing is just confusing.
For an even faster explanation of the Somalia targeting by the asshole administration, here is Amanda’s mild take.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/ZTdoBKbfGM4
The demographic committing the most crimes? White men. I think we should round them up and deport them to Aldebaran.
In my opinion, the flag of Minnesota (and the flag of Somalia) are simple and beautiful.
But im a bit partial, because i love blue flags with stars.
This happened everywhere in just about every state.
The other Covid-19 era scams were by corporations and businesses. They exploited the programs meant to keep businesses from failing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is one example from…Florida.
FWIW, Trump was president during this time.
You made a mistake, PZ. You showed the same flag twice.
Yes, that seems like a much more urgent problem than the fact that poor Somali schoolchildren were not being fed that whole time.
Hypothesis:
The incidence of fraud is fairly uniform, at least over time. The instance of detecting and exposing it is not.
The latter is related to, in general, the governmental motivation to go after white-collar crime as a whole. There’s substantial historical and contemporary evidence that more authoritarian, and (more generally) more establishment-controlled, governments are — how to put this politely? or at least appropriate for this forum? — less enthusiastic about enforcement of white-collar-crime provisions against private actors and more prone to conflicts of interest among themselves. Conversely, there’s also substantial evidence that when any outsider group has a member prominently accused of a widespread fraud scheme, both they individually and their outsider group will be treated (at least in public) more harshly than “upstanding citizens” of the majority/default group. Further, those majority/default groups are more successful in getting activities that they control excluded from scrutiny, even when they would otherwise be considered fraudulent.
No string of citations, just a couple examples:
• Do you really think Enron was the only organization engaged in energy-market manipulation?
• Chicago. For, like, the entire period since the Fire.
• Virtually the entire defense-intelligence-industrial complex, for the entire history of the nation (don’t look too closely at where the majority of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fortune came from…)
@6 raven
Yes indeed. The fascists are emphasizing the Minnesota connection because they are trying to smear Walz. Here are some cases from Texas.
6 Sentenced for Roles in $20M COVID-19 Relief Fraud Ring
Two convicted in Eastern District of Texas COVID fraud scheme
Co-Founder of Paycheck Protection Program Lender Service Provider Sentenced for $65M COVID-19 Relief Fraud Scheme
The Texas flag has one star on it, like the flags of Cuba, Vietnam and Chile. Be sure to check out the Cuban naval jack.
I suspect communists.
Bonnie Blue flag
That sounds much closer to the Somalian flag than Minnesota’s.
Also, look into the De Zavala flag.