… coronavirus restrictions in a lawsuit against the state’s governor. This pious town, always in the news for endemic welfare theft, anti-vax militancy, failure to educate its children, and now of course failure to observe virus containment laws, has just had it. It’s just had enough of government meddling in its wonderful way of life. This is going all the way to the Supreme Court!
Lakewood: Proud to be One of New Jersey’s Coronavirus Hotspots!
So Eli’s in trouble with the law again – an occupational hazard for the very worst of career criminals – and having helped get his buddy Trump to pardon Eli the last time, one assumes Alan Dershowitz is now hard at work on a second pardon.
Eli and his partners in crime hail from Lakewood NJ, a hotbed of theft which you already know about if you read University Diaries.
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What? You say there’s no way Fuckface can be reelected?
Silly. Everyone said there was no way he could be elected the first time.
It’s always been a little dicey, trying to get away with failing to educate your children, and stealing taxpayer money, in America, a country with a meaningful law enforcement establishment. Massive systemic welfare fraud as a way of life occasionally gets you in trouble in this country — just ask Lakewood NJ’s rabbi and his flock.
And now the major ultraorthodox yeshiva in New York City has to pay back eight million of the ten million it stole from the state through truly remarkable, contemptible, long-term, deceit. Which this blog will not detail (it violates our obscenity standards), but by all means read the article yourself.
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Why is UD confident they’ll keep stealing? It’s structural, babe. You educate a community to feel no affiliation with the US beyond lockstep voting as their rabbi instructs them … whaddaya think’s gonna happen? The “US” – that abstraction out there – exists to provide money for one’s life of grand and petty crime, and there’s nothing at all wrong with devoutly pious God-fearers lying and cheating and swindling THAT thing, that vacuous entity out there that can be made to discharge money. It’s just the way they think, and that is that.
That’s the problem with cults; and it’s why self-respecting governments surveil and, when the fraud gets too too too much, pursue them legally.
In 2018, former officials of the [Central United Talmudical Academy, famous for its one hundred percent failure rate on a very simple standardized exam,] pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government’s Child & Adults Care Program of over $3m in reimbursements for school meals that the school had never served... This is classic American graft… [T]ax evasion and welfare fraud are an open secret... When Jews break [the law] so blatantly, it reflects badly on all of us.
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The classic example is Lakewood, NJ; but it’s pretty much everywhere, cuz when you deny the legitimacy – nay, the very existence! – of any entity outside yourself, whatever IS out there exists only to be exploited. Laws? The ‘laws’ are their bogus godless laws. We’re the only godly location in the universe; we answer only to God, who speaks to us and us alone through our rabbis; and if our ‘crimes’ are hurting the heathens, so much the better.
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What almost none of the critics of the [NYT] article I have read mention is that this story is really about corruption: the corruption of city and state political figures and yeshiva deans who have duplicitously taken money from state coffers without abiding by state regulations. And the politicians who have looked the other way and ignored non-compliance, assumingly to cultivate Haredi favor in the voting booth. As much as this a Hasidic story, this is also a New York story of political corruption.
… R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes today, is quoted in the article as saying “The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.” And yet his schools readily accept state funding. It is this corruption that merits a featured essay in the Times.
A massive insurance fraud conspiracy; failure to vaccinate or educate their children; systemic welfare benefits theft: UD awaits Lakewood! The Musical as soon as some lyricist gets hold of America’s most pious, most fascinating, municipality.
When it’s a way of life in two communities, you get these amusing outcomes.
Controversy swirling around the [amnesty] program [offered to the welfare-fraud-ridden Orthodox Lakewood New Jersey community] has not waned in the last year.
In October, the Asbury Park Press revealed that despite [New Jersey Comptroller Philip J.] Degnan’s public statements that the program would recover all benefits wrongly paid to residents, it recouped less than half and left $2.6 million on the table.
Degnan said he did not know until the final days of the amnesty offer that a rogue employee was offering discounted repayment terms to residents.
But confidential documents obtained by the Press say at least four employees and top-level managers in the office knew and signed off on the negotiated settlements.
The employee who led the amnesty program, Andrew Poulos Jr., claims in an ongoing lawsuit he was fired last year and made a scapegoat for the program while his superiors, who also knew about the deal making, were allowed to continue working. The superiors denied knowing about the discounts, the comptroller’s office has said.
What can UD say? It’s Jersey.
Five years ago, Raphael Magarik said what many people who care about distributive justice in America know – systemic welfare abuse rages among the country’s growing ultraorthodox sects. This is money that should go to the actually needy. It’s being stolen.
Strangely, as Magarik notes, the practice is as flagrant as it is widespread. Larger and larger communities of people not entitled to welfare benefits work the system and take them anyway and suffer no consequences. How is this possible?
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You see how it happens when (very) occasional law enforcement action comes down, as it has in the last week in Lakewood, New Jersey. The first person arrested for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars that should have gone to, for instance, struggling public schools was the community’s rabbi. Its spiritual leader.
Not only have the authorities known for ages about these criminal conspiracies; they actually met with the community a couple of years ago and suggested they knock it off.
Why did Prosecutor Warn Lakewood about Avoiding Welfare Fraud?
asks a recent local headline. The article quotes local citizens wondering why an entire community got a helpful suggestion from the police rather than the sweeping arrests it’s getting now. All the money lost over those years might not have been lost had police “just admitted there’s widespread fraud” and arrested people for it.
How Did Massive NJ Welfare Fraud Scheme Work?
Another headline.
Answer? Just by doing it.
The paper trail shows the relative ease the families had in allegedly defrauding the government. In one case, authorities say a woman was able to withdraw $1.5 million from a company and deposit the money into her personal bank account while still collecting public assistance.
You just do it. The authorities know what you’re doing and they do nothing. They call a town meeting. Years later they arrest a bunch of people and the sect agrees to try not to do it anymore.
Hundreds of people have called local officials, inquiring if there would be amnesty for those who admit lying about their incomes, and the APP reported that Ocean County authorities have been swamped with calls from public assistance beneficiaries seeking to stop receiving benefits.
Then, since it’s “a lifestyle,” they do it again.
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So nu. Israel is increasingly a religious state and it can’t do much about its own humongous haredi mess: Close to a million unemployed or underemployed people, many of whom deny the legitimacy of the state and make sure their children continue the unemployability tradition by refusing to follow the mandated national curriculum.
America is another matter. UD is baffled as to why our own fiscal and legal institutions, fully aware of the situation, do little or nothing.
Early morning criminal raids by state and federal authorities Monday sent tremors through Lakewood [New Jersey] as officials signaled that more arrests are impending in a massive investigation into welfare fraud.
In the last two days, hundreds of residents called township leaders asking how they can avoid arrest or get amnesty related to an alleged public-assistance fraud scheme that could stretch into the millions of dollars, according to one law enforcement with knowledge of the ongoing probes.
That source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that dozens have also called Ocean County Social Services in Toms River to cancel their public assistance or update their income information.
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Haredim: A word meaning Those who do not tremble at their own fraud.
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“[T]he dominant culture of Lakewood.”
The man who killed four members of the Lakewood police force might be on or near the campus.
Patrick Walker, a recent graduate of Lakewood High School near Grand Rapids, Michigan recently unearthed a 10-pound mammoth tooth on the golf course where he works as groundskeeper. He credits paying attention in science classes for not backing down when his boss initially dismissed his find.
“Mr. (Douglas) Schmuck always told us to keep your eyes open, you never know what you’ll find,” Walker told The Grand Rapids Press. “He’s into archeology and taught us about that kind of good stuff.”…
Dr. Lou Ann Cook, nursing professor who died Dec. 17, was memorialized by at least 45 current and retired faculty members, administrators and family at a ceremony Feb. 6 in the nursing and allied health complex.
Cook was a nursing professor at this college 25 years.
She was born Jan. 9, 1938, in Lakewood, Ohio.
Click on the link for more.