The Big Stories

by Bryan

11 comments

1 Badtux { 12.12.14 at 12:20 am }

Some “big storm”. While everybody’s freaking out, the weather’s been no worse than a typical fall day in Louisiana when a cold front comes through. I didn’t even drive the Jeep to work today, I drove the Whale. No problem.

2 Kryten42 { 12.12.14 at 4:48 am }

Congress also passed another bill:

via Wonkette:
House Unanimously Passes Super Controversial Bill Telling Nazis To Suck It

The Guardian:
Congress finds something both parties agree on: denying Nazis social security

I’d say that was decades overdue! *sigh*

3 Bryan { 12.12.14 at 9:09 am }

Yeah, Badtux, but Louisiana has a lot of rain and swamps, while California has droughts and deserts. A half inch of rain in San Diego was the equivalent of three feet of snow in Rochester, New York.

All the House of Representatives has been able to do is pass worthless bills that deal with symbolic ‘problems’ that no one but media consultants care about.

4 Badtux { 12.13.14 at 12:01 am }

Wow, deny pensions to Nazis. Kinda pointless today, now that the few remaining Nazis are in their 80’s and 90’s and won’t be around long anyhow. It’s sort of like if we pass a law 50 years from now denying Social Security to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Pretty silly, IMHO.

5 Bryan { 12.13.14 at 10:20 am }

It will probably cost more to identify them and remove them from the system than it will save. Given the period in which they qualified for Social Security, they are probably receiving less than $1000/month. some a good deal less. Having had recent experience removing someone from the system I can attest to how slow and difficult the process can be.

6 Kryten42 { 12.13.14 at 7:20 pm }

Actually, there are 4 living beneficiaries, receiving about $1,500/mth. It was basically a bribe to force Nazi war criminals to leave the USA. It became known as “Nazi dumping”.

Dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards collected millions of dollars in U.S. Social Security benefits after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The payments, underwritten by American taxpayers, flowed through a legal loophole that gave the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave the U.S. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal U.S. government records.
…
The deals allowed the Justice Department’s former Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, to skirt lengthy deportation hearings and increased the number of Nazis it expelled from the U.S.
…
The deals allowed the Justice Department’s former Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, to skirt lengthy deportation hearings and increased the number of Nazis it expelled from the U.S.
…
Since 1979, the AP analysis found, at least 38 of 66 suspects removed from the country kept their Social Security benefits.

The Social Security Administration expressed outrage in 1997 over the use of benefits, the documents show, and blowback in foreign capitals reverberated at the highest levels of government.

Austrian authorities were furious upon learning after the fact about a deal made with Martin Bartesch, a former SS guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. In 1987, Bartesch landed, unannounced, at the airport in Vienna. Two days later, under the terms of the deal, his U.S. citizenship was revoked.

The Romanian-born Bartesch, who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1955, was suddenly stateless and Austria’s problem. Bartesch continued to receive Social Security benefits until he died in 1989.

Paul Shapiro, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, said the revelation that many received Social Security benefits even after removal was revealing.

“Beyond the undermining of American values that these people represented, as a group they gained leverage over government policy in critical areas relating to national security and immigration policy,” he said Monday. “And even decades later as they were forced to leave the country they continued to apply that leverage at the expense of the American taxpayer.”

Source (Mashable): Nazi War Criminals Collected Millions in Social Security Benefits

Given that the USA secretly supported the Nazi’s before WW2 (and many companies such as IBM and people such as Prescott Bush also supported them financially, materially & technologically during the war); it’s hardly surprising this would happen after the war.

Actually, the interesting thing for me is that this and the Snowden story show that there are still some capable journalists around. 🙂 There is a good article on how the AP discovered all this here:

How the AP busted Nazi suspects receiving Social Security payments

A shame journalists didn’t investigate this decades ago. *shrug*

7 Bryan { 12.13.14 at 8:50 pm }

Social Security is an insurance program – you pay in while you are working and get payments when you retire. There is no means testing or other checks other than whether you paid in and how much you paid. The money comes from the Social Security trust fund, not the taxpayers. If they paid in, there is no reason for them not to receive the money like any other person who paid in. There are a lot of Social Security recipients who have moved abroad and still receive their Social Security benefits.

The crime was not stopping them from entering the US in the first place, so they wouldn’t have been eligible for the Social Security program. This is another faux outrage Republican bill. They seem to forget when these people came into the US Eisenhower was President and Congress was in Republican hands. The government was so committed to being anti-Communist that they enlisted former Nazis to ‘combat the Soviet threat’.

8 ellroon { 12.14.14 at 2:17 am }

Yup, we had RAIN. And it was wonderful… for those whose houses weren’t changing addresses as they slowly slid down the hills. Supposed to get more next week!

Californians forget what it is like to drive in the first real rain of the season… so we do pirouettes through the intersections as all the oil rinses off of the roads. Apparently we just drive faster when anything weird like weather occurs. You should see us in the fog!…

9 Bryan { 12.14.14 at 10:12 pm }

I have never understood why so many houses in California are built on the edge of mesas or set into hillsides without any real soil analysis taking place.

I watched videos a few years ago of three houses down in San Diego county slide down a hillside and end up on the lot of a fourth at the bottom. The homes were built on fill dirt that wasn’t of the hillside and contained no root networks to hold it together. The rain apparently dropped through the fill and then flowed down the original slope along with the fill and the houses. This wasn’t a fire area, it was just bad site preparation. Lawns don’t have the necessary root structure to hold the soil in place.

If it wasn’t the rain, the houses would slide in an earthquake, so they were doomed when they were built.

The rain should help with the drought, but y’all really needed more of a snow pack than you got.

10 Badtux { 12.16.14 at 2:14 am }

Actually, anything built in the past 40 years in California has had soil analysis and foundation engineering out the wazoo. I looked into buying some land and building on it. Just the permitting and engineering fees would have been around $85K, of which a significant amount would be for the design and approval of an engineered grade beam foundation tied to bedrock to keep the house intact in an earthquake and keep it from sliding off the hill in the rain. That’s before the first drop of concrete hit the dirt and the first stick of lumber got delivered to the site.

The bad old days of houses built according to Libertarian principles (“we don’t need any of that permitting stuff, we’ll just build wherever and if our house ends up sliding down on top of your house in an earthquake, well, sucks to be you!”) are dead and gone in California. For better (the houses are *much* better built now and much safer too) and for worse (but they’re too expensive for anybody to afford). Sigh.

11 Bryan { 12.16.14 at 9:40 pm }

Actually, many of the houses built don’t exactly match the plans as permitted. I personally know of a case where the foundation as poured was several feet short of the foundation specified, and threats of law suits were needed to correct the problem. This is a major problem with contractors, too many of them cut corners to maximize profits, especially in large developments.

Yes, the permits and required studies are extremely expensive, so it would be nice if the resulting ‘gold plated’ house actually matched them after being built.