April 17, 2019: Maybe Our Biggest Crisis Isn't Along the Border

 

4/17/19: GE has agreed to pay a $1.5 billion fine stemming from fraudulent subprime loans issued in 2005-2007, by WMC Mortgage, a GE subsidiary. According to the Justice Department, “Investors, including federally insured financial institutions, suffered billions of dollars in losses” as a result of WMC’s illegal practices. 

This proves again that giant corporations need gigantic tax breaks and government regulations are an abomination. 

None of the top executives at WHC Mortgage had to face criminal charges, of course, or worry about going to jail. By comparison, Ryan Seibert, 22, was sentenced to seven years in prison for robbing a bank near Dayton, Ohio in 2015. 

His take: $10,000. 

 

NOT-SO-FUN-FACT: The Department of Justice recently indicted 31 doctors, eight nurse practitioners, seven pharmacists, and seven other licensed medical professionals, and charged them with prescribing opioids in return for cash and sex. In one case, a dentist allegedly pulled patient’s teeth, in order to prescribe the highly addictive drugs. An estimated 32 million pills were needlessly dispensed. 

A couple of examples from a story in the Washington Post should suffice:

 

In Alabama, a doctor allegedly recruited prostitutes and other young women to become patients at his clinic and allowed them to use drugs at his home, prosecutors said. …

 

Prosecutors allege that a doctor in Kentucky prescribed pain killers to his Facebook friends who would come to his home to pick up their prescriptions in exchange for cash.

 

Proof again that a big, beautiful border wall won’t solve this country’s biggest drug problems. 

And maybe it’s not just undocumented immigrants sneaking across the border who want to kill us all. (See: 4/18/19.)

Border wall: Going Up!

 

NOT-SO-FUN-FACT #2: Recently, Team Trump, deported the spouse of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving the couple’s 12-year-old daughter – an American citizen – high and dry in Phoenix. 

Jose Gonzalez Carranza, 30, was picked up by ICE on his way to his welding job and then deported to Mexico. 

Gonzalez Carranza was married to Army Pfc. Barbara Vieyra, killed in 2010, while serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. 

This bone-headed decision was promptly reversed, and Gonzalez Carranza and his daughter were reunited.