Beware the Rise of Scamerica

Robert E. Wright  – May 19, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

 

 

Scams, frauds, flim flams, and grifts are nothing new to America. In fact, confidence games were old hat when Clifton Wooldridge published his 1906 classic, The Grafters of America: Who They Are and How They Work, which describes common cons in fin de siecle Chicago. The recent death of notorious investment scamster Bernie Madoff should remind Americans that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

As America descends into policy disarray, the scamming of others is increasing. Wire fraud is rampant, as is the impersonation of government workers, apparently because Americans now expect government officials to accost them for quick cash at least occasionally. I focus here on a much more insidious type of scam that also seems to be on the rise, something that I will politely refer to as “substandard work,” but that in informal adult conversation usually goes by a fecal four-letter word followed by “job.”

Much of the substandard work being conducted across the country right now ultimately is the government’s fault, specifically a set of policies seemingly deliberately designed to induce Americans not to work: extra unemployment pay; major school systems remaining virtual until fall; bizarre summer camp masking requirements. The first entices lower income people to stay out of the labor market and the latter two make parents think twice, or thrice, about returning to work.

As a result, many usually reliable businesses cannot find any workers, much less good ones. Robin Jones, a regional manager for a major fast food chain in the Upper Midwest, recently told me that April and May of this year have been the tightest labor market he can remember in his 43-year restaurant career, which includes stints in Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. His back is giving out because his desk job has turned into a role as a stopgap line worker in the cheap taco wars. While he does what he can, he is only one man. The extreme dearth of workers means much longer wait times than usual and substandard service overall.

A restaurant in a resort town in New Jersey recently purchased a robot called Peanut to deliver food to customers. It reportedly “can open kitchen doors, deliver orders to tables, and bus the dishes when everyone is done eating.” It works until it breaks down and doesn’t demand tips.

The labor shortage is hardly restricted to food services. The pool business pictured below, for example, had a good reputation until recently, when it charged a friend of mine $260 to remove the cover from her pool. Just a regular cover. U.S. dollars, not Zimbabwean ones. Inflation is relatively high, but it ain’t that high! 

If the company had added some suddenly hyper-expensive chlorine to the pool, maybe it would have been okay but it appears the workers were inexperienced newbs flummoxed by simple problems. They removed and stored the cover successfully (bravo!) but couldn’t figure out how to get the pump pumping, got frustrated, and left. But they didn’t want to tell their new boss about their pathetic failure so they charged for the full spring opening service even though they didn’t provide it. 

Not so smart.

All manner of employee malingering and moral hazard appear to be on the rise because every low wage worker knows that they can get fired one morning but hired elsewhere that same day, usually at higher pay. Although full official statistics are available only through 2019, it appears that sexual harassment and other types of employment-related complaints have increased of late. 

 Some of the increase is due to stricter laws and enforcement and more awareness of workplace harassment issues but some may be due to employees hoping for a quick, lucrative settlement, confident that they will be able to find work elsewhere even if their claims are found meritless after investigation. Even remote workers are pressing harassment claims. Unwarranted harassment complaints are simply a more sophisticated type of pilfering than taking home office supplies or using Zoom rooms for personal use, which is also likely on the rise.

Unlike the hapless pool company described above, some companies deliberately overbill lots of their customers less flagrantly, in the hopes that many won’t notice or care enough to complain. When some inevitably ask for refunds, such companies stall repayment or simply credit customers on the next bill and thereby finagle free loans. Investment bank Morgan Stanley got spanked for overbilling in 2017 but if inflation increases nominal interest rates will rise along with it, or if lending tightens due to various new banking regulations now in the works, more companies may give in to the temptation of cheap short-term financing by overbilling.

Yet other companies with even deeper problems push boundaries between sharp business practices and outright fraud. They need to book business today or go under tomorrow and hence are unconcerned about bad reviews or negative publicity in the short run. 

One such company that I personally recently fell victim to is a long distance moving and storage broker based in America. A portion of my possessions eventually made the long trip from South Dakota to the east coast but pickup was two weeks late, which cost me dearly, and dropoff was delayed several times as well, which inconvenienced my poor, hard working spouse. 

Maybe some bad luck was actually involved but over the month it took to complete the job, the moving broker told me more half-truths than Fauci has about Covid. An industry insider revealed to me its original sin: when they get a mark, I mean customer, on the phone, they pretend like they have scheduled a pickup when in fact they have simply estimated when they expect to be able to sell the contract to a long-haul shipper, who then gets blamed for the inevitable delays.

Large, unexpected increases in the prices of inputs, from gasoline to timber, means that many construction contractors are also getting hit hard. They want to pass along the added costs, so owners need to watch out for “change order artistry,” sundry excuses contractors use to increase the contract price. When owners push back hard on change orders the contractor might not show up at all, or do substandard work/use substandard materials, so often it is better to negotiate a new price or not contract in the first place until some stability returns.

The recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline is more malicious than substandard work but the purported perpetrator, a shadowy group called DarkSide, claims to be a business that gives its “customers” incentives to improve their cybersecurity protocols. While the precise vector of the ransomware infection remains unknown or under wraps, Covid restrictions and/or the tight labor market is likely the root cause of the colossal cluster. As AIER’s Peter C. Earle pointed out last year, lockdowns make countries more vulnerable to attack and, as freezing Texans learned this past winter, more vulnerable to natural shocks as well.

Natural immunity and vaccines have scotched Covid, at least in the U.S. If only Americans would develop immunities against overreaching government! Right now, Uncle Sam is more likely to stab you in the back than to have your back. Scamerica will grift ever more fraudulently until government sheds its paternalistic mask and once again lets children be children, employers employ, innovators innovate, teachers teach, and workers work.

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Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.

He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019).

Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

Books by Robert E. Wright

BLM Is A Socially Exploitive Flim-Flam Machine

By Mychal Massie April 19, 2021 @ The Daily Rant

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a domestic terrorist group, that has done more to factually harm and promote the regressive rejection of modernity than Ku Klux Klan (KKK) did in an 86 year period, and that includes being responsible for the deaths of black people.  Over an 86-year period spanning from 1882 to 1968 there were 3,446 blacks lynched in America by the Democrat controlled terrorist group.

BLM exists to extort massive sums of money and blackmail corporate America into doing the bidding of the rabid demonic hordes holding elected office and the Satanic demigods existing in the political shadow world, who fund and dictate the actions of BLM et al.

Nothing that BLM has done or will do, benefits anyone apart from their leadership and the godless entities responsible for the terrorist organization’s existence.

They exist to advance a hybrid of Fabianism, Communism, and Marxism, which I identify as neo-Leninism.  They’ve seized upon the impotence of carven frightened Americans who fear the lost of their jobs and/or being socially disenfranchised.  They bastardize the rewards of hard work, two-parent homes, clean neighborhoods, good schools, and parents who raise their children to respect, the four foundational pillars of Americanism, i.e., God, family, law enforcement, and the military.

BLM has nothing to do with black lives or so-called black people to be perfectly honest.  BLM is a white neo-Leninist domestic terrorist organization that uses skin-color as the viscous substance that lubricates its anti-American and socially exploitive flim-flam machine.  BLM has just enough crayon color people in its power structure to be a flyspeck in a gallon of white milk.

Tangential to that, is the unimpeachable truth that BLM hates blacks and views them as useful idiots and pawns.  Only a person who identifies as an American and not some silly misassignation predicated upon melanin content will grasp said fact.

If you care about a people in the context of this opinion, you want the best for them.  The industrialized systematic extermination of blacks as advocated by Margaret Sanger, doesn’t convey care or concern for a people.  It does however; convey an unambiguous hatred for said people.

BLM leadership has made no secret of not identifying with any cause focused on what they reference as “urban violence.” As I have said many times: The absence of cogent nomological reasoning is the industrial counterpart of probable cause for this group and its proponents, i.e., if it’s white it must have some aspect of prejudice and inherent racism.  Which, if you’re not BLM or their supporters, one quickly realizes specifically defines BLM.

BLM isn’t about helping black people.  They are interested in using them to extort and blackmail corporate America and control legislators.  I offer in evidence the families of Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor.

At no time in American history have white supremacists burned down and/or instigated the burning down of entire neighborhoods in America.  But BLM has fomented racist animosity toward law enforcement and entire police departments; which led neighborhoods in New York, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Texas, California, Missouri, Maryland, California, Seattle, and numerous other cities nationally, even spreading the spores of their malcontent to cities around the world.

Even more striking is the observable fact that BLM rallies and protests are almost always massive gatherings of white students.  I’ve personally witnessed this fact in many small East Coast towns/boroughs.  The referenced protests took place in towns where blacks comprised less than a percent point of the total population, e.g., in Boyertown, PA, blacks comprise 0.03 percent of the total population; in Bangor, PA blacks comprise 0.50 percent of the population; Hellertown, PA is 98.20 percent white and 0.30 percent black; Pen Argyl, PA is 99.81 percent white and 0.01 percent black; Emmaus, PA is 95.89 percent white with a 0.70 percent black demographic.  I can tell you from personal observation that these rallies were almost exclusively white.  Even Quakertown, PA, which boasts a 1.20 percent black populace with 94.46 percent of the total population being white, held rallies in the center of town every Thursday evening and weekends for weeks were attended by school students everyone of whom white.

That’s not an accident. Not only do these facts confirm my assessment, but it further confirms that this disease is spread in miasmic classroom atmospheres and school systems in which the minds of young people are destroyed.

Here again, I challenge every part of Christendom where the truth of God’s Word is still preached, taught, and believed to step up.  We will never be able to fully eradicate this pernicious evil, but true Christendom can step up and begin evangelization efforts by utilizing private Christian schools and homeschooling to reach those in the Erebusic indoctrination centers where the inexorable brainwashing of the malleable minds of children is taking place.

Our children must be rescued from indoctrination centers that social decline; promote abortion, historical revisionism, i.e., historical lies, the acceptance of sexual abominations such as transgenderism and homosexuality.  That won’t happen unless/until the Christian Church embraces Christ’s great commissionto believers.

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About the Author

Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here.

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Why Environmentalism Became Both a Religion and a Con Game

October 7, 2016 By Chet Richards @ American Thinker  

I am a Conservationist.  I am not an Environmentalist.  What?  Aren’t the two the same thing No, they are not. In fact the two movements are diametrically opposed. John Muir was a Conservationist, not an Environmentalist.  He saw the wilderness as a “primary source for understanding God: The Book of Nature.”  Muir did not worship Nature, as modern environmentalists do. Muir worshiped God, the Judeo-Christian God.  So, here is the difference: Conservation derives from the Hebrew Bible. Mankind is to be Stewards of the Land.  We are charged to husband God’s creation.

Environmentalists, for the most part, believe that the Earth’s biosphere is God. And, that human beings are destructive parasites, eating away at the life of their deity. In effect, most environmentalists are atheists searching for something larger than themselves to worship. But environmentalists see themselves as not being the riff-raff parasites that the rest of mankind are. Environmentalists believe they are the elect, the knowing, the superior beings, the priests, the Gnostics.

This notion that people are parasites really got started in the 1960’s. A couple of highly promoted bad actors started this environmental heresy. The first was Rachel Carson with her hysterical polemic about DDT and its purported harm to birds and other wild life. Her ideas proved to be, at best, problematic, but millions of people have died as a consequence of the resulting international banning of DDT. The second, and even more dangerous, problem child was Paul Ehrlich. This curmudgeon has even greater responsibility by amplifying environmental hysteria. Ehrlich should have known better. After all, he is a biology professional. But his mistakes suggest that he may not be all that professionally gifted.

Ehrlich predicted the death of the oceans due to insecticides and other chemicals washing into the sea. He did not account, as he ought to have, for the rapid evolution of plankton to adapt to these foreign substances. (The smaller the organism the faster its evolution – witness antibiotic resistance.) It was a bonehead mistake that no competent evolutionary biologist should make. More famously, Ehrlich predicted mass famine and hundreds of millions of deaths within a few years because of the so-called “population bomb.” He completely ignored the 1960’s technological “Green Revolution” which today has China and India exporting food. And, he completely missed the natural reduction in birth rates, and the consequent leveling of population, as the standard of living of Third World countries increased. Again, that process was something that population experts already knew and understood.

And then came James Lovelock with his “Gaia Hypothesis.” This is the notion that the biosphere is an environment-regulating ensemble of living organisms. In the large, the biosphere, together with its non-organic matrix, could be considered an organism, itself. The idea is interesting. Indeed, it has proven to be scientifically fruitful.

But other people latched onto the biosphere and made Gaia a god. And, with it, made environmentalism a religion. A religion, which Lovelock himself rejects as misinformed – if not dangerous. Lovelock went through his hysteric period in the early years of the ecology mania, but he has since moderated his outlook now that his predictions of imminent environmental doom have proved unfounded.

Why do people do it? Why do they fall into these overblown quasi-religious enthusiasms? I speculate that there are three complementary reasons: Ignorance, Insecurity and Hubris.

Ignorance: Back in the ‘60’s I was a graduate student in physics at one of the University of California campuses. One day I had the opportunity to sit and chat, at length, with one of our leading ecologists. Naturally, I was curious about some aspects of the so-called ecology movement that Rachel Carson had engendered. Much to my surprise, in response I received a long rant about this movement. This eminent scientist was scathing in his comments -- particularly about the sheer ignorance of the movement’s devoted followers. “Not one of them,” he said, “has even heard of a logistic equation, much less predator-prey relationships.” He concluded that harangue by dismissing the movement as nothing but political manipulation of less than astute people. Nothing much has changed since then. The true believers still believe without understanding. Environmentalism is a religion after all.

Insecurity: Most everyone is insecure about something – about many things, perhaps. Long established religions have traditionally provided a framework for ordering one’s life and for reducing this natural sense of insecurity. As we have discovered, there is something about the post World War Two world that has, at least in the West, broken these traditional religious frameworks. Something happened during the war to cause people to no longer trust religious authority. Perhaps it was the sheer evil that was manifest and undeniable during those years of horror. The Cold War amplified that developing sense of insecurity. People started looking for something new to believe in – something that, once again, would provide spiritual tranquility.

The environmental movement seemed to provide the needed solace. Emotional peace may be given through participation in something larger than oneself. But, I note that few of the true believers, being mostly city dwellers, have any real experience of the wilderness.

For those who have experienced it, the gift of wild nature can induce spiritual grace. John Muir felt it. I have felt it. I have felt it in many lonely places around the world. I have been changed by it. I have felt this spiritual tranquility on remote white water rivers, on mountain glaciers, while hiking across Muir’s Sierras, when diving to narcosis depths of the sea, while surfing imposing waves. But Nature didn’t care what I was experiencing, what I was feeling. Nature is utterly indifferent. Nature is dangerous. A momentary lapse in the wilderness and Nature will likely kill you. There is no empathy in Nature. No intelligence. No awareness. Nature is not a caring god. Nature is not even a god. Nature just is. Gaia just is. My companions on these many excursions were savvy, alert, and extremely cautious. Despite some very close calls, we survived. That said, we always sacrificed to the River God before putting in!

Hubris: In the early years of Christianity there were Gnostics. These were Christians who claimed special knowledge about Jesus and what he really taught. Gnosticism eventually was suppressed. Its followers were rejected from the Christian community, in part because of their smug, arrogant, airs of intellectual superiority. While Christian Gnosticism may have died out, the type of people who adopt Gnostic superciliousness remain all too common. In the first half of the twentieth century Marxism was their fashion, and still remains so with a Globalist twist. In the second half, the Gnostics adopted Environmentalism. Doing so made them into superior beings, don’t you know.

Unfortunately, Gnostics are easy marks for the con. A skilled confidence man knows that the best way to hook a victim is through the victim’s vanity. The environmental movement is a con. Its leadership preys on the ignorance, insecurity, and hubris of its followers.

The environmental con takes many forms. In recent decades man-caused global warming is the con game. That scare was deliberately manufactured in the 1980’s. Its purpose was, and is, to cripple the US economy, foremost, and the economy of Western Europe secondarily. This program has had considerable success. Many have bought into the con and the economy is hurting. In particular, some who have knowingly promoted the con are politicians who seek to accumulate power and wealth. Using the scare tactic of climate runaway, stupendous resources have been wasted on misguided attempts to reduce carbon dioxide: solar power, wind power, alcohol fuels, suppression of coal, gas, oil and nuclear energy production. Millions of jobs have been lost through unneeded environmental regulations. Fortunately, Nature did not cooperate with the conmen and politicians. The world did not heat up, as predicted. Belief in global warming is rapidly diminishing, as it should.

But there is always another con, and each new con means further loss of freedom. For half a century the environmental movement has been the primary tool of those leaders who wish to suppress individual freedom and individual initiative. The erosion has been slow, but it has been steady. Most adults, today, have never experienced the freedom that I, and others of my cohort, once enjoyed. Not having that experience they simply don’t know what they are missing. Consequently, they are easily preyed upon by those who would impose further restrictions – for the benefit of mankind, of course. It’s a con: Trade your freedom for a better environment. Trade your freedom for a sense of security. Trade your freedom for a belief that you are doing good by protecting the environment. Trade your freedom for a sense of moral superiority. Trade your freedom and then live in poverty. That’s all right, say the Gnostics, people are parasites, they get what they deserve.

Poverty: There is the source of real irony. True care for the environment, true care for nature, is a rich man’s game. Only the prosperous have the resources to protect the natural world. Only those living in comfort believe that it matters. Only those with wealth – the middle class and more - can be stewards of the land. Impoverish America and the land will be despoiled.

Poor people care little for Nature. Poor people struggle just to live. They don’t have time for environmental diversions. The environmentalist con takes away freedom and replaces it with diminished prosperity. Carried far enough, political environmentalism ultimately will drive people into impoverished serfdom and, with the greatest irony of all, it will wreck the environment.

The Big COVID Con Exposed

September 2, 2020 By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

One of the great grifter movies, aside from the Clinton and Obama presidencies, is The Sting. Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford} team up, “to pull off a complicated scheme known simple as the Big Con,” a racket to crush Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and his empire.

We have had several iterations of the Big Con over the past four years, with Gondorff and Hooker played by a rotating cast including James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. All schemed and conspired to destroy Donald Trump and his family and presidency.

The latest sequel features Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx as the grifters and swindlers, using the Chinese coronavirus as the Big Con to keep President Trump from winning a second term in the White House. In the movie, the con succeeded but in Washington D.C., the con-verse is happening, with the schemes blowing up in the faces of the deep state grifters..........The new CDC statistics show that only 6,640 deaths are due to COVID alone, rather than the commonly reported 164,280 deaths allegedly associated with COVID. In other words, only 4 percent of media sensationalized deaths were due solely to COVID and not other underlying medical conditions...........To Read More....