Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio.
At the end of the third hour, Carmichael cites two articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Free Beacon exampling fraud and broken government in California. His point was later made that in truth, what California has succeeded in doing is that it has managed to abuse small businesses and in particular those within the Black and Hispanic communities.
Leahy: Crom Carmichael the original all-star panelist in the studio. Crom during the break we were talking about California. What’s going on with California?
Carmichael: Well, there are two interesting stories in about California. One from The Wall Street Journal and the other can’t figure out where it’s from but I think it is from The Washington Free Beacon. And the one from The Wall Street Journal is California’s had two billion dollars in benefit frauds. And this is in unemployment benefits.
Leahy: Two billion dollars. Yikes!
Carmichael: Two billion dollars. And the scale of the fraud is according to the Bank of America which contracted with the state to issue the debit cards who identified two billion dollars in suspicious activity. In October, federal authorities arrested a Los Angeles rapper for allegedly stealing identities to swipe one point two million in federal jobless benefits. How did they catch him? The rapper flaunted his heist in a music video. He posted it on YouTube in which he held up a stack of pre-loaded debit cards and said ‘you got to sell cocaine, I just got a file a claim.’
Leahy: How stupid is this guy? Brazen.
Carmichael: Brazen. Yes. And then there was a 140 million in benefits have been paid in the name of 20,000 state prisoners including 133 on death row. Now that doesn’t mean the prisoners are committing fraud. It means people are just finding a database of people in prison and using their names. And that’s how lacks the controls are.
Leahy: I heard about this in other states, by the way.
Carmichael: This is not just California. And this is why when I say that the Democrat Party is the party of government in the states where this is happening this type of thing is happening. It is in California. It is Illinois. It is in New York. It is in New Jersey. Now, what is the Democrat Party in Washington holding hostage for the COVID relief package?
They want hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to go to these individual states to shore up their pension plans and their health care plans that are completely out of whack because the Democrats who control those states have voted to give benefits to government employees that they cannot fund. And now they are underwater.
And once again, you have small business people which is what the COVID relief is supposed to help, the Democrats are holding small business people hostage unless the Republican party in Washington will capitulate and pay hundreds of billions for the sins of the bad government. Now when you pay hundreds of billions to pay for their sins, it just means they can do it again.
And they will because they haven’t stopped the practice. And then in California, I read an article and this was one in The Washington Free Beacon where the California taxpayers have shelled out 1.7 million dollars in payments to a guy named Meng Yu who is the former Chief Investment Officer of CalPERS is the government employee union out there. And he’s under investigation by the federal government because he has invested so much of California’s pension money in Chinese companies. But yet he was the highest-paid.
Leahy: Wasn’t he a Chinese national before he came to America?
Carmichael: He might have been. I don’t know. I don’t know. But what I do know is that he was rewarded by the government of California and ended up with a package of one point seven million dollars. And that also is in California. And these are things that I just I don’t know what we as a country and when the government and the institutional constraints of bad government and COVID have broken all the constraints.
Has just broken all the constraints. Tennessee is Tennessee has navigated very well. The Republican-run states have by and large navigated very well. Texas, Florida, Tennessee South Dakota. The states that have Republican legislators and then-Republican Governors have fared very well in COVID compared to those that are controlled by democrats.
Leahy: A state ethics investigation will examine whether former California Public Employee Retirement System’s CIO Ben Meng. That’s this guy’s name. Yu Ben Meng.
Leahy: Interesting.
Carmichael: He’s the former Chief Investment Officer. So you may be talking about another person. But this is the former Chief Investment Officer. I think he may go by two names. Ben Meng and Yu Meng.
Carmichael: Well CIO would be the same for either one. Chief investment or chief information. So at any rate, the focus I’m trying to make here on California is how they have abused their small business people. And most of the small business people they’ve abused are Black and Hispanic small business people. And a lot of them are Asian business people. And Gavin Newsom does not care about the small business people because they’re not the ones who support him.
Leahy: Here’s the story from Chief investment Officer the magazine. ‘Before starting at Sacramento-based CalPERS, Meng worked from 2015 to 2018 as deputy CIO of the China State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Meng, an American citizen who was born in China was one of the top officials in charge of managing China’s three trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves.’
Carmichael: China’s?
Leahy: China’s. Before he got the job. Born in China. An American citizen first then worked for China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange. And then went from there to being the CIO apparently of CalPERS
Carmichael: And China really would like to take over our country and turn us into a vassal state. Not by doing anything belligerent in the sense of sending an army, but just by simply taking over the government with allies within the American government.
Leahy: Crom, it seems to be a work in process as we speak.
Carmichael: Yes. And they are spending tens of billions of dollars every year doing that.
Leahy: And it’s going to a doing that under a potential Biden administration by a long shot.
Carmichael: Yep.
Leahy: I wish we had something more optimistic to say Crom, but we’re being honest about the state of our country now.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.Â
