Re: Inside Mayor Adams' migrant debit card boondoggle - no-bid bank gets $50 million, border crossers up to $10, 000 each

[Deport !]

On 28 Mar 2022, Rafael <j...@gmail.com> posted some
news:t1ti72$38pqv$1...@news.freedyn.de:

> Lol! Fuck you starving Democrats who voted for this idiot.

It takes money to make money, as the old saying goes, and, apparently, it
also takes money — as much as $53 million — to give money away.

Earlier this month, The Post broke the story that Mayor Adams is giving
out pre-paid cash cards to migrants.

Unusually for the mayor, Adams didn’t publicize this story himself, and
his administration has for nearly a month failed to correct several public
misperceptions about it.

One misperception is that the program allows the city to give out just $50
million to migrants.

No wonder the mayor has been reticent.

This debit-card program — if you read the actual contract — has the
potential to become an open-ended, multi-billion-dollar Bermuda Triangle
of disappearing, untraceable cash, used for any purpose.

It will give migrants up to $10,000 each in taxpayer money with no ID
check, no restrictions and no fraud control.

Why give debit cards out?
When The Post exposed the mayor’s debit-card program earlier this month,
the mayor’s office spun it as a money-saving program, to solve a problem:
migrants staying in hotels don’t eat all their food.

DocGo, the city’s no-bid “emergency” contractor to provide migrants with
three meals a day, throws away up to 5,000 meals daily, wasting $7.2
million a year.

Some food is inedible — expired or rotten — and other food doesn’t meet
migrants’ dietary needs.

Providing mass-scale meals competently and with options for specific needs
— halal, kosher, vegan, non-gluten — isn’t that hard: the school system
does it, airlines do it, hospitals and jails do it.

It wouldn’t be that difficult for the city to solve this problem: on-site
city auditors could refuse to pay for meals that are objectively inedible,
with visible mold, for example, or with expired labeling.

Solving the old boondoggle with a new boondoggle
Instead of assuring that it’s existing no-bid “emergency” contractor
fulfills its duty to provide edible food, however, the Adams
administration has solved its problem by retaining a new no-bid
“emergency” contractor — to provide a service with far more scope for
waste, fraud, and abuse than stale sandwiches: giving out potentially
billions of dollars of hard cash, few questions asked.

Which vendors did the city’s Housing Preservation & Development consider
for this contract, as qualified to provide this complex financial service?

New York City is home to hundreds of top-tier financial-services and
public-benefits providers, a dream of a competitive bidding pool, to
ensure that the city gets a good price, as well as strong protections
against fraud and abuse.

But HPD considered only one: Newark-based Mobility Capital Finance, which
also has an office in Harlem.

MoCaFi was founded by Wole Coaxum, a former managing director at JPMorgan
Chase, who said the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014
inspired him to serve the “underbanked” and “narrow the racial wealth
gap.”

https://nypost.com/2024/02/19/opinion/inside-mayor-adams-migrant-debit-
card-boondoggle-no-bid-bank-gets-50-million-border-crossers-up-to-10000-
each/