Mammon category archive

If you think reverse mortgages sound too good to be true, you’re probably right.

Afterthought:

It is probably wise to be skeptical of deals hawked by retired ex-Law & Order stars who have run for the Republican Presidential nomination. That Republican Presidential nomination thing is a dead giveaway.

That is, underhanded and below-board.

Blair Thornburg says the buyer of land he co-owned near Clover, S.C., told him that he was going to put a house on the property for his son.

Bill Dulin says the same buyer told him he planned to use land he bought from him for hunting or catfish farming.

So both were surprised when Martin Marietta Materials, the Raleigh-based mining company, last year confirmed it was looking to operate a granite quarry on their former property and nearby parcels in the Bowling Green community north of Clover.

Instead of keeping the land himself, the buyer, a Clover man named Kenneth Smith, had instead sold the land to Martin Marietta. Quarry opponents suspect the company worked with Smith to buy the land so sellers and neighbors would not be alerted to plans for the property.

(This caught my eye because my mother grew up in Clover.)

Dan Simpson finds a common thread in some recent topics in the news. A snippet.

What is at the core of these three chronicles? The answer is money.

These are all rich people — Sepp Blatter and the FIFA gang of thieves, Dennis Hastert and the people he lobbied for, and Petra Nemcova and the three-headed Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. They also think they can do whatever they like because they have all that money

My friend was in a local drug store the other day and, even though she was well behind the HIPPA “the line starts here” sign, heard the pharmacist telling a customer, there to pick up pills for her daughter, that her insurance company didn’t cover the medicine. When asked how much the medicine would cost, the pharmacist replied, “$1,000.”

The customer replied, stunned, “For four pills?”

It just keeps getting scammier and scammier.

They aren’t who you think they are, as The Bangor Daily News explains. A snippet (emphasis added):

Over the last five years, judges have ordered nearly $951,000 in restitution from recipients who defrauded benefits programs, or about $190,000 a year. During the same time, the state has recovered nearly $61 million in state and federal money from providers for Medicare fraud, or more than $12 million a year.

Following the money, the focus should be on provider fraud, not demonizing individual recipients of benefits.

“We shouldn’t ignore eligibility fraud,” (Maine–ed.) Attorney General Janet Mills said last year. “We shouldn’t ignore recipient fraud; we shouldn’t ignore any allegations that somebody is getting state or federal benefits who isn’t really eligible for them, but the big fish are the corporations, the major pharmaceutical companies and the providers that have been ripping off the state Medicaid program for years to the tune of millions of dollars.”

Think about that the next time you see one of those commercials for something you probably don’t need at a price which goes unstated along with assurances that it’s “covered by Medicare.”

A parable in pictures at Job’s Anger.

In the light of recent events, in which a few black looters in Baltimore were designated “thugs,” while many not-black bikers trying to kill each other in Waco were designated “overly-enthusiastic partisans,”* Tony Norman struggles to understand the meaning of the word “thug.” Here’s a bit; read the rest (emphasis added):

So a few pundits rushed to call these bikers “thugs,” too, though there was some hairsplitting about that by the most incorrigible racists. After all, while the scene contained nine deaths and the presence of 118 handguns, an AK-47, 157 knives and 43 miscellaneous weapons, nobody was arrested for looting — which somehow makes these losers superior to the “thugs” in Baltimore.

From what I can tell from this arbitrary distinction, the act of looting is what qualifies a person for designation as a thug. . . .

That’s why I was puzzled by an article in Thursday’s Post-Gazette that failed to identify as thugs four major banks that admitted looting the world’s global exchange markets between 2007 and 2013.

___________________

*Okay, so I exaggerated a wee bit, but only a wee bit.

After all, what could possibly go wrong?

. . . researchers took air samples in Carroll County, Ohio, where there are 480 permitted wells – the most in any of the state’s 88 counties. The team found chemicals released during oil and gas extraction that can raise the risk of cancer and respiratory ailments.

Warning: Taste.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Ken Eisold explores the workings of oligarchy. A snippet:

C.E.O.s actually form a club, a tight-knit oligarchy, and in that group there is only one measure of success. C.E.O.s know where they stand relatively to each other, and they want to be treated with respect. For one thing, many of them sit on the boards that determine the salaries of other C.E.O.s, and the boards make a point of knowing what the “standards” are. They may actually believe that compensation works as an incentive, but it’s probably more a matter of playing by the rules and being “appropriate” and “fair” to members of their group – in that rarefied world.

But there is another factor: the status and power of the oligarchy depends on large sums of money required to sustain their social position. In paying each other such immense sums, they are also ensuring the continuation and power of their class.

They must needs water their lawns, come hell or high water, and high water doesn’t seem to be an option.

The water district serving Morada (in Cali’s San Jaoquin Valley–ed.) is so small that a handful of savvy homeowners have preserved their $126 monthly water rate by using an obscure provision of a nearly two-decade-old statewide ballot measure to challenge and block any increases. They’re paying less than many homeowners in nearby cities, while using eight times as much water as the county average.

“These are estate-size lots, and it takes a lot of water to keep that much grass green,” said Morada resident Ed Schroeder, 72, a retired hospital executive. “If we switch to meters and everyone lets their lawn go, it will change this whole neighborhood.”

God forbid that the public good take precedence over their front yards.