How is this real?
Where is the money coming from?
Wall Street?
Nicole Gelinas writes for the New York Post:
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.
Seems reasonable enough.
After all, these Venezuelans are fleeing the brutal civil war in Syria.
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.
See: NYC: Invaders Reject Unhealthy American Food from Shelters, Prefer to Cook Rice and Meat
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.
American food doesn’t meet anyone’s dietary needs.
Fatmerican mutant scum just eat it anyway.
The invaders are a lot smarter than Fatmericans.
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.
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.
CASH, BABY.
MONEY TALKS.
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.
Since doing its migrant deal with MoCaFi, Adams has been content to allow a public misperception: that this program is small and focused, with 500 migrant families at the Roosevelt Hotel receiving debit cards of about $1,000 a month, allowing them to buy necessities at grocery foods and convenience stores.
Roosevelt Hotel isn’t a bad spot, frankly.
It’s hella better than the Chelsea.
But when I own the New York Times building, my guests are staying at the Chelsea.
As the mayor said in February in response to a press question, “we’re doing on a pilot project with 500 people.”
It’s easy to conclude — and the mayor has not disabused anyone of this thought process — that that’s how this will all cost $53 million or thereabouts, the headline figure reported in the press.
Nope. $1,000 a month for 500 families for a year — a good time frame for a pilot — would cost $6 million.
Yeah, that’s nothing.
We should give them a lot more.
The city could have written and signed a contract for about that amount — a contract that allowed for a well-defined pilot program with such well-defined costs, and a way to judge its results.
That’s not the contract the city signed — at all.
Most importantly: the $53 million headline figure is not the money that migrants will receive during the pilot.
This is the number that the vendor, MoCaFi, potentially will receive as its fee for services.
As the contract document clearly and explicitly states, over the year’s term, “in exchange for [MoCaFi’s] . . . performance of the services, the city shall pay to the contractor a total amount not to exceed $53 [million] . . . in accordance with the scope of services and fees.”
That “scope of services” does not include the money that the migrants actually receive on their debit cards.
The city funds the cards — that is, puts money on them — separately.
In other words: for a maximum of $53 million, MoCaFi issues blank Mastercards, in bulk.
That’s it.
The city may even issue debit cards to children: “if [cards] are to be distributed to any person under the age of 18 . . . the city . . . shall confirm that the minor cardholder’s parent or guardian has consented to the minor’s acceptance and use of the card.”
So, city employees and shelter contract workers are going to be in charge of handing out cards to be loaded and regularly refilled with untraceable cash, to people who have no forms of identity acceptable to the American financial-services system, under a program with no eligibility or verification policy.
I guess the question is whether all of this free money will make the invaders stop committing crimes, or just stock up on drugs and weapons and then start committing crimes on a much more extreme scale.
I know what I would do if I were them.
But I’m an asshole.
NEW: El Paso Texas Has Hotels Full Of Illegal Migrants, NONE Of Them Are From Mexico & They’re Flown All Over The Country
“They’re not Mexicans — They come in to the immigration center. They wait there for two days, they process them and then they bring them in vans over to the… pic.twitter.com/4bhU6tQUkf
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 17, 2024
Elvis Dunderhoff contributed to this article.