In the news is “…a scheme that involved exchanging government SNAP benefits for cash at a discount, selling ineligible items like liquor and beer, and even profiting from “MannaPacks”—humanitarian rice meal packs intended for global aid, which were sold for $8 each. Undercover operations confirmed the fraud, with agents witnessing cash trafficking and noting that the stores generated minimal legitimate revenue. That wasn’t some petty scam; it was part of a massive fraud ring run by Haitian nationals in Boston. At the same time, another scheme operated by Yemeni nationals in New York was busy pulling off a similar heist. Combined, these criminal enterprises are charged with stealing a staggering $27 million in taxpayer-funded food stamps. And that’s just what we know about so far. This isn’t a story about a few bad apples. This is organized crime, plain and simple. Federal authorities say the Boston ring allegedly used comically small convenience stores—we’re talking glorified closets—to launder an incredible $500,000 in SNAP benefits every single month. That’s more than six times what a typical large supermarket processes. Over in Brooklyn, it was the same story, different cast. Yemeni nationals were indicted for a racket that vacuumed up $20 million, using fake and stolen EBT cards from at least ten different states. If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same playbook we saw with the massive welfare fraud indictments of Somali nationals in Minnesota. This is a systemic attack on America’s welfare system.” Is this more than ordinary criminality?

It is telling, from the large-scale and widespread nature of such events in multiple states across the nation, that something big is underway here. It is not simply that a large percentage of the American population are criminals and will quickly engage in subterfuge to defraud the government to create personal wealth. This is a carefully orchestrated corruption of many individuals, causing them to engage in widespread repeated acts of wrongdoing and to suppress the fear of consequences so they can be egged on to grow their nefarious enterprises to as great a degree as possible. All such manipulations take a toll on the nation in causing money to flow to the interlopers and their minions and away from regular taxpayers, thereby increasing debt levels, raising prices, and distorting society by misdirecting people into wrongdoing instead of productive paths of self-reward that also contribute to a growing economy. It is one of the many ways they manipulate things to divide and conquer. Every individual they corrupt will end up corrupting others. No nation can survive once it reaches a tipping point with respect to ongoing illegal diversions of money intended for the general welfare. So it is a quite meaningful symptom of the US being on a slippery slope in what is a downward spiral of corruption and degradation that can easily worsen catastrophically, if unchecked.