Free Republic

In addition to illegally trafficking in food stamps for years, Mohammad’s store operated illegally after the secretary of state canceled its business license in 2009 because of Mohammad’s failure to pay the business’s taxes. Store manager Ahmad Damra and clerk Mahmoud Jamil Damrah allegedly helped Mohammad defraud the SNAP and WIC programs for a total of approximately $780,710. Court records allege that the store traded customers’ WIC checks for a cash, allowing customers circumvent program restrictions on using taxpayer funding to purchase products such as beer and cigarettes.

Looking for a good paying job? Well, look no further. No, really, stop looking. In 35 states, welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job, according to a new study by the libertarian Cato Institute, and in 13 states welfare pays more than $15 per hour. “One of the single best ways to climb out of poverty is taking a job, but as long as welfare provides a better standard of living than an entry-level job, recipients will continue to choose it over work,” said Michael Tanner, senior policy analyst and co-author of the study. The study is an...

<p>That new face is a pina colada-sipping, lobster-loving lothario named Jason Greenslate.</p> <p>Greenslate, a 29-year-old La Jolla California surfer and musician who sings that he does not want a “mother**king job” and has “f**k no” guilt about living on $200 of what he calls “free money ” — or what the government called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits — while he avoids a job to hang out on the beach, sing and chase women.</p>

Let me put it this way, my jaw hit the floor. Earlier this week I was able to screen a portion of this Friday’s Fox News documentary “The Great Food Stamp Binge,” hosted by Bret Baier. It airs Friday at 10 p.m. and Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on the Fox News Channel. This investigation focuses on a federal program called SNAP, or "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program."

A Cadillac-driving OUI suspect — charged with running a Boston Globe delivery truck off Interstate 93 and onto the Leverett Connector — was carrying three EBT cards, mocked a cop “for paying for food when she gets it for free” and threatened to put a voodoo curse on him, according to a police report. “I questioned her as to why she had other peoples (sic) EBT cards and she 
began screaming that I was a ‘dumb (expletive)’ for paying for food when she gets it for free,” trooper William Koko­cinski wrote of Vivencia 
Bellegarde, 25, of Everett, noting she had...

Edwin Alemany is a career criminal and he had an EBT card. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The Mass. Republican Party got it right in a tweet yesterday. Not everyone with an EBT card is a criminal, but it appears that every criminal has an EBT card. Of course Gov. Deval Patrick would dismiss this as just another “anecdote.” Please don’t ask why the state is supporting a guy who has 10 convictions at age 28, not to mention 52 citations on his CORI record. His welfare records are sealed, you understand. Alemany has his rights, after...

Food stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout — with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.

Rebah Matheson, a friend on Facebook, recently sent me a picture of a display found at a Sam’s Club in Newport News, VA. The display is advertising Lt. Blender’s Cocktails in a Bag. The below video describes the product.

We've all seen it. The "poor" in line at our local shopping market paying for lobsters, or filet mignon with their EBT card. We hear reports of people using their welfare cards at strip clubs and buying liquor at liquor stores. The list of welfare fraud goes on and on. Welfare payments issued to recipients long after they were listed as dead. Multiple recipients using one Social Security number — and multiple Social Security numbers being used by one person. Electronic benefit cards from Massachusetts being used in places like Hawaii, Las Vegas, and the Virgin Islands. Tens of thousands...

Almost 80 percent of the Senate’s proposed farm bill — a $955 billion measure — will be used to pay for food stamps in the coming decade. “The trillion-dollar farm and food stamp bill should not be called the ‘Farm Bill,” said Heritage Action for America CEO Michael Needham, to Breitbart. “Washington doesn’t want Americans to know that 80 percent of the spending in the bill goes to fund Obama’s big-government, food stamp agenda.” As for the remaining 20 percent? That goes for price supports for farmers — an “equally disturbing” federal disbursement, Mr. Needham said, in the Breitbart report....

The next welfare scandal is going to be the huge balances on some of these EBT cards. Wait until the Department of Terrorist Assistance (DTA) finally coughs up how much money is on these cards. And yes, Gov. Deval Patrick, this is another one of those “anecdotes.” Last January a radio listener from Pittsfield sent me a receipt from a local convenience store. Some loafer had run up a tab of $3.28, so he whipped out an EBT card to pay for it. After paying his three bucks, he had $7,066.58 left on the card. I kid you not. Over...

This week the state Senate punted yet again on doing anything about the out-of-control EBT-card program, you know, the one that kept the Tsarnaev brothers in gunpowder and pressure cookers. During the annual budget debate, Sen. Robert Hedlund (R-Weymouth) proposed putting photographs on the EBT cards to perhaps slow the trafficking in them. Do you realize, he said, the gimme girls and guys “lose” 15,000 cards a year? The state’s motorists don’t misplace that many driver’s licenses in a year. “We know they are sold,” Hedlund said, “passed along.” The enablers used to say that the cost of photo IDs...

(Cartoon by Glenn Foden) Where do food stamps come from? They come from taxpayers—certainly not from family farms. Yet the “farm” bill, a recurring subsidy-fest in Congress, is actually 80 percent food stamps and other government nutrition programs. The food stamps sweeten the farm deal for lawmakers, who admit that the combination works for their political purposes. As Heritage experts Daren Bakst and Diane Katz explain: The food stamp portion creates a reason for urban representatives to support farm subsidies, and for farm-state lawmakers to support food stamps. Talk of de-politicizing agriculture programs and welfare policy is met with...

Tsarnaev family received $100G in benefits Monday, April 29, 2013 PrintEmail Comments (103) By: Chris Cassidy The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned. The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify. “The breadth of the benefits the...

BOSTON —State lawmakers have launched an investigation into whether the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings improperly received public benefits. The House Committee on Post Audit and Oversight is reviewing hundreds of documents collected from state agencies that may have provided benefits to the suspects or their families since 2002. Sources who have seen the 500 pages of documents sent to the House Committee on Post Audit and Oversight told News Center 5’s Janet Wu that the Tsarnaev family -- including the parents of the two bombing suspects, the two suspects themselves, their sisters, the widow of the suspect killed...

Who exactly do you represent? Gov. Deval Patrick dodges questions about how much welfare benefitsthe Chechen terrorists got from his state, citing their "privacy".- Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and his state agencies are refusing to release information on what government benefits Boston jihadist Tamerlan Tsarnaev received, following a national furor over reports he and his family received welfare. Their reason? It would violate the dead terrorist's right to privacy!That's right. Led by the stalwart Boston Herald, media entities pressed for info all day. Across the board, state agencies flatly refused to provide information about the taxpayer-funded lifestyle for the 26-year-old...

Marathon bombings mastermind Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Herald has learned.

The food stamp program in America is entirely out of control. What started off as a modest expense with the noblest of intentions has become a money-devouring system engulfed by fraud and waste....

According to the study, the current food stamp Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card industry is dominated by three main players: J.P. Morgan Electronic Financial Services, Affiliated Computer Services, and eFunds. Together they collect money from 49 states and three territories. In fact, since 2004, 18 of 24 states that contract with J.P. Morgan have paid more than $560 million to the financial monolith.

The video clip shown of a young woman discussing the ease of obtaining public assistance benefits in California and the use (and misuse) of those benefits via the state's EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) program. The woman shown in the video is LaToya Hicks, a "new R&B Pop artist." The clip is an excerpt from a longer interview in which Chapter discusses her life, her music, and the background of the characters and situations woven throughout the tracks on her album.