Personally I think the US government wastes enough on nonsense so I’m not really bothered. Plus if you look at most wealthy people in the USA they got that way through scamming and crime. I wish I knew how to get money like that.

  • MNByChoice@midwest.social
    6·
    5 hours ago

    Local news covered it in MN. Multiple of the identified day cares were inspected this year. A few haven’t had licenses are not known to be operating. (All daycares are inspected annually.) No one knows what the fuck the YouTuber is on about, and they did not share any methodology. (I.E. Could have filmed over a weekend. No one knows.)

    Edit: Daycares are now being broken into and records of children stolen.

  • r0ertel@lemmy.world
    3·
    7 hours ago

    I used to care but as it became a political tool, it became too much effort to care.

    As far as i know, the only exposure is in Minnesota, but that can’t be the only place that these federal dollars were being misused. It smells funny.

    The journalist you’re probably referencing is a YouTuber/influencer and has no journalistic credentials that I can find. It feels like an opportunistic popularity grab. Strike 2.

    I read that the guy making the video was invited to produce a piece by a possible candidate for governor, opposing Gov. Walz. This tells me that it’s now a political advertisement and has lost any credibility and I don’t care enough to fact check everything,so I’ve stopped paying attention.

    The whole thing bothers me. I don’t like it when people don’t follow the rules. Right now, it’s too hard to know the truth, so I’m closing my eyes. There’s enough other stuff to be upset about in life.

  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    7 hours ago

    I think the ethnicities behind the crime are why it’s been so widely covered and propagandized, more than the crime itself. I don’t think it would be hard to imagine how the media would have treated it had it been all white people. This would have been a one and done story at the national level, if not completely relegated to local news.

    I don’t think it’s contradictory to both condemn the crime itself while also calling out the media’s fixation on this specific crime while conveniently ignoring many others. The crime itself is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, especially considering how much tax money gets embezzled by much more powerful (and white dominated) organizations and government agencies every single day, but the media fixation because they’re sCaRy FoReIgNeRs is systemic and much more of a threat.

    • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      There’s multiple parts.

      First there was a massive pandemic relief fraud. A bunch of people exploited programs meant to feed kids, because those programs had relaxed checks during the pandemic. The main organization here is “Feeding our Future” who helped various individuals fraud the government.

      Basically they claimed to be serving millions of meals to kids, with fabricated invoices/etc.

      In exchange for Feeding our Future helping individuals with the fraud, they required kickbacks from the individuals. A lot of this money was used to buy real estate, especially in Kenya and Turkey (which makes it very difficult to recover the money).

      Not everyone involved was Somali, be the majority of the people charged were part of the same Somali-american community.

      Recently it was found out that some similar fraud was happening with Somali run daycares. They were getting millions in subsides, while having few to no children present at the daycares.

      Tim Walz and the Department of Education are being criticized over various parts of how they handled it. The Minnesota Department of Education had warnings about the fraud as early as 2018, but ignored them. Later on they asked the Feeding Our Future to investigate themselves for fraud (which obviously didn’t work).

      When the pandemic meal fraud was discovered in 2021, the MDE decided to continue payments to the fraudsters because they claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to win in court. Tim Walz later claimed a judge forced them to continue payments, but the Judge released a statement saying that was a lie. There’s some speculation that Walz was originally trying to avoid it going to court to avoid it being a big scandal.

      Finally when Walz did announce the fraud, he framed it as a success that they caught these people, even though it had gone on for years and huge amounts of money had already been stolen.

    • Lorfan@lemmy.worldOP
      24·
      10 hours ago

      A journalist uncovered massive contracts for daycare facilities going to somalis that ended up being fraudulent. Some of them were worth billions of dollars.