The Ongoing Normal: Taxpayer Fraud in L.A. Foster Care
Two reporters from the Los Angeles Times have just won a Pulitzer Prize column for their story on the ongoing corruption by the city of Bell California government officials and politicians.
Several members of this small city of mostly immigrants of limited wealth were paying themselves up to a million dollars a year. Part time Council members had to settle for several hundred thousand dollars, and the assistant controller was earning well over a half million.
Why bring this up here when our focus is on abused and neglected children in foster care?
Most of us recall the City of Bell story was gigantic. And for good reason. Individuals whose very job was to serve and protect the community instead profited off of it enormously. We found it disgusting, the obvious greed and contempt for their constituents who they most of thought of as pathetic sheep.
And it strikes a nerve, using our tax dollars to enrich themselves from innocent, decent, hard-working people, just trying to survive, make a life for themselves and their children, and basically, live their part of the American Dream.
So we must ask in our media outlets, why do we hear or read so little about the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars each year which are siphoned from money meant for abused and neglected children? Apathy? Racism? Cover-up? What don’t we get?
It is true, the author knows of no single individual in the Foster Agency system earning a million a year, but what about close to half that amount? Is that scandal enough for you?
What if the same individuals worked in their Foster Agency office infrequently, and rarely did any actual work despite the 6 figure salary that the modest population from the City of Bell could only dream of?
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