Wednesday - December 11, 2019

I think it was the way to DC

$3 Million In Cash Found In Pork Barrels Headed To Mexico

Deputies found $3 million in cash hidden in barrels of raw pork meat on Saturday when they pulled over a tractor-trailer driving south on Interstate 85, according to the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina.

“The Sheriff’s Office has reason to believe that the money was headed to the U.S./Mexico border and also believe that the money was a result of drug sales throughout the region,” according to a news release.

The driver, whom deputies described as a Hispanic man, was stopped for “failure to maintain lane control and impeding the flow of traffic,” the release states.

Illegal pork barrel money? Oh the irony.

Posted by Drew458     on 12/11/2019 at 03:26 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Politics • Porkbusters •  
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   Monday - October 06, 2008

The bacon was taken into custody. . .

I like that headline better than the one the Dayton Daily News chose:

Porcine scare clears Boehner’s West Chester office

See, I’m betting that many Daytonians, being drop-outs graduates of the Dayton public schools, don’t know what ‘porcine’ means. My headline is easily understandable to the average Daytonian, who not only was likely also taken into custody recently, but understands the word ‘bacon’. (Well, the ones that can read. . .)

I do know what ‘porcine’ means, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it in this context. Did a herd of swine invade Boehner’s office? (Maybe looking for ACORNs?) Yeah, guess I’ll have to read the dreaded Dayton Daily Democrat News:

HAMILTON — A package of low-sodium bacon triggered the evacuation of House Minority Leader John Boehner’s West Chester office on Monday, Oct. 6, after staff going through the mail became suspicious of oily residue leaking from a package.

Worried that the residue was evidence of some sort of attack, staffers contacted the Washington, D.C., office and Capitol police about 3:30 p.m.

The four staffers in the West Chester office were evacuated a half-hour later, according to Jessica Towhey, a Boehner spokeswoman.

Police, local fire officials and the Butler County hazardous material team were called to the office at 7969 Cincinnati-Dayton Road.

After two X-rays of the package were inconclusive, officials took the package out back and opened it, only to find it was bacon.

The bacon was taken into custody.

Definitely a better headline. But what a waste of bacon! If you are going to send pork to a congressman to make a political statement, at least send something useless, like pork rinds.

Then again, it was low-sodium bacon. (yuk!) Come to think of it, I’ve a #10 can of rancid lard I could send to, say, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi for that rancid, pork-laden bailout last week.

Mmmm, bacon!

Posted by Christopher     on 10/06/2008 at 09:58 PM   
Filed Under: • Fun-Stuff • Porkbusters •  
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   Tuesday - April 10, 2007

I Gots Dem 1040 Blues

Booooo! It’s time for our Annual 1040 Taxation Without Representation Party™. This Sunday is April 15 so that means .... you don’t have to file taxes yet because it is a Sunday. That, of course, means that next Monday, April 16 is ... still not the deadline for paying your taxes. No, the deadline this year is one week from now - Tuesday, April 17. Wanna know why? Here is the scoop from the IRS Official Shakedown Site ...

“Emancipation Day”. “Patriots Day”. Yeah, that would be too much irony for the annual Fleecing Of The Flock, wouldn’t it? Flock it! I filed my return back in February, did it electronically and had my refund automagically deposited in my bank account a week later. The rest of you nappy-headed taxpayers better get busy writing out checks so the Demoncrat ho’s in Congress can have their pork. Pork: the other green meat.

_{Brian Fairington - Cagle Cartoons}

Why Spring Taxes Me
-- By Tom Purcell

I hate spring. I hate the sunny weather and chirping birds and neighbors smiling and humming, while they spread mulch in their planters.

I hate the buds on the trees and the sweet smell in the air. I hate the way the sun falls gently over the hills at dusk.

I hate everything about spring, because I’m self-employed.

Every year this time I’m a nervous wreck about my taxes. I worry that I’ll owe more than I think I will, and I will. I worry that I’ll not get everything organized and tallied up for my accountant in time, and it’s always close.

This is because our income tax system is complex. It is complex because drunk people (members of Congress) designed it so that a bureaucracy (the IRS) will convert the incomprehensible into the unfathomable (the tax code) in order to punish productive Americans (the self-employed) all in the name of good fun.

To comply with our onerous tax rules, I have developed a highly effective accounting technique: the Big Box Methodology. From the beginning of January through the end of December, I toss every bill, receipt, expense, etc. into a big cardboard box.

Every year, I am forced to organize and tally every one of these items, so that I can document my business expenses. I must document my business expenses to accomplish what every self-employed person hopes to accomplish: to have earned as little income as possible the year before.

I was in a mighty struggle with Big Box during the winter. He kept calling out to me, pleading with me to get things in order. But I ignored Big Box. I ignored his unreasonable demands week after week, and the more I ignored him, the more worried I got.

As spring neared, I began taking Big Box with me. When I went away for the weekends, I put him in my trunk. I had high hopes of using my weekend breaks to organize every slip of paper into a brilliant rendition of how much I earned and spent in 2006, but I did not.

No, I did the same thing this year I do every year. I waited until the last few weeks before taxes are due. Despite the recent cold snap, I know what every self-employed person knows: the weather will break big this week.

As the sun shines and the world comes to life, I’ll get calls from beautiful women who want to spend time with me. I’ll be offered box-seat tickets to baseball games, invitations to cookouts, requests to partake in fun and frivolity of every kind.

But I will turn them all down.

I will turn them down because of Congress. When members of Congress passed the 16th Amendment into law in 1913, they made the income tax deadline March 1. But in 1955 Congress pushed the deadline to April 15.

They did this so helpless American taxpayers would have more time to organize and file their taxes? Ha, ha. No, they did it to give the IRS more time. But I think there was an additional reason.

Dissatisfied that the cost and complexity of the income tax was not painful enough --according to the Tax Foundation, Americans wasted 6 billion hours and $260 billion completing returns last year—Congress saw an opportunity to ruin spring, too.

That’s why I’ve been shut off from the world. That’s why I’ve been hunkered down with an intensity and focus that would make the Unabomber wince.

I have been doing battle with Big Box, you see, trying to make sense of all the receipts, bills, etc. he contains. I’ve been in English-major hell—adding, subtracting, documenting, palpitating.

The worst is yet to come. When I finally get everything organized, I’ll forward the details to my accountant. He’ll use them to make complex tax-code calculations. Then he’ll tell me I owe way more than I thought I did.

Now you know why I hate spring.

---

_{Tom Purcell is a humor columnist nationally syndicated exclusively by Cagle Cartoons. For comments to Tom, please email him at Purcell@caglecartoons.com.}

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/10/2007 at 10:44 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Porkbusters •  
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   Friday - March 30, 2007

Top Ten List Of The Week

Top 10 Most Egregious Earmarks Contained in War Supplemental
(HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE)

The Democrat-controlled Congress is currently fighting to pass a $120-billion-plus emergency war supplemental laden with pork projects. Last week the House voted 218-212 to pass the bill and the Senate is expected to pass it shortly.

Senate Republicans said they expect President Bush to veto the bill because it sets a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal in Iraq. The following list highlights the most egregious earmarks contained in the Senate’s version of the bill, as ranked by fiscal hawk Sen. Tom Coburn’s staff.

10. Allows transfer of funds from holiday ornament sales in the Senate gift shop

9. $3 million in funding for sugar cane

8. $3.5 million in additional funding for guided tours of the Capitol

7. $12 million for the Forest Service money which the President requested in the non-emergency fiscal year 2008 budget

6. $20 million for insect damage reimbursements in Nevada

5. $24 million in funding for sugar beets

4. $75 million for salaries and expenses for the Farm Service Agency

3. $165.9 million for fisheries disaster relief, funded through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

2. $40 million for the Tree Assistance Program

1. $100 million in funding for the 2008 national party conventions.

Posted by The Skipper     on 03/30/2007 at 12:21 PM   
Filed Under: • Porkbusters •  
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   Monday - March 26, 2007

Soooooooeeeeeeee!!

For an additional amount for `Military Personnel, Army’, $8,878,899,000

For an additional amount for `Military Personnel, Navy’, $1,100,410,000

For an additional amount for `Military Personnel, Marine Corps’, $1,495,828,000

For an additional amount for `Military Personnel, Air Force’, $1,229,334,000

For an additional amount for `Operation and Maintenance, Army’, $20,897,672,000

For an additional amount for `Operation and Maintenance, Navy’, $5,115,397,000

For an additional amount for `Operation and Maintenance, Marine Corps’, $1,503,694,000

For an additional amount for `Operation and Maintenance, Air Force’, $6,909,259,000

Provided, That the amount provided under this heading is designated as making appropriations for contingency operations directly related to the global war on terrorism, and other unanticipated defense-related operations, pursuant to section 402 of H. Con. Res. 376 (109th Congress), as made applicable to the House of Representatives by section 511(a)(4) of H. Res. 6 (110th Congress).

For an additional amount for `Operation and Maintenance, Defense-Wide’, $2,855,993,000, of which not to exceed $300,000,000, to remain available until expended, may be used for payments to reimburse Pakistan, Jordan, and other key cooperating nations, for logistical, military, and other support provided, or to be provided, to United States military operations, notwithstanding any other provision of law.

Posted by The Skipper     on 03/26/2007 at 09:18 AM   
Filed Under: • Politics • Porkbusters •  
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   Saturday - January 27, 2007

Senator Feinstein’s Pork

I bet some of you out there actually believed the Democrats were going to take control in Washington and clean up all that corruption and payoffs to Senators and Representatives, didn’t you? If so you are not only incredibly stupid but also exceedingly gullible.

Take Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) for instance. Did you know that for years she has chaired the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee which has surprisingly paid out billions in military contracts to two companies owned by ... you guessed it ... her husband.

The only question for me is why I had to go to some obscure local backwater California news site to find this out. Why wasn’t it all over the front pages of the NY Times and Washington Post? Never mind. I already know the answer to that question and so do you ...

Senator Feinstein’s Iraq Conflict
As a member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee,
Sen. Feinstein voted for appropriations worth billions to her husband’s firms
_{(SILICON VALLEY METROACTIVE) - January 24, 2007}

In the November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.

As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.

Each year, MILCON’s members decide which military construction projects will be funded from a roster proposed by the Department of Defense. Contracts to build these specific projects are subsequently awarded to such major defense contractors as Halliburton, Fluor, Parsons, Louis Berger, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation. From 1997 through the end of 2005, with Feinstein’s knowledge, Blum was a majority owner of both URS Corp. and Perini Corp.

While setting MILCON agendas for many years, Feinstein, 73, supervised her own staff of military construction experts as they carefully examined the details of each proposal. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were or subsequently became URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such MILCON projects.

In her annual Public Financial Disclosure Reports, Feinstein records a sizeable family income from large investments in Perini, which is based in Framingham, Mass., and in URS, headquartered in San Francisco. But she has not publicly acknowledged the conflict of interest between her job as a congressional appropriator and her husband’s longtime control of Perini and URS--and that omission has called her ethical standards into question, say the experts.

- More ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 01/27/2007 at 09:56 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Porkbusters •  
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   Friday - September 22, 2006

Stop, Thief!

Psssst! Wanna buy a slightly used laptop? Good condition, one owner? No, you don’t have to find a crook or crime syndicate or terrorist to get in on this deal. Just ask any civil service employee or check you local pawn shop in D.C. Stuff disappears from federal employees’ care almost daily. Not that all of them are crooks or stupid. Just a good number of them, as has been my experience.

Over 1,100 laptops disappeared in recent years? Nothing new. I have done contracting work for the government for nearly two decades and every contracting company I have ever worked for from Oracle to Lockheed to Harris to Northrop-Grumman to SAIC has always told us that whenever we are on-site at any federal facility to chain our laptops down to the nearest, heaviest desk we can find. That’s no joke.

So who pays for this? Why, you and me and a dog named Boo, of course. The only scarey part is that some of these laptops contain extremely sensitive, private data on American citizens and other data that should never leave a secured building at any time.

Yet they do and that private and/or classified data is secured by nothing more than a login password. Is that safe enough? Bwah-hah-ha-ha-ha-ha .... Not on your life. Almost every IT professional I know has a disk that allows us to boot up a Windoze computer and change the Administrator password in about ten seconds. We have these disks because stupid end users in our offices are continuously forgetting their passwords. Secure data? Not a chance.

1,100 Laptops Missing From Commerce Dept.
_{(WASHINGTON POST) - Friday, September 22, 2006}

More than 1,100 laptop computers have vanished from the Department of Commerce since 2001, including nearly 250 from the Census Bureau containing such personal information as names, incomes and Social Security numbers, federal officials said yesterday.

This disclosure by the department came in response to a request by the House Committee on Government Reform, which this summer asked 17 federal departments to detail any loss of computers holding sensitive personal information.

Of the 10 departments that have responded, the losses at Commerce are “by far the most egregious,” said David Marin, staff director for the committee. He added that the silence of the remaining seven departments could reflect their reluctance to reveal problems of similar magnitude.

In a private briefing yesterday for three members of Congress, Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez estimated that the disappearance of laptops from the Census Bureau could have compromised the personal information of about 6,200 households, Marin said. He said the department was still trying to determine the extent of the problem.

“We don’t know exactly how many computers were lost or whether personal information was compromised,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), who chairs the House Government Reform Committee and attended the briefing. “The secretary has assured me that getting that information is priority number one, and I’m confident he’ll get his arms around the problem.”

Commerce officials told the congressmen that the inventory of missing laptops had escalated rapidly in recent weeks as the department investigated the disappearances. Marin said the committee was concerned that that number could increase significantly as Commerce officials learn more about missing handheld computers, which are increasingly being used in the Census Bureau.

Commerce officials said in a statement that they knew of no instances in which information from the missing laptops had been improperly accessed, adding that all the equipment contained safeguards that would prevent a breach of personal data. “The amount of missing computers is high, but fortunately, the vulnerability for data misuse is low,” Gutierrez said in the statement.

With its disclosure, Commerce is the latest federal agency to admit in recent months that it had lost laptops with sensitive personal data. In May, an employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs lost a laptop containing unencrypted information on about 26.5 million people. Three months later, Veterans Affairs acknowledged that a second computer, with information on about 38,000 hospital patients in Pennsylvania, was also missing.

The Federal Trade Commission has lost two laptops with files containing people’s financial account numbers, and the Department of Agriculture announced that one of its laptops had disappeared along with personal information on about 350 employees.

Gutierrez and his staff told the congressmen that 1,137 laptops had been stolen, lost or otherwise vanished since 2001, mostly from the Census Bureau and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Of these, 249 contained personally identifiable information, nearly all from the Census Bureau. All were password-protected, a low-level safeguard. Only 107 of the computers were fully encrypted.

Posted by The Skipper     on 09/22/2006 at 01:35 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Porkbusters • Stoopid-People •  
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   Wednesday - September 13, 2006

Help Wanted

Wanna earn some quick, easy money? It’s simple. Just talk to your Congress-critter and convince him or her to post their work schedule on the internet so everyone can see just how hard they are working in DC. Or not. You can earn $1,000 for each one you “sign up”.

I encourage all of you to take the Sunlight Foundation up on this offer and tell us who accepted and who balked and refused to comply. I must mention however, that sending your consigliare with an “offer they can’t refuse” or leaving dead horse’s heads in their beds may result in disqualification. Maybe. We’re still considering bending that rule ...

_{(Note: This is not a joke. This is a serious offer.)}

Dear Allan,

Who are our lawmakers meeting with? Lobbyists? Constituents? What do they do with their time? Members of Congress work for us, and we should know what they do every day. That’s a pretty straightforward proposition, and we bet you agree. So Sunlight is launching a campaign, at http://www.punchclockcampaign.com, to get Members of Congress to agree to post their daily calendars on the Internet.

But we need your help and creativity to make that happen. We’ll give you $1,000 for each Member of Congress, and $250 for each candidate, who you get to agree to do this, beginning with the next Congress. We’re not kidding. Consider this a fee for your work. We’re calling this the Punch Clock Campaign because almost all of us have to turn in timesheets or punch a clock to get our paychecks.

The details on how you can get your $1,000, along with suggestions of how to talk to your politicians and other materials are here:

http://www.sunlightnetwork.com/punchclock

This Congress has put in less work days than any other Congress since 1948. What are they doing when they are not in legislative session? If we are going to change the nature of the relationship between lawmakers and citizens, it has to include a greater understanding of what Members of Congress do with their time. Check out our site, ask questions, share it with your friends, and enjoy the hunt for the elusive time of our Congress!

http://www.sunlightnetwork.com/punchclock

Sincerely,

Ellen Miller
Executive Director
Sunlight Foundation and Sunlight Network
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com

Posted by The Skipper     on 09/13/2006 at 02:16 PM   
Filed Under: • Porkbusters •  
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   Thursday - July 20, 2006

Tip O’Neill’s Gift

I can’t say it better than Jeff Jacoby does, so I’ll just shut up and let you read about government bloat, pork and the Democrat who is the prime example of useless government projects, throwing taxpayer money away and ... never mind. Just read ...

O’Neill’s Crumbling Legacy
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | July 19, 2006

All politics is local, Tip O’Neill famously said, and it surely doesn’t get any more local than when a 6,000-pound slab from a project championed by the late House speaker falls on a 38-year-old newlywed from Jamaica Plain, crushing her to death as her husband drives her to the airport. O’Neill died in 1994, but the political culture he epitomized is alive and well and enshrined in the Big Dig, a slough of corruption, callousness, and cover-ups that had become a synonym for government mismanagement long before it killed Milena Del Valle on July 10.

It would be going too far to link O’Neill to the incompetent workmanship and negligent oversight that led to the collapse of a 3-ton ceiling panel in the Interstate 90 connector just as the Del Valles drove beneath it last week. But the culture that he embodied is still solidly in place. Only one month earlier the lords and ladies of Bay State politics had gathered to christen the longest section of the Big Dig as the Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. Tunnel and proclaim the immense—and immensely expensive—highway project his triumphant legacy.

“That project could never be complete until it bears the name of the person who made it all possible,” gushed US Senator Ted Kennedy. “So let us celebrate his great legacy today . . . and remember that our job in public life is to improve the lives of others.” Valle’s life was not improved by this troubled project. It was ended by it.

Kennedy isn’t the only one whose comments, in retrospect, were cringe-making. “Whenever you have a monumental project like this, you’re going to have . . . inconveniences,” lectured Boston Mayor Tom Menino just five weeks before the falling ceiling shattered the Del Valle family. “Anybody who didn’t think about those inconveniences is not realistic.”

_{(-- thanx to BruceLH for the tip on this one --)}

Posted by The Skipper     on 07/20/2006 at 03:09 PM   
Filed Under: • Politics • Porkbusters •  
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   Friday - May 05, 2006

Pigs At The Trough

When it comes to pork in the budget, the US Senate is part of the problem not the solution. Once again, this dishonorable bunch of spendthrifts went out of their way to carve out a little pork for a few pet projects while attempting to provide emergency funding for the war and hurricane relief. Where is the line item veto when you really need it?

Not surprisingly, Democrats jumped on this budget and gave it 100% support. Only 20 Republicans, however, had the sense to walk away from the pig trough. Keep in mind that these b**tards can vote themselves a pay raise any time they want (actually, they’ve rigged it so pay raises are automatic unless they vote against them). Are you sick and tired of this behavior from the Senate yet? If so, let them know. Mail a rancid pork chop or two to your US Senator today. Let them eat cake pork ...

Senate Defies Bush on Spending
$109 Billion Bill for Wars, Storm Relief Disdained in House
_{Friday, May 5, 2006}

(WASHINGTON POST)—The Senate ignored President Bush’s veto threat yesterday and easily passed a $109 billion emergency spending bill for war and hurricane recovery costs that also brimmed with favors for farmers, the fishing industry, and the states of Hawaii and Rhode Island.

The two-week debate that preceded yesterday’s 77 to 21 final vote was marked by an election-year surge in targeted spending on behalf of constituents and special interests, despite repeated warnings by fiscal conservatives about a swollen budget deficit.

The Senate added money to rebuild a highway in Hawaii; protect riverbanks in California; upgrade a hurricane barrier in Providence, R.I.; and compensate New England shell fishermen for their losses from a red tide outbreak. The Senate also took steps to make farming less risky by offering compensation for virtually any scourge, including drought, flood, wildfires and pestilence.

The next step for the Senate is a potentially rancorous final negotiating session with the House, where Republican leaders greeted the Senate package with scorn. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) called it “dead on arrival” and said his chamber “has no intention of joining in a spending spree.”

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) promised a final bill that does not spend “one dollar more than what the president asks for, period.”

If the threats hold, senators will have to accept a final bill that is nearly $15 billion less than the legislation approved yesterday. The House package, which passed March 16, came in slightly below Bush’s original $92.2 billion request, at $91.9 billion.

The Senate bill arrived on the floor last week at $106.5 billion but grew through a series of amendments. Bush did sign off on one additional measure, $2.3 billion for pandemic flu preparations.

The bill’s original intent was to provide funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to help Mississippi and Louisiana rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Ever since the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the administration has insisted on paying war-related expenses through ad hoc supplemental spending bills. It contends that the conflicts are temporary and that military costs cannot be anticipated well enough to be included in the regular budget process.

- More pork news from the WAPO ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 05/05/2006 at 08:35 AM   
Filed Under: • Porkbusters •  
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   Monday - November 14, 2005

How Pork Becomes Dough, Lesson #911

If you aren’t mad yet about wasteful spending in Washington, be prepared. This one will knock your socks off, kiddies. It seems there has been some diddling with the federal relief funds for 9/11 victims and somehow, thanks to bureaucrats at SBA who deny all knowledge and bankers who refuse to reveal details, we have doughnut shops in Georgia getting loans at sweet interest rates to “help them recover from 9/11”. I say we string all the varmints up from the nearest tree and march on Washington with flaming torches and pitchforks. Are ye with me, lads ...?

IT’S A HOLE LOT OF 9/11 DOUGH
November 14, 2005
WASHINGTON (NY POST)

More than 25 Dunkin’ Donuts franchises far from New York City were granted federally guaranteed loans at sweet interest rates under a program that was supposed to help businesses recover from 9/11, The Post has learned. The franchises, located in distant places such as Ohio, Georgia and Vermont, got loans totaling $20 million. The Small Business Administration’s inspector general is probing whether banks pushed the loans to make big profits.

Why so many Dunkin’ Donut shops got the loans — which were provided to businesses ranging from hotels to muffler shops — is one of the mysteries surrounding the troubled program. Taxpayers aren’t the only ones who got dunked. Dunkin’ Donuts franchise owners around the country say they had no idea they were benefiting from a 9/11 program, called STAR because it was part of the Supplemental Terrorist Relief Act.

“We just took the loan to remodel the place,” said Mnosh Vsava, the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Berwick, Pa., who got an $870,000 loan from New York City-based CIT Small Business Lending Corp. “It wasn’t 9/11 things or anything. No one ever explained nothing,” said Bobby Patel, who got a $558,000 loan for his Willoughby, Ohio, franchise. Bruce Herold, the loan officer from Bank One (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.) who approved Patel’s loan, claimed he didn’t know his bank issued a 9/11 loan.

“I have never done a STAR loan here that I knew of,” he said. “This was just an SBA deal.” Yet businesses are supposed to prove they were “adversely affected” by the attacks to get the loans, and banks are required to keep the information on file. Herold said he couldn’t provide such documents because he wasn’t aware he had made a STAR loan. Jeff Gentile, who owns a franchise in Cabot, Pa., said it was “silly” that he got a $120,000 loan under the program.

“I wasn’t harmed in any way by [9/11]. My business wasn’t,” he said. Tony Silva, who manages a Dunkin’ Donuts in Essex Junction, Vt., was the only proprietor to say his business was hurt by 9/11. “Instead of getting probably a large coffee and a couple doughnuts, [customers] were getting probably a small coffee and a doughnut,” he said. “They were spending less money.”

Banks had an incentive to hype the loans because the government reduced the traditional fee — saving some of the biggest lenders millions. The federal guarantee shields the banks from losses. Rival chain Krispy Kreme didn’t get any loans under the program. “It doesn’t make sense to me that people with a Dunkin’ Donuts in Kansas would say, ‘Hey, I can get some 9/11 money,’ “ said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), suggesting banks or the administration pushed the loans.

Dunkin’ Donuts, owned by French liquor distributor Pernod Ricard, is close to being sold for $2 billion and reported more than $3 billion in revenues last year. Dunkin’ Donuts and CIT each denied pushing the STAR loans, even though CIT was the program’s top lender, giving out $422 million, including loans to almost every doughnut shop. “It’s not something that we promote or advocated,” said Andrew Mastrangelo, spokesman for Massachusetts-based Dunkin’ Brands Inc.

Chris Lehnes, a vice president for small-business loans at CIT, said in a statement issued to The Post, “Like many lenders, we do offer STAR loans, and we believe that we are in compliance with all SBA guidelines regarding the STAR program.” CIT declined requests for an interview. SBA administrator Hector Barletto said his agency wasn’t at fault. Congress put that legislation forward. It wasn’t us that put it forward.”

geoff.earle@nypost.com

Posted by The Skipper     on 11/14/2005 at 09:24 AM   
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DISCLAIMER

THE SERVICES AND MATERIALS ON THIS WEBSITE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE HOSTS OF THIS SITE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF SATISFACTORY QUALITY, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICE OR ANY MATERIALS.

Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
3. Use every legal means to defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and, most importantly:
4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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