Under the new Trump administration, the only way to correct a false report if one has been falsely declared dead is to show up in a Social Security Office in person. The problem with that pointless requirement though, is that many offices around the country have been shuttered by the Trump administration, which is deliberately making people either do things online or to use the SSA’s grossly understaffed phone number help line. That means, especially for older people, rectifying a false report of one’s death can be a challenge. Yet proving one was falsely declared dead to SSA should be easy to do by going to a police office, a post office, a state license and registration office, a Senatorial or Representative constuent services office, or even a licensed notary public!
Musk’s criminal scheme, explaIned in detail in a story in the Washington Post, which was alerted to it by angry employees, was to bust into the Social Security Agency’s not-so-secure Death Master File, which is supposed to be used to stop benefit checks of SS beneficiaries who had died, and to add the names of 6100 living legal immigrants of all ages 16-80, most of them with Hispanic surnames, in effect “killing them” as far as Social Security is concerned.
Without a SSN, noemployer, especially these days, will hire someone, and even currently employed legal immigrants, who may have legally been having FICA payroll taxes deducted each month by their employers. Such workers will, if the fraud is not corrected, be unable to collect benefits without a valid SSN.
Even worse, it’s likely that any current employer of such a person would sooner of later discover or be alerted by the the Social Security Administration that the SSN for an employee put on the SSA’s Death Master File no longer has a valid Social Security account.
We can be sure that the the US Dept. of Justice, the appropriate agency to investigate this cruel crime and send its author Musk and his teenage work crew to jail for a long time, will inastead do nothing. Headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, the shameless Trump cultist who is keeping her subordinates busy trying to find ways to indict or disbar lawyers who helped bring criminal cases against citizen Trump. (Those cases were anything but frivolous, though Trump-appointed judges, including Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump in his first term, helped run out the clock on their going to trial until after he had been re-elected. and thus protected from prosecution (thanks to the High Court’s unforgiveble mjority opinion granting presidents “complete immunity for presidential acts done while president.”)
What is needed is for bold state attorneys general to find an angle to enable them to indict Musk and his gang for violag\tion of state laws. I’m not a lawyer but I have written plenty on legal cases, and it seems clear to me that since Musk and his DOGE scammers and hackers are stealing already-paid FICA taxes filed in good faith by employers and employees into these immigrant workers’ Social Security accounts automatically upon receipt of their annual Income tax returns, proving theft should be a piece of cake.
Defrauding workers and their employers by illegally entering names of such people as deceased without, finding or offering any proof of death is clearly a federal fraud and theft. But furthermore, such an action, by rendering able-bodied workers jobless and unemployable, inevitably creates a welfare burden on the states they live in. That means states can claim to have legal standing to bring charges. In the unlikely event that I’m wrong about that, perhaps honest employers of such defrauded workers with enough courage and sense of justice could be pursuaded to sue Musk, DOGE and the Federal government for fraud, since the FICA payroll taxes they had paid according to law into those workers’ accounts, in many cases no doubt for years. would have been lost through Musk’s fraud. That is to say, those employers should have standing to bring such cases, and if enough employers did that it, could be a multi-state class-action suit.
An interesting angle on this criminal conspiracy by “rocket scientist” Musk, who has been demonstrating that he’s actually as dumb as a sack of dog droppings and as devoid of morals, empathy and intregrity as his boss Trump, is that it’s likely that many of these legally employed immigrant workers have plenty of friends at their jobsite — friends who could well be white MAGA supporters. They may well be having their eyes opened to the scams their idol has been playing on them like ending the Ukraine War in a day, ending inflation immediately, not touching Medicaid or Medicare, “cleaning the swamp” in Washington, putting the “ best people” in his cabinet, creating manufactring jobs, etc. At least some of those people will be angry that their hard-working immigrant Green-Card-holding co-worker has had his or her Social Security account cruelly cancelled in a White House scam.
Since this Social Security theft by Musk and his DOGE racketeers is so clearly a crime, it seems to me that at least three and perhaps four of the conservatives on the nine-memberHigh Court could decide to join its three liberals in upholding conviction and a severe judgement against the these monsters. (I’m sure that “Justice” Thomas won’t give a shit.)
One could hope that some outraged federal staff with integrity in the SSA and/or AG’s office might leak documents showing that Trump and maybe AG Bondi were at least aware of or perhaps even in on this crooked scheme and failed to act to prevent it. That would expand the number of defendants added to any case. The Post reports that the Trump White House claimed, offering no evidence, that 6000 of the 6100 people falsely declared dead were criminal gang members or were listed on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List. This at least suggests that Trump himself was aware of Musk’s plan.
In 2018-19 I learned that my name had maliciously been put on the Terrorist Watch List for at least two years during the first Trump administration, most likely as punishment for a cover story I’d done for the Nation a month before, exposing decades of massive accounting and budget fraud by the Pentagon. In my efforts to get my name removed from that list, I discpvered it is a Kafkaesque nightmare.
According to the FBI, the Bureau which compiles the list, it could not remove my name from their own list! I would, they said, (I could sense the smirk on the phone receiver), have to get the federal agency or office that had sent them my name labeling and libeling me as a suspected terrorist, to admit they’d made a “mistake,.” But the FBI also said it “couldn’t” disclose to me the name of the agency that had reported as a suspected terrorist! I’d have to discover that myself somehow, presumably by asking them. (That response is awfully similar to Trump’s dodgy claim that he cannot do what the Supreme Court majority has told him to do, namely make El Salvador’a puppet dictator Nayib Bukele release and return to the US Klimar Abrego Garcia, a legal US resident of this country sent by Homeland Security to a prison in El Salvado “by mistake,.” Trum’p’s reason?: Because “El Salvador is a sovereign state.”)
Meanwhile the FBI in sworn testimony in a Virginia Federal Court considering a leal challenge to the Terrorist Watch List admitted that the vast majority of the over one million names on that list, which consists of people referred to the Bureau by any.of hundreds of federal offices, departments and bureaus, were never properly vetted by the FBI before they were simply added to it. By 2023, CBS reported that the list had ballooned to two million people.
What that means is that if being listed on the Terrorist Watch List is being used as a justification for lying that workers are dead, there are going to be a lot of cases of fraud to take to court.
If my name is still on that list or gets put back on , I wonder if over the next few months ot years, I’ll discover that I’m “dead” to Social Security Administration and no longer have a SSN. At least I’ll get some warning when my monthly benefit payment stops being auto-deposited in my bank.
That’s not paranoia speaking. According to the Post report cited above, “Some of those raising the alarm about the DOGE attack on the Death Maaster List worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the Social Security Death database to go after people the president dislikes.”
The stupidest part of this DOGE action is that simply not having a Social Security account and card is not a crime, It is not a naional identity cart and you cannot ge reqired to carry it on your person. Given that immigrants are often part of tight extended families, many of them also legally in the US and perhaps even already US citizens, they could and likely would support their defrauded victim relative who could just continue legally residing in the US.
They could even legally start A Go Gund Me campaigns for support!
Meanwhile, if they’re like most low-income taxpayers, many of the 6100-6400 defrauded immigrant workers whose SSN numbers were cancelled by DOGE will , when they file their tax returns on April 15 or later, using their “dead” SSN and claiming a refund of over-withheld income tax or claiming a child credit or two, it will make for an interesting class-action suit against the IRS, DOGE, Musk and his boss, Donald Trump, since it’s clear their FICA taxes were properly paid and sent to be added to their their Social Security accounts and work record.
If Musk is that stupid, it explains why so many of his Teslas spontaneously erupt in flames, and why his company’s sales, especially outside the US, have evaporated. Also, I would not recommend anyone volunteer to fly on Musk’s Starship, whether to the Moon or Mars. The man is a delusional publicity-seeking idiot with the ethics and brains of a mobster.
Not only that, but if the peopl who volunteer to fly to mars Kual’ in Musk’s explosion-prone Starships to develop a colony there — one clearly dependent upon regular provision of supplies to survive—would anyone in her or his right mind want the viability/survival of their colony in the hands of such a demonstrably unstable, drug-addicted, mercurial and selfish megalomaniac after seeing how he has run his DOGE operation?
