Month: December 2022

Former professional football player Bret Favre teamed up with Republican state politicians to divert up to $5 million from Mississippi’s Department of Human Services to build of all things a volleyball facility for students at Favre’s alma mater, University of Southern Mississippi. Favre’s daughter attends the school and he was collecting money to build the facility for a sport she was interested in and participating in at the time. Ironic, though Favre starred there as a quarterback for the football team he was fundraising for the volleyball team.

What’s egregious about this all is the money state officials schemed and stole from state coffers was from Temporary Assistance For Needy Families a federally funded program to help poor families in need. If there’s any doubt that poor Mississippians are poor and in need one should only look at statistics for poverty in Mississippi.

The highest poverty rate in the country is in Mississippi, where 19.6% of the population lives in poverty. However, this has improved from 2012, when the state’s poverty rate was nearly 25%. Mississippi has the lowest median household income of any state of $45,792. Mississippi’s educational attainment levels are among the lowest in the U.S., with about 84.5% of adults graduating high school and 22% of adults having at least a Bachelor’s degree.

2019 Poverty Rate in the United States

State officials redirected money from the federal government by rejecting nearly 99% of poor welfare applicants in 2016 and moving those funds to MCEC , Mississippi Community Education Center a non profit which controlled millions in state welfare funds, which then applied the money to projects favored by wealthy and powerful individuals. Thus the poor people of Mississippi became even poorer while the rich took the money earmarked for those most in need to use for items not of necessity but for entertainment and personal enrichment. Not that there is any doubt about this being illegal as well as immoral. Those responsible for the misappropriation of the money, except for Favre, have been disciplined by the court system in Mississippi or fired after investigations but the damage was done and it speaks to a systemic abuse of power and money by state officials.

Earlier this year the city of Jackson and the capital of the state was faced with a crisis in the making for almost a century after flooding exacerbated the water supply and state official claimed there was no safe drinking water available. It’s not like this wasn’t forecast. Since 1922 officials in the state have warned the water supply for the city of Jackson was in peril if the infrastructure that supplied water wasn’t upgraded or improved and money has been “spent” to fix this problem but because of the systemic abuse of state officials to handle money one has to wonder whether that money was really used for what it was intended. For example, an ill-fated water contract with Siemens Inc. originally billed as a way to streamline billing and save money for the city over time, had faulty meters send erroneous bills to customers, if a bill was generated at all.

What Mississippi has to own up to is the fact it has elected officials who have no problem using tax payer money for things they want for themselves while denying services to targeted members of Mississippi based on race, ethnicity and socio-economic status. The poverty rate in Jackson is over 24% yet in the 21st century it still has an infrastructure that delivers water to its citizens that has been complained about since 1922. There’s no one to blame but the officials of the state. Bret Favre was not an outlier he was business as usual.

The reason is because a former president of the United States, the “greatest” country in the world, the oldest democracy in human history and a man who claims to be the smartest man, a stable genius was punked by a pedophile, a racist, and an anti-semite. He was set up in the easiest way by people who sought revenge from him by appealing to his vanity and inflating his ego.

People with this kind of motive, vengence, were able to sit down at a table with Trump in his house…a house that might still have classified documents in it…to be able to embarrass and humiliate him before the world. Milo Yiannopoulos is on record saying this whole sordid affair was done to set up Trump ‘just to make Trump’s life miserable’.

Of course Trump threw up his usual tired excuses about not knowing who Fuentes is…that’s the typical GOP line and one he’s used countless times before. It’s ALWAYS gone on to be proven a lie. Repeating it makes them look really stupid; a former POTUS with all at his disposal including a guard detail whose sole purpose is to protect his life and with everything at stake, including possibly his life, doesn’t know who he’s letting into his house? Laughable but not really. Pathetic is more like it.

A twisted fringe of the GOP that claims its opposition houses kidnapped children in the basement of pizzerias to hold them as sex slaves is the home of people like Yiannopoulos. He condoned sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and joked about a sexual encounter he said he had with a Catholic priest as a teenager way back in 2017. Statements like these got him fired from Brietbart, the home of Steve Bannon, an ally of Trump. Yiannopoulos as recently as THIS SUMMER served in Marjorie Taylor Green’s office as an unpaid intern. This is the legacy a deranged narcissist leaves on the Republican party. He associates with pedophiles, virulent racists and anti-semites who go on to say their association with him was solely to make a former POTUS’ life miserable. This is today’s Republican Party. We can laugh now.