Paying for fraud

I am a manager of a small business (five employees), and I am appalled at what we just went through fighting a fraudulent workers’ compensation case. We had an employee of about six months file a claim behind our back while claiming to the rest of us that the injury was sustained outside of work. We had so much evidence against this person that her attorney waived his fee in order to “get rid of his client.” We opted to settle the case for $500 rather than take the slim chance that a judge might end up finding even 2 percent causation, in which case she would walk away with much more than $500. We had a lien against us from the EDD in excess of $6,000 because of benefits she’s been collecting from this fraudulent claim.  

Upon discussing the settlement, I spoke with the representative from EDD and was able to show her all of our evidence against this person. She immediately agreed with our claim and reduced the lien to $0. Sure that’s great for us. Now here’s the disgusting part:  The state eats that money! We taxpayers have to pay these costs! So, she’s been fraudulently collecting benefits for more than a year now, which she is not responsible for paying back. She hasn’t been working while collecting free money when we know she’s perfectly capable — we have her on surveillance on numerous days surfing, biking, running on the beach, having a great old time — while the rest of us get to pay for it.

And we wonder why our state is in such a deficit, yet the legislature chooses to cut our budgets for schools, medical, homelessness, hunger and all the other many social services people need.  

This “person” should be ashamed and disgusted with herself for what she has done, and so should everyone else who is fraudulently taking money away from the rest of us.

Jenifer Russell
Ventura

Conservative contradictions the norm
Writer Rick Scott finds it noteworthy that Paul Moomjean (Letters, 1/21), a critic of government handouts, is happily collecting an unemployment compensation check. What planet does Scott live on? The Republican mantra “Government is not the solution. It’s the problem” has always been footnoted “Except when I’m the one asking for government help.”  

Items in evidence:

1. The farm subsidy program. Originally designed to help Depression-era farm families, it has grown into a scheme that deposits billions annually into the pockets of wealthy farmers. It is wildly popular in red states and in red areas of blue states like California.

2. Stem cell research. Ronald Reagan is the wordsmith who created the Republican mantra to much acclaim. His family understands the exception. Kudos to Nancy and Ron Jr. for publicly supporting federal stem cell research. However, I can’t recall a word on that subject from any Reagan prior to Reagan pere’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, a disease that should benefit from stem cell therapy. Nor, for that matter, have I heard the Reagans speak out in support of any other medical funding.

3. The Bradbury housing dust-up. The mother of GOP District Attorney Michael Bradbury received Section 8 federal housing assistance for years. That might not seem unusual — until you learn that the subsidized unit was on Bradbury’s Ojai ranch and the landlord receiving the checks was Michael Bradbury. When the arrangement became publicly known in 1997, Bradbury pledged to donate future subsidy payments to charity. He was silent about the $16,000 he had already pocketed.  

An interesting coda to this tale: When asked about the Section 8 payments, GOP Congressman Gallegly praised Bradbury as the one doing the subsidizing.  Apparently, big-hearted Mike did not demand the $200 expected from mom under the Section 8 agreement. All he collected was the $600 arriving each month from Uncle Sugar. Whatta guy. Generous to a fault, as Gallegly shrewdly noted.

To Moomjean I say: Stand tall. You are only the latest in a long line of Republicans pocketing government handouts while preaching against the evils of government handouts. And Scott? Enough with the letters pointing out the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

Ted Hoople
Ventura

More to Avatar than meets the eye
Mr. Moomjean, thank you for the Avatar op-ed (Right Persuasion, 1/21). You stated my observations and resentments precisely. Sadly, no one I have spoken with sees Cameron’s anti-American propaganda as other than a colorful sci-fi flick. Maybe we’re being too serious. After all, Darth Vader was a Nazi and the galaxy is still turning.

Howard Blasingame
Ventura County

A lesson about property rights from a raccoon
At 2 a.m., mama raccoon and her three offspring were tearing up my garden, clawing up plants to unearth grubs and worms, when I came out of the house screaming and waving a flashlight.

She didn’t back off. She snarled and hissed at me as though she owned my little sixth of an acre of suburban paradise and I was the interloper. Outraged, I charged forward with a broom, at which point she and her little ones lumbered slowly back over the neighbor’s fence. But mama gave me an accusatory look in leaving.

Only later did I notice how alike she and I sounded in asserting our claims to the lot. And still later, it came to me that if prior occupancy was any way of legitimizing a property right, she may have had the better case. Not she, of course, but her kind had occupied this territory long before mine.

Which brought me to consider who owned this land before me. Recent owners sold willingly to willing buyers. But dip just a bit into history, and there one finds the forced sale of Mexican territory in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the offer they couldn’t refuse, to use a Mafioso term, and the abrogation of Spanish land grants by the new Yankee owners. And what right had Spanish kings to assume ownership of land occupied for time out of mind by Native Americans?

It would seem ownership of land is steeped in coercion and theft — often even in blood.  In a sense, we owners are all receivers of stolen property. While I’m not about to cede my meager holdings back to the Chumash or the raccoon, this realization does occasion a little humility. We are all fiercely territorial — raccoons, humans, dogs, cats, all creatures great and small — self-righteously ready to fight for what we understand as our own. It seems part of our inherited equipment.

And I’m not any different. When anyone parking on my street overlaps my driveway by even an inch, I’ve been known to pitch a hissy fit that would put Madame Raccoon to shame at this incursion on my property rights.

Some social good comes of this passionate concern for our stuff; we defend it from environmental and economic harm, which benefits everyone. Owners, for example, are known to be more conscientious about maintaining property than renters, thus boosting values in their area beyond what they can claim as their own.

Also, we tend to discount NIMBYs who want noxious stuff in someone else’s backyard. They are often regarded as terminally self-centered, but I wonder, considering how all is connected, if the real problem is that they are defining “backyard” too narrowly.

What most needs protection and cherishing today is what belongs to everyone, the endangered commons — our soil, our watershed, our oceans, our air, the very planet itself. What belongs to everyone gets abused by everyone to the impoverishment of everyone, even to extinguishing life on earth. We have reached the point where our fierce territorial instincts need to be transferred to the larger “backyard.”

Do pushy environmentalists think we own the whole dang planet? Actually we do, we all do, and it’s time we asserted our rights with fervor equal to the threat to our property.

Margaret Morris
Ventura

Political carpetbagging must not be condoned
Over the past few weeks, local newspapers have been buzzing about the election that will take place June 8 in Ventura County’s second supervisor district. Linda Parks, a Thousand Oaks resident who has an extensive résumé of local government service and civic activism, has to counter an attack from political carpetbagger Assemblywoman Audra Strickland.

Mrs. Strickland is termed out and is so hungry for that government check and taxpayer-funded health care that she is moving from her home town of Moorpark to Thousand Oaks just to run for election. Strickland must not think people can see how this is only a greed-filled move.

This is an example of a political carpetbagger — someone who does not work for the benefit of the people, instead looks for any way to undermined anyone. The distasteful actions of Mrs. Strickland, her Office and the chairman of the Ventura County Central Committee with its politically charged telephone survey, first denied by Strickland office District Director Rondi Guthrie, at first saying they had nothing to do with it, then acknowledging that Strickland and the county GOP were behind it, ultimately lying to the voters.

I am not surprised Audra has sent her attack-dog chief of staff Joel Angeles to take care of political opponents, and voters who stand in the way of Strickland Ventura County, as in 2008.

If you’re like me and you want an intelligent and independent person in local government who works for the benefit of the people as a whole, not herself regardless of party, then go to www.voteforparks.com or email Support Supervisor Linda Parks. She is working for Thousand Oaks and Ventura County with you in mind.

Christopher James Grant
Ojai