Rome police reported that vandals left a dead rabbit for staff to find at the Social Security office on Riverside Parkway on Friday morning and also left the water running outside.
According to reports, the rabbit was found on a window sill behind the building along with a bag of shredded paper torn and scattered around the building Friday morning.
U.S. District Court Judge Brian C. Wimes sentenced Charles Daniel Koss, 63, of Independence to seven years in federal prison and ordered Koss to pay $212,987 in restitution to the Social Security Administration and the Department of the Treasury. ...
Koss began receiving Social Security disability payments in 1987 for myoneural disorder and hypertension. In 1994, according to court documents, Koss began operating Embassy Mortgage, a real estate business, with his wife in Blue Springs. Koss was working as a loan officer and office manager for the business.
According to the indictment, when Koss learned that he would have to repay the government, he created a false negotiable instrument – which he called a “Registered Private Money Order” – purporting to draw on a bogus trust account held by the U.S. Treasury. He allegedly utilized the false negotiable instrument as payment for his debt and mailed it to the Social Security Administration.
Koss subscribed to what is known as the redemption theory, the indictment says, which claims that a “Birthright Trust” is created with the U.S. Treasury when parents of a newborn child pledge the child’s birth certificate to the government. Redemption theory involves bogus claims that when the U.S. government abandoned the gold standard in 1933, it pledged its citizens as collateral so it could borrow money. The movement also asserts that common citizens can gain access to funds in secret accounts using obscure procedures and regulations.
According to the indictment, adherents of the redemption theory sometimes call themselves “sovereign citizens.” The sovereign citizen movement is a loosely organized collection of groups and individuals who have adopted anarchist ideology. Its adherents claim that virtually all existing government in the United States is illegitimate and they seek to “restore” an idealized, minimalist government that never actually existed.
The Social Security Administration sent Lanier Schriner a shocking letter. It said the feds paid her too much more than 30 years ago, and now they are coming to collect.
More than three decades ago, Schriner was just heading to college along with small disability payments from her deceased father's Social Security.
"I received it before I went to college and then after I turned 18," she said. "Then you could still collect disability and disability payments if you're going to school."
Just last week, the payments came back to haunt her.
"I got this letter, 30-some years later, just the other day, that said I owed a $167 back payment," Schriner said.
It says she was overpaid at some point, but there are no specifics in the letter.
The amount's not important to her, but the time that's passed.
"I think it's ridiculous," she said. "I can give evidence that I don't owe it, but I'm not sure how to do that when I don't have any paperwork from 30-some years ago," she said.
Oh, the sweet irony.
Pete Peterson is the conservative billionaire who is a major financier in the effort to dismantle, cut and privatize Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Recently he and his foundation held a contest asking folks to submit videos on why it is important to “fix” the national debt of which, he and his foundation falsely claim, Social Security is a major contributor.
Sometimes the best-laid plans for a propaganda campaign can go awry. The winner of the $500 grand prize determined by popular vote on the website came from the completely opposite side of Peterson’s cut Social Security argument.
