Discussion: Kentucky Lawyer Pleads Guilty In Massive Disability Scheme

They probably were angry at all “those” lazy non-working people getting government benefits.

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It was all over for him last year.

UPDATE 4/7/16 @ 10 a.m.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WSAZ) – Social Security Disability attorney Eric Conn will be back in federal court for his detention hearing Thursday afternoon. The hearing is set for 1:30 in Lexington.

Conn, along with retired Administrative Law Judge David Daugherty, and Dr. Alfred Bradley Adkins, a clinical psychologist who worked for Conn, were indicted earlier this week for their roles in a scheme to fraudulently obtain more than $600 million in federal disability payments for thousands of social security claimants.

Conn and Adkins were arraigned on the charges on Tuesday and both pleaded not guilty to the 18 count indictment. Adkins was released on bond during the hearing. Conn was denied bond and remains in federal custody. There is still a warrant for Daugherty’s arrest.

Department of Justice officials argued that Conn should be detained because he’s a flight risk. They said he told several people in 2011 and 2012 that he “would never go to jail.” He also has wired money overseas and has his house up for sale, they said.

During Tuesday’s arraignment, Conn’s attorneys argued that he has gone abroad and faithfully returned each time. Conn’s lawyers also argued that he has complied with investigators, has strong community ties in Kentucky and made the comments about not going to jail many years ago.

Meanwhile, DOJ attorneys added that Conn could intimidate a witness because Count 9 of the indictment alleges that he had retaliated against an informant who was helping law enforcement already.

When asked by the judge if Conn understood the conditions of his upcoming detention hearing, he replied, “Unfortunately, yes sir.”

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Yeah, but couldn’t he still vote until he plead (or was found) guilty? Inquiring minds want to know…

I missed the part of the story where it said he was conservative or lecturing people on Christian values and how to run government. As an East Kentuckian myself, I’ve got to say that it is as likely he was a big contributor to the Democratic Party as to the Republican Party. So much so that I have no desire whatsoever to go look him up on OpenSecrets for fear I’m going to find a new cudgel placed into the hands of the Republican monsters now running the state.

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So what? His days of defrauding the government are over.

Wonder if they’ll go after that money he stashed overseas.

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If you’ve ever been close to or aware of someone trying to qualify for disability, you know that this is an uphill battle. I’m pretty sure all first time applicants are rejected and have to appeal. As a group, these are generally folks not up for navigating the appeal process. People like Conn who design a whole practice around falsifying paperwork so the unqualified get signed up, while those in need don’t, need to spend a long time in jail. He’s only going to be sentenced for one count of theft and one count of payment of “gratuities.” That $550M? Gone.

Here’s my list of folks on disability:

My friend’s child, now 35, with Down Syndrome. He needs 24 hour supervision. He doesn’t talk. When he turned 18 he had to take tests to “prove” he was still disabled. (OMG, Maude! He’s been cured of Down Syndrome! Praise the Lord!) The test they administered was an IQ test (WISC) that requires the subject be able to talk to be valid. The office of the official tester was on the 2nd floor of a building with no elevator.

My friend who used to be a car mechanic. By his mid-30s he had severe spinal damage that left/leaves him in chronic pain. He’s had multiple surgeries on the upper and lower ends of his spine to alleviate both the orthopedic problems and the pain. Can’t say they’ve improved the pain or ability to walk/function comfortably, although they’ve probably kept it from progressing to the point he can’t walk or sit. He regularly needs to prove he isn’t faking it.

My relative in his 60s who’s a long time alcoholic. He’s damaged all of his internal organs and scrambled his brain. On good days he walks with a cane. He wears diapers. When he (actually we on his behalf) first applied for disability, he was rejected. Fortunately, some other programs became available and SSI didn’t need to be pursued to keep him housed and fed. At 67 he’s been in assisted living for 3 years. This is much less expensive to taxpayers than the 7 hospitalizations the previous year. BTW, he’s a big Trump supporter.

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I’m not taking up for them. God knows it’s one of the many things that drove me from the state, but I am (more or less) of them and I understand the mindset.

The attachment of an Appalachian to place is intense. For most of them, the idea of getting on a bus and getting the hell out is as outre as the idea of getting on a spaceship to Alpha Centauri. A few percent, including almost all of the ones at the right tail end of the IQ curve, leave, the rest stay and stay. And this seems to be a characteristic of poor people who grow up in mountainous areas everywhere, for some reason. Even those of us who get out feel the magnetic pull of that useless goddamn vertical terrain and familiar accents and feel a rush of warmth as soon as they appear on the horizon when we’re returning to what we still (and always will) think of as “home.”

And many people who leave a rural area for the Big City say they feel the same way, but I swear it is just different level of intensity for mountain-born people. The tragedy being, of course, that mountains always mean poverty because the terrain is inimical to the kind of economic development that benefits anyone other than a few mineral right owners. At best, you end up with a third-world resource extraction economy and a form of neo-colonialism.

When I was taking “Politics of Developing Nations,” I was stunned at how all of the characteristics common to post-colonial resource rich/cursed nations in Africa and South America applied to Appalachia. Absenteeism, kleptocracy and corruption, capital flight, abysmal government services used as a form of patronage rather than to improve the region and on and on and on.

And so, there they sit, decade after decade. Coal mine employment is now a tenth of what it was at its peak in th 50’s even as eastern U.S. production has remained steady for decades, because automation and strip mining have eliminated those jobs forever. Mines where the coal was high-sulfer are closed forever, because, yes, the Clean Air Act made it fucking worthless, mines where there is high-grade metallurgical coal benefitted for a while as power plants bought up the coal that used to be reserved for the steel industry back when steel was mostly made from ore and coke rather than just recycled. And now those mines are closed too. Mined out or unable to compete with mountain removal, Wyoming pits and, above all, natural gas.

And still they wait, unto the third generation, for the return of jobs that will never come back. Eagerly they will pin their hopes on any charlatan who promises to return them, as much as any poor person in a Great Lakes steel town experiencing the kind of social and economic collapse that has been the norm in Appalachia for decades. The only employers are the schools and the hospitals, with predictable consequences for the effectiveness and honesty of both. Huge numbers who aren’t lucky enough to get a school or hospital job live on sketchy disability claims or a relative’s, and, as in the cities, pervasive despair is what creates the customer base for opiates.

So why do they vote for Trump, why are they racist? Because if you are one of the lucky few with a job, you necessarily live in utter contempt of those on disability who you see as lazy parasites rather than victims. You naturally lump the disability rolls in with the drug addicts, conflating overlap with universality. And if you’re on disability despite being more or less able-bodied (and yeah, it’s not total fraud because none of them are healthy–poor diet, poverty and bad healthcare see to that), you desperately need to feel like there’s someone you’re better than, because otherwise how else can you live with yourself?

And the thing I find most distressing is that the second you try to describe the tragic mess that is Appalachia to many middle class liberals from elsewhere, you get zero compassion for them, because the way they express their ignorance and despair and anger at their lot in life is politically inconvenient for us. And you get to see the amazing spectacle of otherwise compassionate liberals talking like libertarian assholes. Full of moral instruction for the uplift of their inferiors, full of ideas on how they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, contemptuous of people physically, mentally and emotionally damaged by an accident of birth. Indeed, all too often, you’ll hear liberals talking about them in much the same way white racists talk about poor black people.

All too often, liberals look at Appalachians and see poor people they don’t want to help, poor people who they want to hurt the way Randian sociopaths like Ryan want to hurt all poor people. All too often, liberals wish them the worst because they “vote against their interests,” blind to how the prejudice and unshakable attachment to right wing ideas is a symptom of their intractable plight, as much as diabetes and Oxycontin.

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Towards the end of his second term, Clinton was trying to work on urban issues of the type you’re talking about. Of course the sex thing was all people could keep in their brains, so his work was for naught. I was trying to explain to Mom why some solution, or at least relief, to urban issues was so important to America. She just didn’t get it. While urban issues are much more explosive than Appalachian issues, Appalachia makes it onto my radar for strictly humanitarian reasons.

During this last election where coal country once again made it into the political discussion, I kept thinking that there must be some way to bring economic relief to the region. Everyone says no, but there must be a way to bring mountain people into the workforce. Telecommute? Small remote location centers for ? I refuse to believe there is no solution possible. Some of that money that’s going towards Trump’s weekly vacations could be used devise ideas that might work. Preferably devised by people with first hand experience in the area.

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Although I like your comment and agree with it, how does one help people who don’t know how to help themselves even in little ways? It’s going to take something that will give them hope, it’s going to take education, and it’s going to mean reliable jobs so that they can have a better life.

What jobs?

It’s one thing to explain the problems and attitudes. What are the solutions?

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It’s because of asshats like these that folks like me with legitimate medical claims for SSDI have to go through YEARS of review and appeals before they can get their benefits.

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People have been trying since the Johnson Roosevelt Administration. The Appalachian Regional Commission has been at it since 1964 and it has had some successes. But the hole was so very, very deep to start with and every step forward is met with two steps back.

And it’s a Gordian knot.

Bad, underfunded schools made worse by patronage, corruption and a societal bias against education because of the multi-generational experience that “eduction” = “leaving and never coming back except for the odd holiday.” And you can’t make them better without more revenue, you can’t generate more revenue without more economic development, you can’t get more economic development without better schools and outside money to try to make the schools better runs into all the other problems.

Bad roads. Hard to build them, much more expensive to maintain them and once built, you fight a losing maintenance battle to repair the damage done by coal trucks that are allowed to haul bigger loads than the roads can bear. Can’t make them better without more money and as to that, see above. Indeed, even with massive funding, you face a constant battle with nature. Anyone who’s ever driven through the mountains on I-40 can see a part of that.

And even leaving that aside, even with excellent infrastructure, the region suffers the basic competitive disadvantage of transport cost because you have to spend extra fuel fighting gravity to get into the mountains and then most of the gain in potential energy gets wasted as friction heat on the way back down because you’re frantically braking to keep the truck or train from running out of control.

Unbelievably bad water and sewer infrastructure. Gravity is the friend of water systems in the flatlands, and their enemy in the mountains. Mountains have a way of leaching heavy metals into water systems and wells even when people aren’t blowing up mountains and shoving the toxic overburden into watersheds. Added to the problem is a proliferation of privately owned water companies (because the state and local governments couldn’t or wouldn’t build them in the old days) acting as private interests.

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Just saying, there’s always going to be a lot of dependence and intractable poverty and that we have a moral duty to help them despite the fact that they will never, ever, ever be grateful for it. Because it’s humiliating and damaging to people who are, culturallly, abnormally prideful. They’ll hate us for it, hate those who receive it who aren’t related to them and they’ll vote for people who run on taking it all away, and we just have to do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

And I’m saying we owe it to ourselves to feel compassion rather than disdain (even knowing pity makes them more angry) and, above all, to avoid falling into the trap of thinking of them and talking about them like they’re some kind of degenerate subhuman subspecies.

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Help them how?

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Why do guys like this always have strange, oddly related to their crime, names???
I mean, not as obvious as Manny A. Bankrober or Stan P. Lurker, but you know what I mean…

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If there was an easy answer, it would already have been done, but it all comes down to money. And money helps. And there will likely never come a point when it will be self sustaining. But progress has occurred.

Largely through the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which Republicans have been trying to kill for decades, the number of high poverty counties in the region has been cut from nearly 300 in 1960 to less than a hundred now. Counties moving from high poverty to mere poverty over the course of a half century and more is what progress looks like there.

It’s slow, incremental progress. Two steps forward, one back. One forward, two back. Create one small business and then watch it die during the next recession and then incubate new ones. And it needs more, not less, help. It needs consistent help rather than constant spurts. A commitment to boring stuff, to building water and sewer systems that will never be able to operate economically without subsidies paid for by outside money, to improving roads even though they’ll be costly to maintain, and to dumping money into schools even knowing much of it will be dissipated by patronage and maladministration and that the best teachers will never come there without more money than anyone will ever give them.

And we have to do it knowing all they while that most of the beneficiaries will, at best, have no idea the government is making their lives better and, at worst, will actively curse government for doing it. And that’s the really hard part.

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I have to admit, I am pretty impressed with the dollars involved. even over a ten year period, for East Bumfuck, KY, those are pretty substantial average annual amounts. then I saw how much he actually made out of it over the same period, averaging out to around $600k a year. damn good for the area, but it seems kind of tiny, compared to the total each year.

hopefully, they’ll put him and those complicit with him away, in very unpleasant places, for several years. As well, I assume his assets will be seized and sold off, in an attempt to recover some of the monies he helped to steal from the rest of us.

yeah, I’m guessing he wasn’t an HRC voter last Nov.

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@centralasiaexpat

Conn Mc-Conn-ell …That work for you…?

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because the way they express their ignorance and despair and anger at their lot in life is politically inconvenient for us.

I’d use the words “damaging to us and our families” rather than “inconvenient for us,” but I won’t deny being one of those liberals who has always had a hard time summoning much sympathy. My parents were both born, raised, and college-educated in Missouri, and waved goodbye to to the state permanently by 1946. Both were authentic liberal Unitarian pinkos from the late 1940s onward, and they thoroughly despised the backwards rural attitudes that characterized the larger Missouri culture of their day, which was heavily influenced by the Appalachians who were the early settlers of the state. In particular, my parents hated the religion-based hostility to education and science and the overt racism and anti-Semitism that suffused life there. Their sympathies lay primarily with African Americans and other racial minorities, not with the white people they figuratively and literally left behind. I absorbed my parents’ attitudes as much as any kid does.

I agree with you that they deserve help anyhow because it’s the right thing to do, but not if it’s at the expense of helping other communities who are just as deserving and far more likely to support the broad political and policy agenda of the Democratic Party.

Do you think the “Eleven Nations” theory of the United States has any validity, or do you think it’s a bunch of hooey?

Greater Appalachia: Extending from West Virginia through the Great Smoky Mountains and into Northwest Texas, the descendants of Irish, English and Scottish settlers value individual liberty. Residents are “intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/

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All those coal country Trump voters getting illegal Federal disability benefits–hyprocrites and phonies.

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I’d be completely on board for helping folks in Appalachia. I would happily put taxpayer money behind relocation programs and retraining for starters. Programs like that don’t have to convince everyone but they might have some meaningful effect. We have many jobs that require skills the US is short of like high-skill welding. Please, people go for it. The pay is darned good.

What we can’t do is support dreamers who have fundamentally irrational attachments to declining places. As you write, it produces masses of dysfunction and now even leads to a decline in life expectancy for white Americans overall which is pretty shocking when you think about it. No matter an individuals attachment to place they do not get to commit fraud in order to have it, they do not get to leave their children orphans because they died of a drug overdose.

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