Category Archives: Red State Talk Radio

Chicago is Money Sick, Is it Contagious to Other Cities?

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Now that El Chapo Guzman has escaped prison in Mexico, Chicago will have an increase in their cartel and cocaine epidemic.
Chicago’s Financial Fire
The city faces trouble from every direction.

After years of warnings, financial reality is hitting home in Chicago, clouding Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hope for a transformational legacy. In March, Moody’s downgraded the city’s credit rating to junk, but Chicago’s financial hole long predates its ratings slide. The trouble began emerging at least as far back as 2003, albeit under the radar. Then, as the Great Recession pummeled municipal budgets around the country, former Mayor Richard M. Daley engaged in dubious deals, such as the city’s parking-meter lease. In 2010, as Daley’s tenure neared its close, Crain’s Chicago Business published an exposé on the troubling levels of debt that the mayor’s administration had accumulated. In 2013, after Daley had left office, the Chicago Tribune ran a series further detailing the city’s questionable debt practices, such as “scoop and toss”—that is, rolling over debt at higher cost as it came due, rather than paying it off. Chicago’s pension woes, along with Illinois’, started attracting media coverage—as did financial can-kicking by agencies like the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), which drained its reserves in 2012 and created a 2015 budget showing 14 months of revenue (“loopy,” said the Tribune). So for several years now, the media have been telling Chicagoans that there’s a financial crisis. But it hasn’t really felt like one, at least not in the booming Loop and on the North Side.

The Moody’s downgrade triggered termination clauses in swaps contracts that the city and CPS had been using as part of their financial juggling act, creating a liquidity crisis. To deal with the downgrade fallout, the city plans to issue $1.1 billion in long-term bonds. While some sort of refinancing may be required, the proposed debt issue contains maneuvers similar to those that helped get Chicago into trouble in the first place—including more scoop and toss deferrals, $75 million for police back pay, $62 million to pay a judgment related to the city’s lakefront parking-garage lease, and $35 million to pay debt on the acquisition of the former Michael Reese Hospital site (an architecturally significant complex Daley acquired and razed for an ill-fated Olympic bid). The debt-issue proposal also includes $170 million in so-called “capitalized interest” for the first two years. That is, Chicago is actually borrowing the money to pay the first two years of interest payments on these bonds. In true Chicago style, the proposal passed the city council on a 45-3 vote. Hey, at least the city is getting out of the swaps business.

Even with no further gimmicks, Emanuel will be six years into his mayoralty before the city can stop borrowing just to pay the interest on its debt. And without accounting for pensions, it will take the full eight years of both his terms to get the city to a balanced budget, where it can pay for the regular debt it has already accumulated.

Then there’s the crisis engulfing the city’s schools, which are facing 1,000 layoffs and numerous other cuts to avoid running out of cash. Forced by a state mandate to start paying its pensions, CPS coughed up $634 million as required last week. A recent Ernst & Young report said that even if CPS got another five-year pension-contribution holiday, it would still rack up an additional $2.4 billion in accumulated deficits by 2020. Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union, hostile to any reform that would affect teacher salaries and benefits, says that the district is “broke on purpose.” And CPS has no permanent CEO in place after Barbara Byrd-Bennett resigned last month amid a federal investigation into no-bid contracts.

Emanuel wants Springfield to pay for Chicago’s teacher pensions going forward, as it does for every other school district. He has a legitimate gripe here, but the state is in a deep financial hole of its own, with its teacher-pension fund in even worse shape than the city’s—and a government shutdown looming over the failure to pass a budget.

It’s not just the teachers’ pensions that are in trouble in Chicago; pensions for all municipal workers are woefully underfunded. (Separately, Cook County plans to raise its sales tax by one percentage point to start dealing with its own yawning pension gap.) Emanuel is willing to raise taxes by instituting a $175 million annual pension levy for the schools, but even his best-case scenario for pensions leaves a structural deficit in the CPS operating budget. And an Illinois Supreme Court ruling puts the previously negotiated city reforms in jeopardy. The court struck down state-level pension reform, saying that even future pension accruals for public employees can’t be reduced—a ruling that triggered the Moody’s downgrade. Emanuel denounced the Moody’s decision while strongly defending the legality of his reform. He makes good arguments, but he’s up against an extremely pro-union court. Perhaps recognizing this, he isn’t even trying to reform the police and fire pension funds. Instead, he proposes simply to defer and extend payments. If adopted, it would mean that the city wouldn’t be on track to funding its pensions until 2021—a decade after Emanuel was first elected. Even so, Crain’s projects that this would raise the city’s slice of property taxes next year by 31 percent—and by more than 50 percent if the deferrals aren’t approved.

Add it up and Chicago residents face another five to six years of pain just to get into a position where they might begin climbing out of the hole. This surely isn’t where Rahm Emanuel envisioned himself back in 2011. One wonders whether he fully understood the true financial condition of Chicago when he decided to pursue the mayor’s office—or grasped the lack of power even the most autocratic mayors have compared with the president or a governor.

Even if all of Emanuel’s reforms go through, the best that he could hope for is that after nearly a decade in office, he will have put out Chicago’s financial fire. There is one thing he can do, however, truly to change the trajectory: partner with Illinois governor Bruce Rauner to get legislation passed requiring that all future local-government employees get 401k-style defined-contribution pensions. This would make it much harder for future administrations to create another pension disaster.

Of course, getting such a law passed wouldn’t be easy, which is precisely why a tough guy like Emanuel should take a shot at it. If he succeeded, he could yet leave a legacy that future generations of Chicagoans would look back on with gratitude.

Those Neighbors Did NOT KNOW this About the Chattanooga Shooter

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The family while from Jordan, the father is Palestinian. He is and was abusive to all family members and the mother (wife) has additional family members in the United States.

There are clues that the son, the shooter lived in Jordan after graduating from college and possibly traveled to Yemen. The passport is being investigated for all family members.

Upon Mohammad’s return home to Chattanooga, he was radicalized and found a new circle of jihad friends online.

Terror on the Homefront

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From FNC: “Terrorist organizations are spending time and money and using American social media platforms to recruit and incite sympathizers and ‘lone wolves’ here in the United States and around the world,” said a GIPEC analyst. “The social media companies have a moral responsibility to make their platforms safe from these horrific and directional posts that call for terrorist behavior that we have been witnessing over the past months.”

Now for the chilling family details the neighbors never saw or knew

CNN News Source:

 

Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez grew up in a home where his father, Youssuf S. Abdulazeez, according to divorce papers filed by his mother, had beaten her repeatedly, sometimes “severely,” leading Rasmia Abdulazeez to file for divorce and seek a restraining order in February 2009. The mother alleged in the divorce filing that Youssuf Abdulazeez sought to take a second wife.

Mohammad Abdulazeez, who was killed by Chattanooga police after his rampage Thursday, would have been 18 years old at the time of the filing of the court papers, in which his mother states he and his four siblings witnessed the violence in the home.

The divorce papers were filed by the mother in Hamilton County, Tennessee, and state that Youssuf Abdulazeez “has repeatedly beaten Plaintiff, including at times in the presence of children. On one occasion, he beat Plaintiff so severely that she has fled the marital home and went to a Crisis Center.”

The mother also alleged that the father “has sexually assaulted the Plaintiff in the marital home when the children have also been in the home,” and that occasionally, he was “physically and verbally abusive towards the children, striking and berating them without provocation or justification.”

At one point, Rasmia Abdulazeez’ brothers came to Chattanooga from Kuwait and Washington, D.C. to “work out family difficulties,” but that after they returned “Defendant has become more abusive,” according to the complaint filed by the mother.

In the court papers, Rasmia Abdulazeez claims that her husband “…intends to take a second wife, as permitted under Islamic law, in the parties’ native State of Palestine.” Rasmia Abdulazeez was seeking custody of the couple’s minor children because, according to her, she did not work and her husband only gave her a few dollars a week.

Despite problems described by the mother in the papers, the case was all dropped and an agreement signed by both husband and wife was filed to end the dispute within several weeks, the papers show.

In the agreement to end the dispute, the “Husband agrees to not inflict any personal injury, harm, or insult upon the Wife or upon any of the children of their marriage.” In those documents the elder Abdulazeez also “agrees to be responsible for financially supporting the family and paying for the day-to-day expenses associated with the family’s residence… and the needs of the members of the household.”

The FBI hasn’t released much information on Mohammad Abdulazeez, saying it doesn’t yet know what motivated Thursday’s bloodshed, but it is working on an assumption.

“We will treat this as a terrorism investigation until it can be determined that it is not,” said FBI Special Agent Edward Reinhold.

People who knew Mohammad Abdulazeez said they were stunned to hear he was the man who went on such a violent, murderous spree, when he sprayed a military recruiting center at a strip mall with bullets on Wednesday, then drove more than 7 miles to assault a Navy Operational Support Center.

Mohammad Abdulazeez was born in Kuwait in September 1990, during the Iraqi invasion of that country, Kuwait’s Interior Ministry said Friday, but he was also a holder of a “temporary Jordanian passport,” according to a Jordanian government source.

They explained that Abdulazeez was a Palestinian who used the temporary Jordanian passport as a travel document. Jordan issued such temporary passports to Gazans and some other Palestinians. But the officials stressed he is not considered to be a Jordanian citizen.

Abdulazeez was in Jordan in 2014, when he visited an uncle there; it is believed he spent months there on his visit.

The father, Youssuf Abdulazeez, is believed to have left Jordan and came to the United States in 1982, according to Jordanian officials.

Law enforcement officials told CNN the father’s name came up during a FBI terror-financing investigation in the 1990s, and the FBI fully investigated him in 2002 for alleged financial support of overseas groups, but both investigations were closed with no charges brought against Youssuf Abdulazeez.

Numerous efforts by CNN to reach the father, Youssuf Abdulazeez, for comment about the divorce papers and allegations were unsuccessful.

He did not appear to have an attorney or make any court filings during the civil proceedings with his wife.

One Year Later, Russia Still Spinning Shooting MH17 out of Sky

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It has been one year since Soviet loyalists shot MH 17 out of the sky killing over Ukraine with a BUK missile. Reuters has a summary background here.

Since that time, Russia has denied any involvement while only recently has Putin referred to a ‘kinda-sorta’ maybe position.

From WSJ in part: MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin says he won’t accept a proposal for the U.N. Security Council to set up a criminal tribunal over the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, casting doubt on the prospect of bringing those responsible to justice under international law.

In a phone call Thursday with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Mr. Putin called the proposal “untimely and counterproductive,” according to a Kremlin statement. He said a “thorough and objective” international investigation had to finish before countries took any decisions on how to punish those guilty of the crime.

Russia holds a veto in the U.N. Security Council, giving it the final say on any of the council’s efforts. A year after the crash in eastern Ukraine, there are other avenues to pursue a prosecution, but the challenges are deep.

There were cell phone videos that were taken by the ‘separatists’ and they have finally surfaced telling a disgusting story.

From Buzzfeed: Two days after MH17 was shot down over east Ukraine — turning a simmering separatist conflict into a crisis of global proportions — the crash site remains a hideous mess that will make it harder for investigators to establish what happened — and for relatives to get peace. As Ukraine, Russia, and Moscow-backed rebels trade barbs over which side fired the missile that brought the Boeing 777 jet down, the bodies of the 298 passengers and crew killed instantaneously were still strewn across a field, decomposing in the 85-degree heat.

 Nobody seemed to know where the bodies would be taken. Ukraine wants them stored 185 miles north in Kharkiv, the only nearby city with the facilities to take them, but claims that rebels have already spirited 38 corpses to their nearby stronghold in Donetsk and conducted their own autopsies. With the wreckage from the crash spread out over a 10-square-mile radius, the many bodies still at the scene may fare worse. Ukraine claims to have found 186, and BuzzFeed counted 82 in Hrabove alone, many of them unmoved since the crash. Local firemen and police officers, some of whom had clearly spent the night drinking moonshine, listlessly shoveled body parts into black garbage bags and left them to broil at the roadside.

The wreckage of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 is shown after it crashed near the town of Shaktarsk, in rebel-held east Ukraine, on July 17, 2014

   

In part from Australia: The plane was shot down during a bout of heavy fighting last year between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists, sparking global condemnation.

Kiev and the West point the finger at the separatists, saying they may have used a BUK surface-to-air missile supplied by Russia. But Moscow denies involvement and instead accuses Ukraine’s military.

A criminal probe by a joint investigation team consisting of Australian, Belgian, Dutch, Malaysian and Ukrainian detectives is currently underway.

The five countries have also asked the United Nations Security Council to establish an international criminal tribunal to try those responsible for crimes connected to the plane’s downing.

 

Iran Agreement Celebrated by WH, What Others are Doing

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While no one has paid much attention beyond Obama spiking the football, it is important to keep a keen eye on those countries affected and the other secret maneuvers the White House is still doing.

1. The National Security Council, the White House and the State Department have delivered the JPOA already to the United Nations before Congress received it, much less can debate it.

2. Those pesky inspections that likely will not happen at all, they certainly wont happen by ANY U.S. personnel. Iran has banned U.S. Inspectors.

3. An Iranian police chief has now been put in charge of Yemen with the West’s approval.

4. There are several additional parts to the JPOA that are under negotiation now, so a full understanding of the whole agreement cannot even be accessed nor achieved.

5. The deal with Iran includes elements to destroy Israel’s ability to defend itself.

6. Saudi Arabia made a decision to NOT wait until Iran get their big cash payload, they are moving ahead in matters with Yemen, Syria and offensive measures with Iran.

7. The White House is now meeting with Saudi Arabia and Israel to re-gen the relationship. A Saudi envoy is in Washington DC for talks and Secretary of Defense has been dispatched to Israel.

8. There are talks to provide Israel with the B-52 bombers and the Bunker Busters have already been upgraded and delivered.

9. Investigations are underway to determine what Iran will buy and stockpile with respect to their missile inventory given that concession.

10. Due to unforeseen future actions by Iran, the Pentagon has war-planners determining all military responses against Iran.

11. Several concerned countries have offered alternative plans to the signed Iran P5+1 deal yet they are being dismissed and or rejected, spelling out larger allied separation from the United States.

12. Future Middle East unrest and attacks are forecasted.

13. Russia is fully empowered with the Iran deal but may have to take a short term financial hit on oil prices.

14. Bashir al Assad of Syria remains in power, gets a financial boost from Iran and the civil war in Syria continues.

15. Allies are at odds over the Iran deal as noted by the clash between the UK and Israel.

16. The arms race in the Middle East has begun such that it includes missiles and purchasing nuclear weapons.

17. The continued divided between the White House and Congress is now permanently broken where Joe Biden has been dispatched to sell it.

18. The Iran lobby money and operations will escalate in Washington DC.

19. By Iran receiving billions, the plotting of future terrorism around the globe is probable.

20. Iran is already threatening those who opposed the deal.

21. Iran is now open for global business and Europe is delighted where they will fund additional aggressions by a rogue country leaving the United States to track covert money, agreements and relationships.

22. Iran and Cuba human rights abuses will continue to be noticed and checked yet will go without consequence.

 

Raised Level to ForceCon Bravo Failed Chattanooga

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U.S. Northern Command Admiral William Gortney ordered the increase of the force protection condition in the United States to FPCON Bravo in May of 2015.

This order was to increase security given recent threats from Islamic State when they posted the names and photos of former and active military personnel on the internet.

Additionally, this came on the heels of the Garland, Texas shooting coupled with the aggressive and correct statements from FBI Director James Comey where all 50 states had open investigations on terror plots.

Over the July 4th Independence Day weekend, the FBI made several arrests of which the details on those cases have not been fully released.

It should be noted there has been a calculated mistake made by the Obama administration in cadence with the Pentagon to train Islamists and to have them embed with our forces where often the results have been deadly, most notably the deaths of Seal Team 6 members in Extortion 17.

The enemy has embedded with our forces and the psychology of our troops has been to accept this dangerous condition where if for nothing else the Green on Blue attacks occur all too often.

When it comes to attacks on any of our military bases anywhere in the world, the security trip wires for protection is wrapped in political correctness and includes our diplomatic posts which lead to the cause of death in locations such as Benghazi. A suicide attack in the first week of July killed 33 in Khost, Afghanistan at a NATO base.

It was only a few weeks ago that a potentially deadly decision was made that former U.S. bases in Iraq would come out of mothballs and re-open on a measured schedule, when one base in particular, Taqqadum is now staffed with both Iranian militia and U.S. forces. How deadly stupid is that?

The matter of feeble security and the decisions to keep a LIGHT FOOTPRINT  has been a well argued issue going back to 2011 where serious testimony and factual events were listed for both at home and abroad.

It is important to take a look back. It puts things in real perspective given the ‘Allah’ event in Chattanooga that took the treasured lives of 4 Marines.

It must also be noted and beyond dispute, there is NO such thing as a ‘lone wolf’, that is merely a poll tested phrase to not offend any enemy. Any wolf is led by a pack leader after an effective propaganda war creed launched.

December 2011, the document report and testimony to Congress

Homegrown Terrorism: The Threat To Military Communities Inside The United States

At least 33 threats, plots and strikes against U.S. military communities since 9/11 have been part of a surge of homegrown terrorism which Attorney General Eric Holder has said “keeps me up at night.” After Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was killed May 1, the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Defense Intelligence Agency warned thousands of U.S. law enforcement and security agencies about possible retaliatory attacks by Al Qaeda, its allies or unaffiliated homegrown terrorists on our military. Weeks after the Pakistan raid, two radicalized U.S. citizens allegedly plotted to attack military personnel in Seattle.

The Majority Staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security has been conducting an investigation, which finds that 70% of the plots against military targets occurred since mid-2009 – including the two successful homeland attacks since 9/11. Other key findings:

 More than five terror plots have been disrupted involving U.S. military insiders in the past decade and at least 11 or more cases involved veterans or those who attempted to join law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The likelihood of another deadly attack by a trusted insider is a severe and emerging threat, which the Pentagon is aggressively investigating to identify perpetrators;

 Two successful attacks against the military outside of Afghanistan and Iraq were perpetrated by radicalized soldiers assigned to U.S.-based Army units: at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait in 2003 and at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009;

 At least 16 external terror plots targeting military personnel stationed inside the U.S. Homeland have been disrupted or investigated;

 At least nine other external plots were thwarted involving U.S. Persons in the homeland who traveled or planned trips overseas to kill G.I.s in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere;

 A growing number of terrorist threats are directed at families of military personnel. Particularly at risk are relatives of troops in units involved in counterterror operations.

For the full 14 page report that includes names and locations up to 2011, click here.