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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.
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.
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
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.
The Muslim brother in the White House had very shallow and empty words in response to the jihad massacre in Chattanooga where 4 Marines were killed. Remember, Obama is their direct boss and Commander in Chief.
He is just not that into our military, much less Christians.
During the Islamic month of Ramadan, Obama provides deep recognition, respect and benevolence to Islam.
On Monday, Barack Obama, speaking at an Iftar dinner (the evening meal when Muslims end their daily Ramadanfast at sunset), he hosted at the White House, intoned to his audience, “The Koran teaches us that God’s children tread gently on the earth … We affirm that whatever our faith, we are one family.”
Praising two Muslim young women he invited to sit at his table, Obama lauded Samantha Elauf, who sued Abercombie and Fitch and won in the Supreme Court after she claimed she was not hired because she wore a hijab, saying he had not spoken before the Supreme Court at her age.
Obama has never spoken before the Supreme Court.
Abercrombie and Fitch has hired other women wearing hijabs; Elauf, a Palestinian-American who boasts #free Palestine on her Twitter feed, was initially awarded $20,000 by a federal court in Tulsa, but the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver threw out that decision because Elauf had not asked Abercrombie to accommodate her head scarf.
Obama also praised Munira Khalif, who has spoken in front of the United Nations regarding women being counted in a census. Khalif recently graduated high school in Minnesota and was accepted by every Ivy League school, choosing Harvard. Obama said when he was 18 he had not spoken before the UN. Read more here.
There are 4 Americans in prison in Iran for which there have been countless calls and efforts for their release. Major Garrett of CBS asked Barack Obama during a press conference if he was content with leaving those Americans behind to which Obama responded by shaming Garrett for even asking the question.
It should also be noted that the Palestinian Authority demanded that thousands of terrorists in prison in Israel be released for a scheduled round of peace talks between Israel and the PA. Barack Obama forced Israel to comply for face financial extortion. Israel complied where later many of those terrorists were re-arrested in Qatar. The betrayal continues. The secrets were effective.
Mojtaba Atarodi, arrested in California for attempting to acquire equipment for Iran’s military-nuclear programs, was released in April as part of back channel talks, Times of Israel told. The contacts, mediated in Oman for years by close colleague of the Sultan, have seen a series of US-Iran prisoner releases, and there may be more to come
The secret back channel of negotiations between Iran and the United States, which led to this month’s interim deal in Geneva on Iran’s rogue nuclear program, has also seen a series of prisoner releases by both sides, which have played a central role in bridging the distance between the two nations, the Times of Israel has been told.
In the most dramatic of those releases, the US in April released a top Iranian scientist, Mojtaba Atarodi, who had been arrested in 2011 for attempting to acquire equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs.
American and Iranian officials have been meeting secretly in Oman on and off for years, according to a respected Israeli intelligence analyst, Ronen Solomon. And in the past three years as a consequence of those talks, Iran released three American prisoners, all via Oman, and the US responded in kind. Then, most critically, in April, when the back channel was reactivated in advance of the Geneva P5+1 meetings, the US released a fourth Iranian prisoner, high-ranking Iranian scientist Atarodi, who was arrested in California on charges that remain sealed but relate to his attempt to acquire what are known as dual-use technologies, or equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs. Iran has not reciprocated for that latest release.
Solomon, an independent intelligence analyst (who in 2009 revealed the crucial role played by German Federal Intelligence Service officer Gerhard Conrad in the negotiations that led to the 2011 Gilad Shalit Israel-Hamas prisoner deal), has been following the US-Iran meetings in Oman for years. Detailing what he termed the “unwritten prisoner exchange deals” agreed over the years in Oman by the US and Iran, Solomon told The Times of Israel that “It’s clear what the Iranians got” with the release of top scientist Atarodi in April. “What’s unclear is what the US got.”
The history of these deals, though, he said, would suggest that in the coming months Iran will release at least one of three US citizens who are currently believed to be in Iranian custody. One of these three is former FBI agent Robert Levinson.
Solomon told The Times of Israel that the interlocutor in the Oman talks is a man named Salem Ben Nasser al Ismaily, who is the executive president of the Omani Center for Investment Promotion and Export Development and a close confidant of the Omani leader Sultan Qaboos bin Said.
The latter tells the fictional tale of John Wilkinson, a successful American businessman who fails in all of his business endeavors in the Gulf until he meets Sultan, who explains to him, according to the book’s promotional literature, how to forgo his hard-charging Western style and “surrender to very different values rooted in ancient tribal customs and traditions.” Those mores have been central to the murky prisoner swaps surrounding the nuclear negotiations, Solomon said.
Solomon said he identified Ismaily’s role back in September 2010, when Sarah Shourd, an American who apparently inadvertently crossed into Iran while hiking near the Iraqi border, was released, for what were called humanitarian reasons. She was delivered into Ismaily’s hands in Oman and from there was flown to the US — the first release in the series of deals brokered in Oman. One year later, in September 2011, her fiancé and fellow hiker, Shane Bauer, was set free along with their friend, Josh Fattal. The two men were also received at Muscat’s Seeb military airport by Ismaily before being flown back to the US.
The US began reciprocating in August 2012, Solomon said. It freed Shahrzad Mir Gholikhan, an Iranian convicted on three counts of weapons trafficking. Next Nosratollah Tajik, a former Iranian ambassador to Jordan — who, like Gholikhan, had been initially apprehended abroad trying to buy night-vision goggles from US agents — was freed after the US opted not to follow up an extradition request it had submitted to the British. Then, in January 2013, Amir Hossein Seirafi was released, also via Oman, having been arrested in Frankfurt and convicted in the US of trying to buy specialized vacuum pumps that could be used in the Iranian nuclear program.
Finally, in April, came the release of Mojtaba Atarodi.
The facts of his case are still shrouded. On December 7, 2011, Atarodi, a faculty member at the prestigious Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in Tehran — a US-educated electrical engineer with a heart condition, a green card and a brother living in the US — arrived at LAX and was arrested by US federal officials.
He appeared twice in US federal court in San Francisco and was incarcerated at a federal facility in Dublin, California and then kept under house arrest. The US government cloaked the contents of his indictment and released no statement upon his release. His lawyer, Matthew David Kohn, told The Times of Israel he would like to discuss the case further but that first he had to “make some inquiries” to see what he was allowed to reveal.
In January, shortly after Atarodi’s arrest, his colleagues wrote a letter to the journal Nature, protesting his detention. “We believe holding a distinguished 55-year-old professor in custody is a historical mistake and not commensurate with the image that America strives to extend throughout the world as a bastion of free scientific exchange among schools and academic institutions,” they said.
Solomon, who compiled a profile of Atarodi, believes that the scientist, prior to his arrest, played an important role in Iran’s missile and nuclear programs. Atarodi, he said, has co-authored more than 30 technical articles, mostly related to micro-electric engineering and, in 2011, won the Khwarizmi award for the design of a microchip receiver for digital photos. “That same technology,” he said, “can be used for missile guidance and the analysis of nuclear tests.”
Solomon further noted that the then-Iranian defense minister and former commander of the revolutionary guards, Ahmad Vahidi, attended the prize ceremony and that Professor Massoud Ali-Mahmoudi, an Iranian physics professor who was assassinated in 2010, was an earlier recipient of the prize.
“There is no doubt in my mind that Atarodi came to the US at the behest of the logistics wing of the IRGC [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps],” Solomon said.
On April 26 Atarodi was flown from the US to Seeb military airbase in Oman, where he met with Ismaily, and onward to Iran. “The release of someone who holds that sort of information and has advanced strategic projects in Iran is a prize,” Solomon said. The US, said Solomon, must have already received something in return or will do so in the future.
Thus far, US-Iran prisoner swaps have been conducted in a manner utterly distinct from the old Cold War rituals, in which, as was the case with Prisoner of Zion Natan Sharansky, spies or prisoners from either side of the Iron Curtain walked across Berlin’s old Glienicke Bridge toward their respective home countries. Instead, with Iran claiming it knows nothing about the whereabouts of former FBI agent Levinson, for instance, and the US eager to show that it will not barter with hostage-takers, the deals have taken the form of a delayed quid pro quo.
There are currently three US nationals — Levinson, Saeed Abedini, and Amir Hekmati — still believed to be held in Iran.
US President Barak Obama raised the issue of the imprisoned Americans in his historic September phone call to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Blinken, told CNN that aside from the nuclear program it was the only other issue that was brought up in the call.
The interim deal in Geneva did not include any reference to prisoner dealings. Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN, “you’ve got to decide how much you’re going to try to accomplish, and just tackling all the dimensions of the nuclear agreement is ambition enough.” A spokeswoman for the National Security Council added that the “talks focused exclusively on nuclear issues.”
The omission prompted the chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, Jay Sekulow, who is representing Pastor Saeed Abedini’s wife Naghmeh, to charge Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry with turning their backs on an American citizen. On the center’s website, he called the decision “outrageous and a betrayal” and said it sends the message that “Americans are expendable.”
Abedini, who was born in Iran and later converted to Christianity, was arrested earlier this year in Iran for what would seem was strictly Christian charity work and sentenced to eight years in prison. He was recently transferred from Evin Prison, a notorious jail for political prisoners in Tehran, Sukelow wrote in a letter to Kerry, “to the even more notorious and brutal Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj.”
Amir Hekmati, a 31-year-old former Marine from Flint, Michigan, who allegedly obtained permission to visit his grandmother in Iran in 2011, was charged with espionage and sentenced to death in 2012. In September, Hekmati managed to smuggle a letter out of prison. Published in the Guardian, it contended that his filmed admission of guilt had been coerced and that his arrest “is part of a propaganda and hostage-taking effort by Iranian intelligence to secure the release of Iranians abroad being held on security-related charges.”
Levinson, a 65-year-old veteran of the FBI, was last seen on March 9, 2007, on Kish Island, Iran. According to Solomon, Levinson was stationed in Dubai at the time as part of a US task force comprised of former officers operating in the United Arab Emirates, training officials there to combat weapons trafficking, and was tempted to come to Kish for a meeting.
The last person he is known to have had contact with, and with whom he shared a room the night before his abduction, according to a Reuters article from 2007, is Dawud Salahuddin, an American convert to Islam, who is wanted in the US for murder. According to a New Yorker profile of the Long Island-born Salahuddin, he showed up at the home of Ali Akbar Tabatabai’s Bethseda, Maryland door in July 1980, dressed as a mailman, and shot Tabatabai, a Shah supporter, three times in the abdomen, killing him. From there he fled to Canada and on to Switzerland and Iran.
Salahuddin has indicated that Levinson had come to Kish to meet with him.
In September, Rouhani denied any knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts. In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, he said that, “We don’t know where he is, who he is. He is an American who has disappeared. We have no news of him.”
This is highly doubtful. In 2010 and 2011 Levinson’s family received a video and photographs respectively of him in captivity. In January of this year the AP reported that “despite years of denials,” many US security officials now believe that “Iran’s intelligence service was almost certainly behind the 54-second video and five photographs of Levinson that were emailed anonymously to his family.” The photos and the videos traced back to different addresses in Afghanistan and Pakistan, suggesting, perhaps, that Levinson, the longest-held hostage in US history, was imprisoned in Balochistan, a desert region spanning the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
On Tuesday, Levinson’s son Dan wrote a column in the Washington Post calling Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif “well-respected men committed to the goodwill of all human beings, regardless of their nationality.”
Several hours later, White House Spokesman Jay Carney published a statement saying that the US government welcomes the assistance “of our international partners” in attempting to bring Levinson home and, he added, “we respectfully ask the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to assist us in securing Mr. Levinson’s health, welfare, and safe return.”
As was the case with the Geneva negotiations, and as is likely happening with the upcoming round of talks regarding Syria, there is good reason to believe, and in this case to hope, that the movements played out under the spotlights of the international stage have been choreographed well in advance, perhaps in the sea-side city of Muscat, under the careful tutelage of Salem Ben Nasser al Ismaily.
