It’s not rocket science: cut tax rates, revoke sanctuary status, lock up the criminals. That’s all. Business will thrive again; tourists and shoppers will return. But the Chicago Democratic Machine just doesn’t do “solutions.”
Chicago: A City in Freefall
Water Tower Place, an eight-story, 758,000 sq. ft. high-end shopping mall in downtown Chicago, is in the news.
Once one of the biggest and most exciting malls in the Midwest, it quietly leaked that the owners are interested in renting out the top five of its eight floors “for purposes other than retail.”
Not just wealthy shoppers, but even browsing tourists, too, it seems, are staying away in droves.
Chicago could support such a luxury mall once. The Magnificent Mile was a thrilling destination for generations. What happened to Chicago’s iconic Michigan Boulevard? Or to back up even farther — what happened to Chicago?
Chicago.
The Second City. The Biggest Airport in the World. The City of Big Shoulders. Hog Butcher to the World.
Back when it was The City That Worked, Chicago had a lot of nicknames, and for good reason, before we lost them, one by one. We were known as a global corporate center, a transportation hub, a theatre district second only to New York, a restaurant destination second to none.
But Chicago has been other things too, all along. A machine town run by one corrupt party, the Democrats. A world-famous home of organized crime, from the mafiosi of the Prohibition Era to the drug gangs of today. A tax and regulatory hell where the government’s share of your income, both above board and under the table, was always painful.
So, living and working in Chicago — and by extension, in Chicagoland — has always been a challenge. As an employer, you had to charge more for your product, to cover the taxes and graft. As an employee, you had to be paid more, in salary and benefits, to cover the income tax and property tax, the sales tax and highway tolls. Everything adds up, making this an expensive place, not just for some of us, but for virtually all of us.
Still, it could be worthwhile. For a long time — over a century — the math could work, because the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.
Theaters could charge more for tickets, restaurants could charge more for dinner, office buildings could charge more for rent, all because of the cachet of being in Chicago.
Where else can you enjoy a different cuisine every meal for weeks? Where else can you see a different professional show every day, visit a different world-class museum or aquarium or art gallery every day?
And if you’re here on business, where else can you call on dozens of customers in the same downtown on the same business trip? You don’t need to fly to ten different airports; whatever your business may be, you have a week’s worth of clients to visit on the same expense report. Even Chicago’s high costs didn’t stop a visit from being cost-effective in the end.
But there’s a funny thing about this kind of math. It works...until it doesn’t.
Over the past couple of generations, other cities grew, even surpassing Chicago in size. Other cities learned how to cook more than one cuisine, build more than one theater, develop a variety of shopping and cultural options. Other cities built office complexes and skyscrapers to host world-class corporate headquarters.
There are now dozens of cities that boast all the same benefits as Chicago, without the negatives that Chicago has.
Chicago’s key negatives — the crooked politicians, the high taxes, the outrageous crime — have only continued to grow, often on purpose.
Chicago’s crooked politicians now have complete control over state government, rolling over the much more reasonable politicians of downstate (or outstate) Illinois. This has caused the tax and regulatory burden, already high, to skyrocket. They have mandated sanctuary city status, filling the city, county, and state with indigent illegals to swell the already unaffordable welfare rolls. They have taken a Safe-T Act approach to defanging the criminal justice system, increasing the crime problem exponentially by empowering and encouraging the criminal element.
In nearly every other arena of life, we see people and organizations in a competitive environment rise to the challenge. When a sports team gets better, its rivals do, too. They have to. When a restaurant or department store becomes more popular, its competitors across the street or across the mall quickly up their game as well, offering better value, better service, better quality, better ambiance — whatever it takes to win back the customers they’ve lost.
Only in politics do we see this apparent disinterest in results. Only in the sphere of state and local governments do we see politicians uninterested in the decline of their cities, the indigence of their population, the loss of opportunities for the generations to come.
In both Chicago and Springfield, the statistics virtually scream for a change in direction, and our politicians just whistle louder to themselves, hands over their ears, as they continue to do more of the things that caused the problems.
It’s not rocket science: cut tax rates, revoke sanctuary status, lock up the criminals. That’s all. Business will thrive again; tourists and shoppers will return. But the Chicago Democratic Machine just doesn’t do “solutions.”
If Chicago is to compete with the rest of the world, and become a happy destination again instead of the place that everyone flees, we need to replace our politicians...before there’s nothing left for this City of Big Shoulders to rebuild.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. Read his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II).
Image: PhotosByMahin via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
Leftist cities: Be careful what you wish for because you’re going to get it
A young friend of mine moved to Portland, Oregon, because, as a nascent hipster, he thought Portland would be a cool yet affordable place to live. After less than a year there, he can’t wait to leave. The coup de grace to his dreams of a life in the hipster capital of the Pacific Northwest was the mini tent city that sprang up immediately outside the door of his apartment building. Apparently, stepping through human feces, needles, and used condoms just isn’t hip. Indeed, Portland is so bad that even the drug dealers don’t want to live there anymore, proving the truth of Prof. Peter St. Onge’s thesis about the problems flowing to the winner in gamed elections.
I was first in Portland in 1966 and last in Portland in 2013. Both times, Portland presented the same face: It was a clean, charming little city that I found enchanting as a little girl and a grown woman. Since then, while it’s been amusing to watch the hipster takeover, it’s been much less amusing to watch the decay as hard leftists took over the city’s governance, doing away with the police and opening the door to an unlimited influx of drug addicts people.
In 2020, Oregon voters decided to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs. Technically, selling them is still a crime, but the police in Portland don’t police that crime. With a dramatically reduced force, why bother? When your city has gone in a few years from one of the safest cities in America to one of its murder capitals, policing drug sales is a low priority. The city has been adding police to its roster again, but it’s a case of too little, too late.
Image: Naked warfare on Portland’s streets. X screen grab.
With legalized hard drugs, the homeless situation in Portland…which is a problem, not of poverty, but of substance abuse and mental illness…is so bad that even the drug dealers are desperate for more stringent laws:
Three years on, the policy, known as Measure 110, has proved to be disastrous. Even Utah, a 33-year-old former forklift truck driver who prefers to give the Mail only his 'street' name, freely admits he cannot understand what possessed his fellow Oregonians to support the move.
Speaking of the policy's effect on drug use in the city, he says: 'It's made it worse. Don't get me wrong, it makes it better for me, but getting the police off our backs and giving us free pipes and foil to do our drugs is not going to get us off the streets.'
He estimates that 20 per cent of the city's more than 5,000 homeless people want to tackle their addiction. But it's hard when they live in a city that Measure 110 has turned into what even the Left-wing New York Times recently called a 'drug-user's paradise'.
And it appears that after nearly three years in which Portland's once attractive and vibrant downtown area has been turned into a tent-covered hellscape of soaring crime, endemic drug abuse and maniacal behaviour, the rest of the city has finally accepted that the decriminalisation experiment has spectacularly failed.
Locals complain of having to step over used needles, shattered glass pipes and human faeces on the way to work, and say they've become inured even to blood- curdling screaming fits from disturbed addicts.
This viral video gives some sense of what’s happening on Portland’s streets:
I saw this report on the woes of legalized drugs and limited policing yesterday. Then, today, I saw a video by Prof. St. Onge explaining that, when you game elections, you become obligated only to those who work the system with you to keep you in power. (E.g., the LGBTQ+ lobby, which is politically powerful but numerically small.) The actual voters are no longer important. Inevitably, their lives degrade in very painful ways. Eventually, the party’s voters abandon it:
We are, of course, seeing this problem play out in Democrat-run cities across America, not to mention in the whole of America. Not a single Democrat policy benefits the majority of people. Instead, each caters to a numerically small demographic willing to go to the wall for Democrats.
However, because that demographic is small, ultimately, it cannot maintain weight at the ballot box. There’s not enough cheating in the world to give it the margin it needs to win. (Of course, all that is off the table once the party in power resorts to force of arms, but we must hope it doesn’t come to that.)
Democrat policies are losers. The sooner the American voters wise up and turn their backs on the Democrats, the better and safer we’ll be.
“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
Why Elon Musk is right about George Soros
Something some observers of public life in the United States and elsewhere have been wondering for a long time is whether, if you wanted to destroy American civilization, its values, traditions, and institutions, you would act differently from how George Soros has acted so far. I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s richest man, seems to agree.
“In my opinion, he fundamentally hates humanity,” Musk said during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization, getting D.A.s elected who refuse to prosecute crime. That’s part of the problem in San Francisco and L.A. and other cities.” As for why Soros uses his Open Society Foundations to focus on local races instead of national campaigns, “once you get to city and state district attorneys,” he explained, “the value for money is extremely good. Soros realized you don’t actually need to change the laws; you just need to change how they’re enforced; if nobody chooses to enforce the law — or the law’s differentially enforced — it’s like changing the laws.”
Not by chance, to make an example, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who a few months ago became the first prosecutor to bring a criminal case against a current or former American president when a grand jury indicted Donald J. Trump, according to reports, got support from a political action committee that took money from George Soros. Not to mention that Bragg’s controversial “Day One” memorandum reportedly said his office wouldn’t prosecute some “nonviolent” crimes, such as resisting arrest and fare-beating. Later, Bragg backtracked on that policy after strong public resistance.
Cities in which Soros has successfully installed D.A.s have become ungovernable and increasingly unlivable because of the high rate of crime and violence.
Another recent example is that, according to the filings reviewed by Fox News Digital, George Soros and two of his family members helped propel the political career of New York attorney general Letitia James, who brought a civil lawsuit against Trump last year, alleging that he and his company misled banks and others about the value of his assets. James, a Democrat, is seeking $250 million in damages and to bar the former president from doing business in the state. The Hungarian-born billionaire pushed at least $20,000 to James’s candidacy, including two $10,000 donations in 2021 and 2022, and his son, Jonathan Soros, gave her campaign at least $10,000 between 2018 and 2022, while Jonathan’s wife, Jennifer Allan Soros, added $4,000 in 2022.
Posting on his social media platform Truth Social, the former president wrote:
Wow! Just found out that Corrupt and Racist Attorney General Letitia James of New York State is financially backed by George Soros. No wonder this ‘TRUMP CASE,’ being presided over by a highly partisan and out of control Judge who found me guilty before the trial even started, wouldn’t allow a JURY, and said Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, was worth only $18,000,000, when it is worth 50 to 100 times that amount, has become an embarrassment to the New York Judiciary. No new businesses want any part of this charade. WITCH HUNT!
Moreover, just a few days ago, a New York Post examination of Open Society Foundations records showed that George Soros has funneled more than $15 million since 2016 to groups behind the past few weeks’ pro-Palestine protests, where demonstrators openly cheered Hamas’s October 7 barbaric terrorist attack. Soros’s grant-making network, writes the Post, gave $13.7 million of the money through Tides Center, a San Francisco–based left-wing advocacy organization that sponsors several groups who justify Hamas’s atrocities. Tides’ beneficiaries include the Illinois-based Adalah Justice Project, whose members co-sponsored a rally on October 20 in New York City’s Bryant Park, where hostile demonstrators waved a sign that read, “I DO NOT CONDEMN HAMAS.” It also gave $30,000 in 2020 to Desis Rising Up and Moving, another co-sponsor of the Bryant Park protest. Other Soros-backed, pro-Hamas organizations include Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, which received $650,000 and $400,000, respectively.
As Dan Schneider, vice president of the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, told the NYP, George Soros and his son Alex — who has become a de facto White House “ambassador,” making at least 14 visits there on behalf of his father since President Joe Biden took office — have a long history of supporting some of the most radical groups and movements worldwide, including pro-Hamas organizations that support the most heinous kind of behavior.
All in all, I think we can say that Soros’s main goal is political. Unlike Bill Gates, whose philanthropy focuses mostly on ameliorative projects such as eradicating malaria, the American-Hungarian billionaire wants to transform national and international politics and society. At the core of his project is the destruction of America and what she stands for — all within a megalomaniacal framework, so to speak.
An article from 30 years ago offers us an excellent key to understanding what kind of person George Soros is and the sort of psychological mechanisms underlying his behavior:
George Soros bills himself, without a hint of self-mockery, as a “financial and philosophical speculator.” The grandiose label is a fitting choice for a man who as a child fantasized about being God and as an adult can tell reporters with a straight face: “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”
Samuel Robert Piccoli is a blogger and the author of several books, among them Being Conservative from A to Z (2014) and Blessed Are the Free in Spirit (2021). He lives in the Venice area.
Image: World Economic Forum via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Defund the Soros Hamas Insurrection
Congress can close the ‘terror loophole’ behind pro-Hamas riots in New York.
[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
On October 18, pro-terrorist insurrectionists stormed the United States Capitol after a hate rally by two anti-Israel groups: IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. Both hate groups had issued statements that either justified or rationalized the Hamas atrocities against Israelis.
IfNotNow’s statement after the Hamas rapes, killings and kidnappings argued that, “we cannot and will not say today’s actions by Palestinian militants are unprovoked. Every day under Israel’s apartheid system is a provocation.” Jewish Voice for Peace described the Hamas attacks as an incident in which “Palestinian fighters from Gaza launched an unprecedented assault” in response to Israeli “oppression” which is the real “source of all this violence”.
The pro-Hamas insurrectionists rally for a ‘ceasefire’ that would allow Hamas to attack again had come knowing that their actions were illegal and over 400 of them had intended to be arrested. Over 300 eventually were arrested for their insurrection in the Capitol’s Canon rotunda. Three of the extremists were taken into custody for assaulting police officers.
IfNotNow has a long history of getting its activists arrested to support terrorists and JVP has previously promoted events featuring terrorists and those arrested included key organization figures like Alissa Wise: a top JVP official who has supported terrorists and engaged in sustained harassment of Jewish people over their support for the Jewish State.
The Capitol Insurrection was one of a number of illegal rallies held by these hate groups including an attempt to take over New York’s Grand Central Station on the Sabbath which also led to multiple arrests. Participants included May Ye: a Chinese-American activist from Maine who claimed that she “became a rabbi to be a Jewish voice for Palestinian liberation”.
Both groups, like much of the pro-terror network, had benefited heavily from Soros funding.
The If Not Now Education Fund, the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit arm of the 501(c)(4) extremist organization, had received two sets of two year grants from the Soros Open Society Foundations totaling $400,000 beginning in 2019 and running until 2023. JVP had also taken in $650,000 from OSF with multi-year grants beginning in 2017 and running through 2023. Like IfNotNow, JVP is a 501(c)(3) and has a 501(c)(4) arm. Both benefited from recent Soros grants.
The illegal pro-terrorist activities of both JVP and IfNotNow, as well as many other groups in the anti-Israel network, reflects the refusal of the IRS to enforce the tax code against the Left.
The IRS had previously found that the tax code bans funding of anti-war groups or any organization whose “primary activity is the sponsoring of…protest demonstrations in which demonstrators are urged to commit violations of local ordinances and breaches of public order.”
Such organizations don’t “qualify for exemption under section 501(c)(3) or (4) of the Code.”
IfNotNow and other anti-Israel protest groups are one of many leftist organizations whose very existence is a violation of IRS regulations. But above and beyond the tax code, Soros is knowingly funding riots and illegal activities by hate groups with a long history of such activities.
On Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, anti-Israel protesters were arrested for blocking traffic at an event cosponsored by Adalah, a BDS group which helped produce the BLM platform calling for a boycott of Israel, and has received $1.5 million from Soros, as well as by JVP and IfNotNow.
In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Hamas supporters gathered for a “Flood Brooklyn for Palestine” hate rally whose name echoed “Al Aqsa Flood”: the Hamas name for its butchery in Israel. 19 were arrested after NYPD officers were assaulted and hit with fireworks and bottles by the hate filled mob. Participating groups included Linda Sarsour’s Arab American Association of New York, which received $60,000 from the Soros network, as well as Samidoun: a terrorist front group banned by Israel and Germany, whose fiscal sponsor the Alliance for Global Justice received $250,000 from Soros in 2020. (This money may have been intended for AFGJ’s BLM groups.)
The Ford Foundation and other major leftist donors have stated that they will no longer fund Samidoun, after the terror front group handed out candy to celebrate Hamas atrocities, but the Soros network has offered no such promise of ending its funding of the extremist sponsor.
At another “Flood Brooklyn for Palestine” rally targeting the vicinity of the Crown Heights community, home to the largest group of Jewish Chabad Chassidim in the world, participants celebrated the Hamas attack and called for the destruction of Israel. Members of the hateful mob vandalized police cars and local businesses and then proceeded to hijack the Brooklyn Bridge. Terrorist supporters marching on Lower Manhattan carried a large black and white banner reading, “Honor the Martyrs” referring to the dead Islamic terrorists.
That rally was called by Within Our Lifetime, along with other Islamic groups, whose chair, Nerdeen Kiswani was defended and “proudly supported” for her hateful activities by Palestine Legal which received $25,000 from the Soros network.
The support for pro-Hamas groups is not surprising. George Soros has a history of defending Hamas. “America and Israel must open the door to Hamas,” he urged in a 2007 editorial after the group first came to power, while claiming that Hamas had a “more moderate political wing”.
“Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah can be treated merely as targets in the war on terror because both have deep roots in their societies,” he argued in an earlier editorial. And in another editorial complained that pro-Israel activists were “abetting” Israel’s “insistence on treating Hamas only as a terrorist organization.”
While Soros was editorializing for Hamas, Rob Malley, the son of an adviser to the PLO’s Yasser Arafat, was conducting backchannel talks with Hamas as a director at Soros’s International Crisis Group. The revelation of the Hamas link forced the Obama campaign to temporarily drop Malley, who later returned as Obama and Biden’s Iran deal negotiator. (Malley is currently under investigation by the FBI for mishandling classified information.)
Malley, who served as the CEO of the Soros group, before joining the Biden administration’s Iran effort, had argued that it’s a mistake to think of Hamas only “in terms of their terrorist violence dimension” and claimed that “there’s so much misinformation about them”.
The real mistake may be thinking that it’s a coincidence that George Soros has funded hate groups rallying for Hamas and against Israel, after defending Hamas in the past.
The Hamas insurrection in the streets of our major cities has been fueled by money from major leftist donors, including Soros. The funding of organizations engaged in illegal activities is a violation of both the tax code and the law. The failure to hold the funders of radical domestic terrorism, whether by BLM or Hamas supporters, accountable has led to violence in the streets.
The Soros insurrection must be defunded and the entire network of organizations, including the billionaire Nazi collaborator behind it, must be held responsible for its illegal activities. If the IRS will not do its job and enforce the tax code against nonprofits engaged in illegal activities, Congress must move to close the loopholes and end the nonprofit status of groups engaged in violence, crimes and support for terrorist organizations. Taxpayers should not be funding terrorism and tax-exempt organizations cannot engage in illegal activities and back terrorists.
George Soros has spent much of his life organizing the destruction of the nation by funding a vast network of extremist groups. And he is not alone. Billionaire donors and foundations have brought the country and the world to a series of crises by taking fringe organizations and causes, and injecting enough money into them that they appeared to be mainstream.
Congress can deal a serious blow to the empire of extremists by reforming the tax code and closing the ‘terror loophole’ that enabled the ugly displays of hatred in New York City. And across America. If BLM wasn’t enough of a wake up call, the Islamic terrorist rallies within miles of Ground Zero ought to be. It’s time for Congress to defund the Soros Hamas insurrection.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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Jeff Bezos Leaving Democrat-Run Seattle for Miami
NEW YORK (AP) — Jeff Bezos is leaving Seattle, where the billionaire founded Amazon out of a garage nearly three decades ago.
In a Thursday night Instagram post, the 59-year-old Bezos announced plans to return to Miami — where he spent his high school years — to be closer to his parents and his partner, Lauren Sánchez.
Bezos stepped down as the CEO of Amazon, still based in Seattle, almost three years ago and said in his social media post that operations for his rocket company, Blue Origin, are “increasingly shifting” to Cape Canaveral. Miami is about 200 miles south of Cape Canaveral.
“As exciting as the move is, it’s an emotional decision for me,” Bezos wrote Thursday, noting that he’s lived in Seattle longer than he’s lived anywhere else.
Seattle has been Bezos’ home since 1994, when he started Amazon out of his garage. Thursday’s Instagram post includes a brief video tour led by Bezos of Amazon’s first, humble office, with his father behind the camera.
“It doesn’t take long to tour the offices of Amazon-dot-com Inc,” a young Bezos says in the video, pointing to his desk, a fax machine, and a long orange extension cord that was needed to supply the room with additional power.
Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world today, has lavish properties in Miami, which has already attracted some other big names in tech over recent years. Last month, Bloomberg News reported that Bezos had purchased a mansion in South Florida’s “Billionaire Bunker” for $79 million, just two months after buying a neighboring estate for $68 million.
Both mansions are in Indian Creek, an exclusive man-made barrier island in Miami. Celebrity neighbors include Tom Brady, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in early 2021, citing the desire to devote more time to philanthropy and other projects. But Bezos still has broad influence over Amazon as executive chair and the company’s biggest shareholder.
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