Skyrocketing Chicago crime has small businesses, corporations pack their bags: 'Enough is enough'
A business owner in Chicago, Illinois tells Fox News Digital that skyrocketing crime in the city forced him to quit doing business in town adding to the list of individuals and businesses that have fled Illinois over the past couple of years amid surging crime.
Gary Rabine, founder of the Rabine Group and owner of 13 businesses, told Fox News Digital this week that surging crime in Chicago was a driving factor in his decision to pull his road paving company out of the city after his crews were repeatedly robbed, sometimes in broad daylight, even after adding security to the jobs.
"We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous," Rabine told Fox News Digital.
Rabine said that the additional cost of security and insurance for the "thousands" of jobs in the city each year eventually caused jobs to cost "twice as much as they should be". Rabine explained that the higher costs ultimately hurt the ratepayers, many of them with modest financial means, who ended up paying more for utility services.
"What happened eventually is we said enough is enough," Rabine said. "We stopped doing work down there, we stopped doing work for the gas company, the electric company, the south side, the west side and eventually all over Chicago. Those companies now work in other places. They work over the border in Wisconsin, the outer suburbs of Chicago, where they feel safer."
Last week, billionaire Ken Griffin announced he is moving his hedge-fund firm Citadel out of Chicago after citing crime as a major concern over the past few months.
"If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here," Griffin told the Wall Street Journal in April. "I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from."
Rabine told Fox News Digital that Citadel’s downtown location, and the crime that has become prevalent there, was most likely causing Citadel to have trouble hiring and keeping talent.
"I’m confident that Citadel was losing people," Rabine said. "And I'm guessing that 50, 60% of those people, maybe more, were raising their hands and saying get me out of here."
Rabine added, "If you want a great culture in your company you have to have people that love being on the team and they don't want to live in a violent area. They don't want to live in a place where their kids can't walk to school safely and their wives and kids can't go shopping in a beautiful environment like Michigan Avenue which was once the safest place you could ever go shopping."
Along with Rabine and Griffin, other companies have made the decision to pull out of Chicago amid the skyrocketing crime in the city.
Construction and mining equipment giant Caterpillar announced this month it is moving its headquarters from Deerfield, Illinois, a north shore suburb of Chicago, to Irving, Texas just outside of Dallas.
"Illinois has faced a recent one-two punch of Caterpillar and Citadel uprooting for Red States," Alfredo Ortiz, President and CEO of the Job Creators Network, told Fox News Digital. "To stop the outflow and protect their economies, Blue States should copy the good policies of Red States and make their states safer and more economically friendly."
Global aerospace company Boeing also announced in May it is moving its headquarters out of the Chicago area to Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.
In addition to companies leaving the state, Illinois lost a higher percentage of residents than any other state in 2021, according to a survey by Allied moving company.
Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian non-profit think tank, published in a study in December that "more Illinoisans fled for other states from July 2020-July 2021 than during any other year in recorded history."
While many factors including taxes, coronavirus lockdowns and cost of living have contributed to the population decrease, Rabine tells Fox News Digital that crime is a major driving force and places blame at the feet of Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
"Lightfoot is a lousy leader," Rabine, who ran for governor as a Republican in Illinois’ recent gubernatorial primary, said. "She doesn’t stand up for the community at all."
Rabine also pointed to damage he says Pritzker has done by signing a controversial criminal justice reform bill that ended cash bail and has been condemned by a variety of law enforcement officials.
"We have to get this governor out," Rabine said. "He's a socialist Democrat, a lousy leader, and a terrible American."
https://www.foxnews.com/us/skyrocketing-chicago-crime-small-businesses-corporations-pack-their-bags
******************************************************The Push For Permanent Vote-By-Mail
Leftists fell in love with all-mail elections in 2020. Now they want to make vote-by-mail permanent.
Transforming our country’s elections into a mail-in fiasco is a big step toward handing power over elections from the states to the federal government, empowering professional activists, inviting fraud, and damaging America’s constitutional system. It places the integrity of the republic in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service, the government agency that routinely delivers your neighbor’s mail to your house. And it promises to undermine public trust in electoral outcomes from now until doomsday, which could make the problems of the 2020 election routine.
I’ve documented progressives’ relentless effort to federalize elections, from the $400-million flood of private cash Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sent to elections officials in 2020 to the $80 million “dark money” campaign for permanent vote-by-mail ahead of the 2022 and 2024 elections. That reporting builds on Capital Research Center’s year-and-a-half long investigation into the role of “Zuck bucks” in battleground states and our discovery that they targeted areas rich with Democratic votes, like Philadelphia and Atlanta.
At the heart of that misadventure are the Center for Tech and Civic Life, Arabella Advisors’ $1.7 billion activist empire, and the National Vote at Home Institute. But Americans should be familiar with the true face of vote-by-mail: Amber McReynolds.
She’s often labeled a reform-minded “independent” and is listed on the website of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers and in Governing Magazine’s 2018 Top Public Officials of the Year. In interview after gushing interview with left-leaning outlets, she’s touted as a good-government advocate uninterested in petty partisan goals.
But make no mistake: Amber McReynolds is a product of Activism, Inc.
McReynolds started her career registering voters in Iowa—a key primary state—in the 2004 election with the New Voters Project, part of a multi-million-dollar activist nexus called the Public Interest Network, whose oldest elements—the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs)—started in the 1970s under legendary community organizer Ralph Nader.
If you’ve ever been solicited on the street for a donation to the American Civil Liberties Union or Sierra Club by a “clipboard kid,” you’ve probably had a run-in with these guys, who are famous for generating new liberal activists—and a president. As Barack Obama put it in 2004, “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”
Revealingly, the network lauds McReynolds alongside two other notable progressive alumni: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and eco-activist-turned-Colorado State Sen. Faith Winter.
In 2005, McReynolds was hired by the Denver Elections Commission. In 2011, she became the agency’s director. A year later, the city’s Democratic mayor awarded her with the “rising star” award for overseeing the creation of Denver’s ballot-tracking and electronic petition-gathering software (Ballot TRACE). A year after that, in 2013, McReynolds successfully pushed for Colorado’s adoption of all-mail voting and election-day registration, reportedly downplaying the threat of voter fraud in her testimony before the state legislature by claiming ignorance of the concept: “I’m not sure, to be honest, what is an illegal vote…. What does that mean?”
McReynolds was key to many of the last-minute voting-law changes in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2020 election, which conservatives criticized as unconstitutional and vulnerable to fraud. She’s cited extensively in an amicus briefing filed by the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Common Cause Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia-based Black Political Empowerment Project, and the Latino-focused Make the Road PA—all left-wing get-out-the-vote groups—supporting the Pennsylvania Democratic Party’s lawsuit against Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, demanding the state adopt drop boxes and “alternatives to in-person voting.”
McReynolds’ sworn testimony (paid for at a rate of $225 per hour) notes that “ballot drop-boxes can be an important component of implementing expanded mail-in voting,” “do not create an increased opportunity for fraud,” and “are generally more secure than…post office boxes.” She also supports the adoption of “text-to-cure,” a system adopted in 2020 in Colorado wherein voters are invited to email, fax, or send a text message to “cure” mistakes in their ballots (e.g., a missing signature) instead of sending an affidavit.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the Democratic Party’s favor, determining that county elections boards may accept mail-in ballots in “unmanned drop-boxes” and extending the deadline for mail-in and absentee ballots by three days—even for ballots missing a postmark.
All of these controversial factors later featured prominently in the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and other battleground states, thanks to funding from Mark Zuckerberg and the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled state Senate banned both private funding for elections and drop-boxes in April 2022; the bill is expected to be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, and drop boxes were still in place for the state’s June primary. In Wisconsin, the state supreme court ruled drop boxes were illegal in February 2022 after 570 were used in 66 of the state’s 72 counties between 2020 and early 2021.
Interestingly, McReynolds also oversaw Denver’s adoption of the now-controversial Dominion Voting Systems in May 2015, lauding the system in a presentation before election officials (only a grainy image of her presentation exists). The liberal Brennan Center for Justice profiled Denver’s adoption of Dominion in a 2015 case study, noting that it was designed to promote vote-by-mail given that 95 percent of Denver voters cast their ballot by mail under the state’s all-mail system. McReynolds later defended Dominion against claims of ballot fraud days after the 2020 election, tweeting:
No, Dominion voting machines did not cause widespread voting problems. Don’t be fooled by conspiracies & disinformation. Instead rely on trusted sources of information like election officials.
In a Denver Post op-ed in 2017, McReynolds in her capacity as Denver’s director of elections accused President Donald Trump’s new Commission on Election Integrity of “frightening away Denver voters” and leading voters to withdraw their registration due to its supposed partisanship (it was bipartisan) and unclear mission. The commission was formed to investigate “improper voter registrations,” “voter suppression,” and fraud. In late 2017, the left-wing group United to Protect Democracy sued the commission for attempting to gather voter information from the states. McReynolds provided sworn testimony alleging that the commission had caused Denver voter registration withdrawals to surge.
In 2018, McReynolds left Denver to lead the National Vote at Home Institute and Coalition, a pair of tiny nonprofits in Washington, D.C., formed the year prior to promote vote-by-mail everywhere.
Like all 501(c) nonprofits, both Vote at Home groups are officially nonpartisan, per IRS tax exempt rules. Yet they were created with start-up funding from the liberal National Association of Letter Carriers (the postal workers’ union), which hosted the group’s kick-off event at its union headquarters in Washington. The event was attended by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon (a Democrat elected in the country’s first-ever all-mail federal election), and Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling, who later joined the board of Vote at Home. At the event, Keisling illustrated his vision of voting, with my emphasis:
Imagine a state where voters never have to show a photo ID; wait in voting lines; leave home or work early to get to their designated polling place; or worry about bad weather, traffic jams, finding parking or public transportation, or arranging childcare.
AVR’s [automatic voter registration] underlying policy premise is identical to vote-at home’s; if the government knows you’re a citizen, you become a registered voter. [Emphasis added.]
Brian Renfroe, executive vice president of the postal workers’ union, leads Vote at Home’s board of directors. Also on the board is Emily Persaud-Zamora, director of the Nevada affiliate of the liberal get-out-the-vote group State Voices, and 2018 Democratic Maryland gubernatorial candidate and former NAACP president Ben Jealous, who now heads the far-left judicial activist group People for the American Way, infamous for the original “borking” of judge Robert Bork, and later their attempted “borkings” of President Trump’s Supreme Court appointees.
Also on Vote at Home’s board is Stephen Silberstein, one of the top 20 donors to the Hillary Clinton-aligned super PAC Priorities USA Action in 2016, a board member for the anti-electoral college group National Popular Vote, and a member of the Democracy Alliance, where the left’s most powerful donors regularly meet to discuss funding of political and get-out-the-vote groups. The Silberstein Foundation has donated at least $425,000 to the National Vote at Home Institute since 2018.
McReynolds herself spoke at the Democracy Alliance’s 2018 fall conference (on an unknown topic) alongside Black Lives Matter co-founder and “trained Marxist” Alicia Garza, then-Leadership Conference president Vanita Gupta (who’s now associate attorney general in the Biden Department of Justice), and the “civic-engagement” (read: voter-turnout) group For Freedoms.
The Vote at Home nonprofits have also received funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund Voice, various AFL-CIO unions, and the Arabella-run dark-money groups Hopewell Fund and New Venture Fund.
Under McReynolds, Vote at Home released its first national vote-by-mail proposal in mid-2020, “catapulting” this tiny organization into the center of the left’s scheme to use Covid-19 to transform the 2020 election.
As the election loomed, Vote at Home supplied secretaries of state with drop box locations—many of them paid for by CTCL’s “Zuck bucks”—and pushed for hasty adoption of mail-in ballots in at least 37 states and D.C.
California hired McReynolds to consult on its massive vote-by-mail expansion plans in mid-2020. And in the Atlanta suburb of DeKalb County, Georgia, Vote at Home published a 60-page report to help the county “create a modern, lean vote-by-mail program.” DeKalb received $9.6 million in Zuck bucks—$12.59 for every person living there—and gave Joe Biden 300,000 votes.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-push-for-permanent-vote-by-mail
************************************************In Allowing Coach to Pray, Supreme Court Says First Amendment Doesn’t Contradict Itself
The First Amendment to the Constitution has two connected clauses on religion, one prohibiting an “establishment of religion” and the other protecting the “free exercise thereof.”
The case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District involved a high school football coach, Joe Kennedy, who routinely kneeled midfield after games to offer a private prayer of thanks, saying he was engaging in the free exercise of his religion.
His school district in Washington state fired Kennedy for doing so, claiming that allowing such a religious display would amount to an establishment of religion.
In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court tried to untie this knot by ruling Monday that the school district violated the coach’s constitutional rights.
Since being hired in 2008, Kennedy had knelt on the field after each game to briefly express gratitude for what his players had accomplished and for the opportunity to be part of their lives. When players asked to join him, Kennedy agreed but never pressured or encouraged them to do so.
Kennedy also continued a practice, begun before his hiring, of pregame or postgame prayer in the locker room for students and coaching staff.
In September 2015, the school district warned Kennedy about making “religious references” in the presence of students at midfield and during the locker room prayer tradition.
The school district claimed a “direct tension” between the First Amendment’s two religion clauses required an employee’s right to exercise his religion to “yield so far as necessary to avoid school endorsement of religious activities.”
The district also claimed that if anyone saw Kennedy kneeling, by himself and in silence, they might assume that the district endorsed whatever he was doing. That risk was enough to prohibit him from doing so, the district said, even when, as happened one time, “everyone had left the stadium.”
The school district said it would allow Kennedy such a solitary silent prayer only if he was “not observable to students or the public.”
Attempting to comply, Kennedy ended the tradition of locker room prayers and avoided any religious references when players joined him at midfield. He drew the line, however, at his solitary, silent, brief prayer after a game.
After his dismissal, Kennedy sued, claiming that the school district had violated his First Amendment rights to exercise his religion and to speak freely.
The lower courts sided with the school district. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said that anything Kennedy said on the field, at a time when he could have been talking to students, amounted to “speech as a government employee.” Allowing any religious speech, even silently, would constitute an establishment of religion, the appeals court said.
In the opinion released Monday, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to reverse the 9th Circuit. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and (except for one section) Brett Kavanaugh.
The school district’s policy was hardly neutral or “generally applicable,” the high court said, because it targeted only religious expression, a conclusion that the school district conceded.
Under the Supreme Court’s previous decisions, therefore, the school district had to show that its policy was “narrowly tailored” to serve a “compelling” government interest, the toughest standard the high court applies. The school district failed to meet this standard, violating Kennedy’s right to freely exercise religion.
As to free speech, the court asked whether Kennedy offered his silent prayers “in his capacity as a private citizen, or did they amount to government speech attributable to the District?”
Unlike some of the court’s previous cases, Kennedy’s prayer was not “commissioned or created” by the government, or anything that the coach would be expected to say “in the course of carrying out his job.”
When Kennedy knelt for his silent prayer, others were free to engage in all manner of private speech. Kennedy was simply not acting within the scope of his employment and, therefore, his prayer was private rather than government speech.
The Supreme Court rejected the idea that the school district could avoid violating the establishment clause only by violating Kennedy’s right under the free exercise clause.
The First Amendment’s free speech and religion clauses, Gorsuch wrote, are not “warring” with each other. The lower courts treated them that way only by relying on the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman, which invited judges to explore the purpose and effect of government actions, as well as make subjective judgments about “excessive entanglement” between government and religion.
The Lemon decision was so difficult to understand and apply that many courts simply opted to “purge from the public sphere” anything that anyone might think “partakes of the religious.” The lower courts in Kennedy’s case had relied on Lemon when, in fact, the Supreme Court “long ago abandoned” it, although it never has been formally overturned.
Although relying on Lemon resulted in pitting the First Amendment’s religion clauses against each other, the Supreme Court looked instead to “historical practices and understandings” to bring the clauses into harmony.
“An analysis focused on original meaning and history,” Gorsuch wrote, leads to the conclusion that a brief silent prayer, even if others might observe it or even be offended by it, does not amount to the government’s endorsing religion.
It’s important to remember the facts of this case.
A coach knelt by himself, after a game ended and everyone else was tending to their own business, to offer a silent prayer lasting less than a minute. The school district claimed that the First Amendment required it to ignore his rights and fire him because someone might have seen him kneel and might have thought the school district approved of this.
That view, Gorsuch wrote, is “a sure sign that our Establishment Clause jurisprudence has gone off the rails.”
In his 1973 dissenting opinion in Roe v. Wade, then-Justice William Rehnquist wrote that “the Court’s opinion will accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of leaving this area of the law more confused than it found it.” That charge had long applied to the court’s decisions involving the religion clauses.
Once the court started ignoring what those clauses originally were intended to mean, it started inventing its own versions, with new tests or standards popping up and then fading away, and similar cases being decided with opposite results.
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Financial sanctions designed to hurt Russia only hurt Western investors
The West has actually PREVENTED Russia from paying its debts!
Russia’s “default” on its foreign currency sovereign debt last weekend is one of the stranger outworkings of the web of sanctions the West has woven around Russia’s finances.
While the failure of about $US100 million ($144 million) of interest payments to reach foreign bondholders is being described as a default, and technically is one, the ratings agencies that would normally declare the default have yet to do so.
They can’t, because the sanctions prevent them from rating Russian bonds.
The bond holders who haven’t received their money could themselves declare a default but, in a practical sense, it would have no near-term impact. Russia didn’t waive its sovereign immunity in the bonds’ documentation and it is unclear who, if anyone, would have the jurisdiction to hear any claim they might have or whether Russia would observe any judgement if one were made.
Russia had gone to great lengths, until the weekend, to avoid triggering any defaults but a pathway through the sanctions net that had been deliberately left open and that allowed US bondholders to receive payments from the Russian government was closed by the US Treasury late last month.
Then the European Union sanctioned Russia’s National Settlement Depositary, completing the wall around Russia’s ability to transfer funds out of the country.
The bizarre aspect of the situation is that Russia has the funds to meet the payments and avoid default – it is still raking in billions of dollars a month from its oil sales – and is willing to pay them out. Indeed, the government transferred the funds to an agent within Russia. The problem is that the agent is unable to deposit those funds in the bondholders’ accounts because of the sanctions.
Perversely, it’s not Russia being punished by the default but the foreign bondholders who haven’t received their interest payments.
The default is being widely described as “symbolic,” which was perhaps the point of the decisions by the US and EU to act to ensure Russia couldn’t complete the payments and therefore to force it into its first default on foreign debt in more than a century. (The Bolsheviks repudiated Russia’s foreign debt obligations in 1918 while Boris Yeltsin’s government defaulted on $US40 billion of purely domestic debt).
Russia’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, said of the failure to get the funds into bondholders’ accounts that anyone could declare whatever they wanted to but “anyone who understands what’s going on knows that this is in no way a default.” At the fundamental rather than technical level, it’s hard to argue against that.
The bid by the US and EU to choke Russia’s energy revenues is much more devastating for Moscow than falling into a default.
The bid by the US and EU to choke Russia’s energy revenues is much more devastating for Moscow than falling into a default. CREDIT:AP
The US and Europe presumably wanted to attach the odious label of defaulters to the Russians, as well as signalling that the net of financial sanctions had been completed and that Russia is now largely, albeit not entirely given its relationships with China and India and a handful of others, cut off from the core of the global financial system.
It was a manufactured default that will inevitably be followed by others as interest and principal payments on other issues of the $US20 billion of debt owed to foreigners fall due.
It is a messy situation, although Russian bonds have traded at fractions of their face value ever since the first round of sanctions were announced and therefore the bondholders were well aware of the prospect of default.
Theoretically, the bondholders could try to sue for payment although, as noted, that’s not straightforward.
They could also try to convince a court to allow them to seize assets, including the central bank reserves that have been frozen in offshore jurisdictions, or Russian government properties offshore. Sovereign and diplomatic immunities would complicate those efforts.
Alternatively, they could simply wait for the eventual resolution of the war in Ukraine and hope that the sanctions will eventually be lifted and Russia allowed to re-engage with the global financial system and bond markets and be able to repay their debt.
As Argentina has demonstrated – even after defaulting eight times on its sovereign debt – for investors, time and attractive yields heal most wounds.
Apart from Russia’s demonstrated willingness to pay, there’s no doubt about its capacity to pay.
After sanctions were imposed after its invasion of Crimea in 2014, Russia went to great lengths to build up its foreign exchange reserves (half of which are now frozen by the Ukraine-related sanctions) and reduce its overall debt and its foreign liabilities.
It has a debt-to-GDP ratio of only about 17 per cent and, with higher oil prices offsetting the limited markets into which it can now sell its oil and the big discounts it has to offer to attract those buyers (primarily China and India), it is estimated to have generated roughly $US100 billion in oil revenues since the start of the invasion.
The US and Europe presumably wanted to attach the odious label of defaulters to the Russians.
The US and EU are now trying to choke those revenues by imposing price caps on Russian oil, using the dominance of UK, EU and US insurers and reinsurers and the threat of uninsured ships and cargoes to enforce them.
That is of more consequence for Russia and its economy than any default.
It already has economic issues, given it is experiencing an inflation rate of more than 17 per cent and is economy is tracking towards a double-digit contraction. The World Bank has said it expects Russia’s GDP (which includes a first quarter largely unaffected by the sanctions) to shrink 8.9 per cent this year. The oil revenues are its economic lifeline.
The default that has captured so much attention this week is unusual, indeed unprecedented, but in contrast to the more serious threats to Russia’s finances will eventually be an historical curiosity as the first sovereign debt default triggered, not by the inability or unwillingness to pay by the debtor nation, but by the active efforts of its creditor nations to prevent it from paying.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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