Back in February, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago proposed some sweeping revenue changes designed to significantly boost the state’s credit rating to “AA” over time and help accelerate the state’s pension payments to bring down its huge, unfunded liabilities. The group’s proposals were striking because their members are some of the wealthiest people in the state. In the country, even.

An often bitter, loud, and racially-divisive debate played out before, during, and after last week’s Chicago city-council meeting where members voted to pass a temporary funding package to shelter asylum-seekers.

House and Senate Republicans claimed during budget-related floor debate last week that the super-majority Democrats had masked the true size of their plan by delaying the start of some spending until the second half of the upcoming fiscal year. Yes and no. Republicans pointed to the $317 million cost of increasing Medicaid provider reimbursement rates, including for hospitals. But that new spending doesn’t begin until January 1, the halfway point in the 2024 fiscal year, which begins July 1.

I'm weary of the vast constitutional violations by government personnel, both criminal and civil, that are going unaddressed primarily due to the public's toleration based upon political considerations that are shallow, mostly manufactured, and grossly derelict in Americans' stewardship of the Republic.

Power corrupts. We know this. In fact, we know this from experience learned the hard way at the hands of our own government. So why is anyone surprised to learn that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens? This is how the government operates, after all.

There is circumstantial evidence the Supreme Court sought to facilitate the impact the 2008 financial collapse. This collapse was utilized to transfer middle class wealth from this nation’s people to its Wall Street sociopaths – a plan which the facts suggest has resulted in one of the most massive genocides ever known.

From Illinois law: “No unit of local government shall levy any tax on stock, commodity, or options transactions.” That statute has long been targeted for elimination by the Chicago Teachers Union and its allies. The CTU reliably shuns any proposal to increase property taxes across the board, instead pushing often-times “magical” solutions as alternatives. It’s one way the union has maintained its popularity among Chicago voters.

A few weeks ago, Senator Robert Peters posted a tweet that he knew would generate backlash. What he didn’t know was that it would go national. The tweet was in response to teens converging on downtown Chicago. The Chicago Tribune reported three teenagers were wounded in two shootings and 16 were arrested during the violence: “I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement. It’s a mass protest against poverty and segregation.”

River Cities' Reader Issue 1009 May 2023 Ed Newmann Cartoon - Hunger-Park Parade

America is experiencing a non-organic, deliberate, and highly orchestrated socioeconomic destabilization whether we admit or not. The underlying agenda is to replace America's governance model as a Constitutional Republic to a global Progressive version of Neo-Feudalism, mirroring all its worst aspects and those of Marxism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, and Monarchism. Every one of the above is a top-down model of governance with precious few haves and super-majorities of have-nots who answer to a centralized authority that owns and/or controls all resources and means of production in a society.

Dred Scott Way Street Sign

The only way slavery and genocide can exist openly in a society is with the participation of the government – and indirectly the people. In the United States, the final check on tyranny was supposed to be the judicial department, composed of courts governed by judges whose judicial power was intended to be checked by juries of citizens.

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