For years, it was conventional wisdom that the most financially-challenged state in the US – whether it comes to overall debt burden, outlays, tax collections, underfunded pension and retirement obligations, or simply credit rating – was Illinois, followed closely by New Jersey in second place.
Authored by Matt Agorist via The FreeThoughtProject.com,
Residents of New Jersey were given a deadline to turn in their gun magazines or become felons overnight, and so far, no one is complying.
Unless you’ve been under a rock lately, then you’ve likely seen the unprecedented push by all levels of government to separate law abiding Americans from their guns. No, this is not some conspiracy theory. The president himself ushered in a new level of gun control doing what his liberal predecessor even refused to do by banning bump stocks. However, as states across the country seek to limit the ability of innocent people to defend themselves, people are disobeying.
Continue reading “Over One Million US Gun Owners Say Fuck You to New Jersey Politicians”
Guest Post by Mercy Otis Warren
I am a regular guy with a regular job trying to slog out a decent life for myself and my family here in NJ. Not too long ago I was traveling through a commercial section of the county seat close to my home. It was midday; the traffic was light and the weather was fair. As I approached my exit, I slowed down; moved over into the exit lane; and passed the entrance/exit to a fast food joint, where incidentally a police officer was sitting in his crown vic.
As far as I knew I did nothing wrong, but my immediate reaction was: “s*** I hope he stays put.” I think most people would have the same reaction and that speaks volumes about the sad climate that exists between the authorities and the citizens they exert control over. My hope was in vain; he pulled out behind me. After trailing me for about 2 or 3 minutes, I saw the dreaded cherry lights flashing in my rear view.
Continue reading “THE EXTORTION MILL OF SUBURBAN POLICING IN NJ”
If decreasing your long-term pension return assumption from 7.5% to 7.0% creates a financial crisis, imagine what happens when their actual returns are 1%.
Guest Post by Martin Armstrong
The roads in Illinois are in decay. This may be the first state to go bankrupt. The question is not if, but when. State unions are so greedy that they are destroying the very state. This is exactly how Rome fell — government employees against the people.
Seven states have constitutional provisions that state employee pensions must come BEFORE everything, including debt payments. Since the legislature in New Jersey was Democrat, they fought Governor Christie on pension reform. Their solution? On the ballot in November, there will be a provision to amend the state Constitution to put employee pensions before everything else. The people are generally kept ignorant of what that means to property taxes and the future of the state. Therefore, the average person will say, “Sure, I should get my pension, so they should also.”
Illinois should declare bankruptcy. It is simply inevitable. There is absolutely no hope for Illinois whatsoever. Every year they will have to pay more and more. If the state who manages the pension money loses, well, the taxpayers have to cover those losses as well. The governor tried to stop the downgrade of expectations for earnings in the pension fund from 7.5% to 7%, which means they have to raise taxes and/or cut service by almost a half-billion.
It’s time to just turnout the lights in Illinois. Welcome to the Sovereign Debt Crisis. This is the contagion you will finally start to hear about, but only after the elections. Why spoil the party?
I sure hope Fat Boy Christie can work his crony capitalistic magic on the whole country as our next President Blimp. His brilliant plan to revive the putrid shithole of Atlantic City by taking taxpayer money and handing it to mega-corporation casinos has worked wonders. If his plan is any more successful there won’t be a casino left in Atlantic City by the end of 2015.
I love watching the union drones protesting the loss of their jobs as the Republican governor pisses away hundreds of millions on the $2.5 billion Revel albatross. It’s as if no one in New Jersey has any common sense, mathematical ability or balls to tell the truth. So I’ll do it.
PA and Delaware have opened dozens of casinos in the last five years. Why would someone from either of those states travel to the dangerous ghetto shithole of Atlantic City to lose their money when they can do it 15 minutes from their house? They stopped going to AC. Shockingly, this resulted in a plunge in AC gambling revenues and profits.
Then Christie and the politician bozos passed online gambling in New Jersey. You can go into debt by gambling away money you don’t have in the comfort of your own living room. Why take your life into your hands by entering the Atlantic City kill zone to lose your welfare paycheck? Shockingly, this has resulted in even less revenue for the gambling meccas in AC.
And guess what? The dumbass middle and lower income clientele who dump their cash into slot machines have run out of cash. They have either no jobs or shit jobs, while their cost to feed, house, and warm themselves has skyrocketed. The dupes and suckers don’t have a pot to piss in as their extended unemployment benefits expire and food stamps get cut.
The signs of collapse are everywhere if your eyes are open. Maybe Fat Boy Christie will come to the rescue again with more New Jersey taxpayer cash to save a few mega-corps and their union drone employees.
PA and Delaware will experience the same thing in the near future. You can’t get a jackpot out of a stone.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/12/2014 10:41 -0400
The Atlantic City casino industry implosion continues. Following the second, and final, bankruptcy of AC’s “state of the art” Revel Casino a month ago, as well as the shuttering of Atlantic Club hotel Casino and the Showboat hotel casino, the grim corporate reaper has come for one of the most prominent boardwalk casinos of all: Trump Plaza.
The casino which opened in 1984 as a JV between Donald Trump and Harrah’s AC, was for a long time the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s one-time Atlantic City empire, which however promptly escalated into a series of sequential bankruptcies, chipping away at Trump’s reputation and business model, as one after another of Trump’s properties sought Chapter 11 protection.
The final punch came in February 2013 when Trump Plaza was sold to a California company for $20 million – the cheapest ever transaction for an Atlantic City casino, and a fitting testament to the death of this one-time east coast gambling mecca. It was here, however, where a very bored Carl Icahn, once again spread his wrinkled activist wings when in April 2013, as senior lender for the mortgage, Icahn declined to approve the sale for the proposed price and the deal was put on hold.
Unfortunately for Icahn, this is one he may have let go, because as the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, Trump Plaza has decided not to bother with continuing the sale process and will instead shutter permanently. “Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino will shut its doors for good in mid-September, according to state officials who were briefed Friday by lawyers for the casino.”
“I believe Sept. 16 is the targeted closure date that we were told,” said Assemblyman Vince Mazzeo (D., Atlantic). Mazzeo said he and State Sen. Jim Whelan (D., Atlantic) received a phone call late Friday afternoon from a Trump Plaza lawyer. Atlantic County officials also were briefed, he said.
Mazzeo said the attorney told him that Trump Plaza management plans to make a formal announcement and issue 60-day layoff notices to about 1,600 employees Monday.
“This is another blow to the casino industry here,” Mazzeo said. “With mid-September the timing of the closing, it will have a devastating impact on the local economy.”
The news will hardly come as a great surprise: there has been speculation for more than a year that Trump Plaza was on the verge of closing. “Like the Atlantic Club, Trump Plaza is one of the city’s smallest and oldest gambling halls – it opened May 26, 1984 – and had difficulty competing with the bigger casinos in town and in nearby states, including Pennsylvania.”
But while the creditors will be angry they have other sources of income; one group of people even more furious and with zero recourse are the unions. Bob McDevitt, president of Unite Here Local 54, the union that represents most casino workers, led a Boardwalk rally Wednesday to protest Showboat’s planned closing. McDevitt, who labeled Showboat’s closing “a criminal act” by Caesars Entertainment since the property was still profitable, could not be reached late Friday to comment on the latest casino to fall.
Meanwhile, the city is slowly but surely realizing that its business model is dead.
Whelan, a former Atlantic City mayor, expressed his displeasure Friday night. “I go from depressed and sad to being angry,” he said. “When these casinos close, people lose their jobs and their careers. It’s a very sad situation.”
Employees at Trump Plaza had not been notified Friday of the planned closure, but slot attendant Stan Jelesnianski, who said he has worked there for 21 years, said employees had been worried “for a long time.”
“Business has been slow,” he said.
According to May 2014 monthly revenues from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, the latest monthly data available, Trump Plaza ranked last among the 11 casinos in total revenue, making $5.2 million. Of that total, it generated about $4.6 million from slots, down 19.8 percent from May 2013. And it took in $660,666 from table games, a decrease of 45.6 percent from a year ago.
Its year-to-date total casino revenue of $21.9 million was down 26.7 percent from the same period a year ago.
Charles Pinkett, a Boardwalk rolling-chair operator, said the casino has seemed to be on life support for a while. “The people have been talking about how there’s no room service,” he said.
The only good news perhaps is that yet another icon of the Trump “empire” – built entirely on other people’s money and junk bonds – is being dismantled. After this, there is just one more left…
Mark and Alice Aronson, dining outside, said they were surprised and saddened to hear another casino was on the way out. Alice Aronson, a local therapist, said she had clients from Showboat who were dealing with the pain of the likely layoffs.
“It’s a shame,” she said. “This is a good place. I heard Donald Trump is not involved anymore. I thought maybe he’d fight for it. It seems, one by one, they’re not taking care of their employees.”
Trump Plaza’s closing would leave one Trump-brand casino in Atlantic City – the Trump Taj Mahal, between Resorts Casino Atlantic City and the soon-to-close Showboat.
We give the Trump Taj 6-9 months before it too joins its peers in the liquidation docket, and the name Trump will no longer appear on the boardwalk for the first time in over three decades. In the meantime, those curious to track the demolition of the Atlantic City gaming empire in real time, can do so at the New Jersey WARN Notice website.
Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
While this story is not new, I must have missed it back in April when it first broke and it is absolutely incredible. The reason I am posting on it today is because we have new information which turns an already shocking story into something far more terrifying.So let’s get into some background first.
This is the story of Ethan Chaplin, who back in April was twirling a pencil in his seventh grade classroom in Vernon, NJ. One of the class bullies saw an opportunity to be a jerk and yelled: “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.”
Rather than demonstrating any sort of common sense, the teacher apparently had a panic attack and reported him, which resulted in a two-day suspension. Here’s what Vernon Superintendent Charles Maranzano had to say about it:
“We’re responsible for their mental and physical health and safety and security. When a student misbehaves or displays actions that are non-conforming or don’t meet our expectations, it causes us some concerns.”
I guess I don’t understand what schools are like these days, but the classes I grew up in were filled to the brim with misbehavior to the extent that a twirling pencil would be seen as a positive indicator of student interaction. Somehow, we all survived.
As if that part of the story isn’t bizarre enough, Ethan wasn’t allowed to return to class until he underwent a psychological evaluation in which he was forced to strip and give blood samples that caused him to pass out (sounds a lot like how police in New Mexico force anal probes on citizens for no reason).
Amazingly, the saga manages to get even worse. Just today, we find out that New Jersey is threatening to take Ethan away from his father. Incredibly, the state is claiming that the prior psychological evaluation wasn’t sufficient and more testing needs to be done. Since his father Michael is pushing back, the loss of custodianship has been threatened. Absolutely insane.
Here’s a must watch short video from PIX11 News on the incident:
I suppose this is an example of that amazing “quality of life” Chris Christie keeps referring to…
This Huffington Post article from early April was the source of much of the information in this post.
