Free Republic

Thousands of unvaccinated New York City municipal workers are up against a deadline on Friday to get a COVID-19 shot or get fired, with Mayor Eric Adams apparently determined to carry out the terminations despite an outcry from union leaders. Fewer than 4,000 of the city's 370,000 workers were facing termination at the end of January as a result of the mandate, according to the mayor's office, which said it expected to have an updated number of affected city employees on Monday. Although that would represent less than 1% of the city's workforce, it would be one of the biggest...

May 31, 2019 / 04:26 PM EDT Virginia Sports 4:51 p.m. Virginia Beach police say they believe there’s only one shooter, and that person has been taken into custody. They say multiple people have been injured. There’s no word on the extent of the victims’ injuries at this time. Nearby Sentara Princess Anne Hospital has been placed on lockdown in the meantime. Police are asking the public to avoid the area. Stay with WAVY for updates. The latest as of 4:42 P.M. — City Manager Dave Hansen confirmed there is an active shooter situation at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center....

Harvey. Illinois is in the midst of a financial crisis that represents the tip of the iceberg ... The city of 25,000 in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago is suffering from high unemployment (22%). An astonishing 32% of the population lives below the poverty level. This is a deadly mixture that has caused catastrophic shortfalls in revenue, leading to a crisis in funding pensions for the city's retired workers. Since state law prohibits municipal bankruptcy, Harvey has been forced into a situation Illinois has never seen. In February, the state began to garnish Harvey's revenue to fund its pension...

The southern California city of San Bernardino has defaulted on nearly $10 million in payments on its privately placed pension bond debt since it declared bankruptcy in 2012, according to documents seen by Reuters. In addition, the city has not negotiated with its bondholders since September, according to a person familiar with the stalled negotiations. The missed payments illustrate the trend among cities in bankruptcy to favor payments to pension funds over bondholder obligations, which has increased the hostility between creditors and municipalities.

Crowdfunding has worked for films, political candidates, disaster relief and now real estate. Crowdfunding, the act of soliciting funds from the public, most recently on the Internet, is already a powerful tool. Now it is being used by cities to raise funds bypassing the traditional muni bond market. Central Falls, the Rhode Island city that filed for bankruptcy two years ago, is seeking to finance a park project through a crowdfunding website rather than the municipal-bond market. The city of about 19,000 wants $10,044 to put five trash cans in Jenks Park, which is currently “\”littered with garbage and debris,”...

Detroit, you're not alone. Across the nation, cities and states are watching Detroit's largest-ever municipal bankruptcy filing with fear. Years of underfunded retirement promises to public sector workers, which helped lay Detroit low, could plunge them into a similar financial hole. A CNBC.com analysis of more than 120 of the nation's largest state and local pension plans finds they face a wide range of financial burdens as aging work forces near retirement. Thanks to a patchwork of accounting practices and rosy investment assumptions, it's not even clear just how big a financial hole many states and cities have dug for...

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Miami and its former budget director of securities fraud related to several municipal bond offerings. The city and Michael Boudreaux made materially false and misleading statements and omissions about interfund transfers in three 2009 bond offerings totaling $153.5 million, the SEC said in a statement Friday. Boudreaux orchestrated the transfers to mask growing deficits in the city’s general fund, the SEC said. The SEC in 2010 started cracking down on state and local governments for not providing investors in the municipal bond market with accurate information about pension liabilities. Since then, Illinois and New...

And so the next casualty of the inevitable municipal collapse appears, which is, as expected, that one-time symbol of all that was right with a (once upon a time) manufacturing America, having since been replaced with the anti-symbol of all that is broken: Detroit. DETROIT BEGINS MORATORIUM ON ALL DEBT SERVICE PAYMENTS FOR UNSECURED FUNDED DEBT DETROIT TO DEFAULT ON CERTIFICATES OF PARTICIPATION DUE TODAY And, true to from in the New Normal America, where the "fairness doctrine" rules supreme under Big Brother's watchful eye, the premise of the upcoming glorious recovery is a well-known one: "the shared-sacrifice." To wit:...

Obama proposed this last year and now its back on the table: This week, the Wall Street Journal’s John D. McKinnon and Andrew Ackerman are reporting that House Speaker John Boehner “is willing to consider curbing the tax-exempt status of municipal-bond interest, subject to negotiations with the White House.” Reality check...the only reason investors buy muni bonds is because of the tax exempt status. They pay less interest than other bonds that are already taxed so if they are gonna tax the muni's....might as well get the higher interest rate. So what happens then? Local, county and state municipalities will...

Real-estate and newspaper mogul Mortimer Zuckerman voted for Obama but began seeing trouble as soon as the stimulus went into the pockets of municipal unions. 'It's as if he doesn't like people," says real-estate mogul and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman ... The Boston Properties CEO is trying to understand why Mr. Obama has made little effort to build relationships on Capitol Hill or negotiate a bipartisan economic plan. A longtime supporter of the Democratic Party, Mr. Zuckerman wrote in these pages two months ago that the entire business community was "pleading for some kind of adult supervision"...

Harrisburg City Council answered the state’s takeover threat by voting to seek Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection Tuesday night, essentially adding the courts and more turmoil to the fight over the capital city’s fate. The same majority who voted down the state-sponsored Act 47 plan and Mayor Linda Thompson’s followup fiscal-recovery plan voted 4-3 to hire Philadelphia-area lawyer Mark Schwartz to fight the takeover and then 4-3 to file for bankruptcy as soon as possible. ... "Wake up, Harrisburg. Wake up and look around,” Smith said. “I’m tired of being bent over and spanked in the corner. We should have...

Women are to be allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia. K ing Abdullah bin Abdulaziz announced the change yesterday and also said women would be allowed to run in elections. However, the new law will not come into force until 2015. In a speech, the king said the move was in accordance with sharia law.

Contrary to recent media reports, the malicious prosecution of Julie Bass of Oak Park, Michigan has not ended. Authorities have also charged her with having unlicensed dogs, though they never escaped or threatened anyone. Here’s the unedited scoop straight from her own blog, Oak Park Hates Veggies: Home-grown: Julie Bass has fallen foul of local authorities by growing vegetables in her front yardHome-grown: Julie Bass has fallen foul of local authorities by growing vegetables in her front yard 1- the charges against us were not actually “dropped”. they were dismissed by some judge we have never heard of or seen....

May 11 -- Ireland's government will impose a levy on domestic private pension savings, raising as much as 1.9 billion euros ($2.7 billion) to finance a job-creation program. The government plans to apply an annual 0.6 percent charge over four years on pension assets, excluding funds providing benefits to non-resident employers and members, Finance Minister Michael Noonan said in Dublin yesterday. The move should generate 470 million euros ($675 million) a year, he said, adding pensions had received "massive" tax breaks in the past.

"Fundamentals are horrifying: unfunded pension liability [is] growing from $7 trillion this year to $11 trillion next year to $15 trillion in two years. Health care costs going up at 9 percent a year, inability to raise taxes ... headline risk is predominant," Albrycht said. "You need to have aggressive reform, like we are seeing in New Jersey. You need to have governments dealing with the situation, like we're seeing in Wisconsin and Illinois," he added. If over the next 24 months there is not pension reform, the munis are in trouble, Albrycht went on to say. "13 states right...

Who Has The Big Knife Out For Meredith Whitney? Robert WenzelFebruary 3, 2011 There's something very odd about the trashing Meredith Whitney is getting over her warnings on the municipal debt market. First, there's been the unending attack by Charlie Gasparino at FOX on her warning. Now word comes, via Gasparino, that a Congressional subcommittee, headed by Congressman Patrick McHenry, wants to look into the condition of the municipal bond market . Although Gasparino is painting the story as though it is somehow an investigation of Whitney. Writes Gasparino: "As part of this inquiry, the subcommittee is looking into the...

It's hard to look at this chart, and not have your heart skip a bit of a beat. For three days now, munis have tanked, and this is the worst one yet.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments strapped with big municipal debt burdens, saying the Fed had limited legal authority to help and little will to use that authority. "We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states, he said later, "should not expect loans from the Fed."The $2.9 trillion municipal-bond market has been stung recently by worries that some cash-strapped cities or states won't be able to pay off or roll...

Budget shortfalls and subsequent muni bond defaults "could derail the recovery, cost a million public employees their jobs and require another big bailout package that no one in Washington wants to talk about," ... Gov. Christie does an excellent job of framing this discussion by pointing out the huge disconnect between the benefits of public sector employees vs. their private-sector counterparts. "I think the general public thinks, 'I can't believe anybody gets a pension anymore. I've got a 401(k). It got killed in the stock market. I don't know what I'm gonna do for my retirement. I can't believe people...

When state and local governments want to spend more than they collect in revenues, they issue bonds. Such bonds are a longstanding feature of the American landscape, going back at least as far as 1812, but during the last decade they have spun out of control, as states and cities have increased their borrowing to indulge in more and more spending on new stadiums, schools, bridges, and museums. They have even started borrowing to cover their basic operational expenses. Since 2000 the total outstanding state and municipal bond debt, adjusted for inflation, has soared from $1.5 trillion to $2.8 trillion...