Billionaire JB Pritzker bought a mansion next to his Gold Coast palace.
To cut his property taxes by $331,000, he and his wife ripped out five toilets during a “remodel” and declared the whole place uninhabitable.
Cook County caught the scam. Feds investigated it as tax fraud. He eventually paid up... after getting busted.
Now he's put a .2% tax on crypto transactions.
These people...
Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.
They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.
Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.
They lost them for two reasons.
The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.
In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.
Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.
That fight dragged on for years.
The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.
Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.
So now it's all gone.
The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.
Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.
Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.
But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.
Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.
And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.
Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.
Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."
There it is. "Billionaire-owned."
That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.
Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.
Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."
When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.
They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.
Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.
But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."
Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.
Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.
Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.
It’s not an antisemitic conspiracy theory when a foreign lobby openly brags that they bought two congressional seats with candidates who will be loyal to Israel.
Thomas Massie declared:
“I came here to make sure our Republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber.”
History will remember him for it.
But Washington is no longer salvageable.
The Republic has fallen to foreign influence and corporate power.
This CBS interview w Thomas Massie is insane.
Massie: “my policy has always been, no country is special and no country deserves my constituents’ taxpayer dollars.
So I’ve never voted for foreign aid, to Egypt, to Syria, to Israel or to Ukraine… but the ones in Israel … they are the biggest recipients so they are mad.” […]
CBS: “…are you antisemitic?”
$32 million dollars and an entire administration mobilized to destroy one congressman.
His crime?
Demanding answers about Epstein class abuse networks, and refusing to let child predators hide behind political cover.
If that level of firepower doesn't tell you who's being protected, nothing will.
Go Massie!
I think one of the wildest things, is that all of this is happening on the verge of the USA 250th anniversary. Like this should be a momentous time in our history, but instead we've never been more splintered. With corrupt elites laughing and mocking us directly.
CIA whistleblower claims the agency “took back 40 boxes of JFK and MK-Ultra files” that Tulsi Gabbard was reviewing for declassification.
The whistleblower also alleges the CIA “illegally monitored the computer and phone usage” of Gabbard’s investigators during the probe into the COVID-19 origins cover-up.
“These were Americans being spied on illegally while carrying out duties directed by the President and under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence.”
You are watching in real time as billionaires steal a seat in Congress to punish the sitting congressperson who forced the revelation of their pedophilic tendencies. They are actively working to buy this seat & rob Kentuckians of someone who actually cares about their state.