Katie Tucker moved into her own apartment this week, the first real home her 1-year-old baby has ever known.
She had been living with family members and friends for more than a year, but a new Charleston Housing Authority program made a permanent place to live possible, just in time for Christmas.
A series of misfortunes and some personal struggles knocked down Tucker financially, and she and her baby Sydney were having a hard time getting up.
…the declining, little-known city of Prichard is now attracting the attention of bankruptcy lawyers, labor leaders, municipal credit analysts and local officials from across the country. They want to see if the situation in Prichard, like the continuing bankruptcy of Vallejo, Calif., ultimately creates a legal precedent on whether distressed cities can legally cut or reduce their pensions, and if so, how.
“Prichard is the future,” said Michael Aguirre, the former San Diego city attorney, who has called for San Diego to declare bankruptcy and restructure its own outsize pension obligations. “We’re all on the same conveyor belt. Prichard is just a little further down the road.”
Many cities and states are struggling to keep their pension plans adequately funded, with varying success. New York City plans to put $8.3 billion into its pension fund next year, twice what it paid five years ago. Maryland is considering a proposal to raise the retirement age to 62 for all public workers with fewer than five years of service.
Illinois keeps borrowing money to invest in its pension funds, gambling that the funds’ investments will earn enough to pay back the debt with interest. New Jersey simply decided not to pay the $3.1 billion that was due its pension plan this year.
Now the city faces a rare and crippling crisis. On Jan. 1 city property values will decline immediately because higher taxes will be needed to stabilize its pension fund. All of that will occur because the state, in the new year, will be able to take over the pension plan since the mayor and council are nowhere near a deal that will deliver the $200 million-plus needed to bring the plan up to 50 percent funded, from the current 29 percent.
That takeover will mean the city will be forced by the state to pay much higher contributions into the fund year after year. The state doesn’t care where the money comes from — even if it means sharply higher taxes — only that the city shore up its pension program.
City Council members keep saying that such a hit won’t come for years, but that lackadaisical attitude is part of the reason they and the mayor have failed to find a compromise.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Watch it all–he is a remarkable fellow.
Nick Maiale of Big Nick’s Cold Cuts in Philadelphia does not sell cigarettes to anyone under age 18. Not that he doesn’t get asked.
“I get them every day,” he says of teenagers trying to buy cigarettes despite the law against selling to minors. “I have to card twice a day.” Only once, he says, has the deli been fined for selling to a kid. “My wife got caught” by a teen who looked older, Maiale says. “I could’ve killed her.”
But Philadelphia is an easy place for kids to buy cigarettes illegally. When undercover shoppers for the city’s health department ”” local high school students posing as customers ”” try to buy cigarettes in one of the city’s 4,300 tobacco retailers, they succeed at least 25% of the time.
Cities are bracing to lose millions of dollars in funding for transportation and community projects, from subway lines to youth centers, because of a renewed push in Congress to ban lawmaker-directed spending known as “earmarks.”
With the incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives committed to ending the practice and the Senate facing a vote to ban earmarks today, local officials are scrambling to find ways to pay for projects in case the federal funding never arrives.
Spending bills in the House for the 2011 fiscal year include more than 3,000 earmarks worth $3 billion, according to the budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense ”” from $2.5 million for a transportation center in Rochester, N.Y., to $250,000 for park upgrades in Gonzales, La.
A Michigan city is pleading with churches, schools and a hospital for donations to help cover its staggering budget deficit.
The mayor of Mount Clemens, Barb Dempsey, sent a letter this week to 35 tax-exempt organizations asking them to voluntarily contribute to the city’s general fund, which pays for services like fire protection, streetlights and roads. Ms. Dempsey said the city has already drastically cut its expenses, having disbanded the police department six years ago, but still faces a $960,000 deficit that is projected to reach $1.5 million next year.
“Those are all services that they utilize at no cost to them,” Ms. Dempsey said. “We figured it can’t hurt to send out letters. If you don’t ask, you never know.”
For decades this central Indian city was vintage old India: crumbling Mughal-era ruins and ancient Buddhist caves surrounded by endless parched acres from which farmers coaxed cotton.
But this month Aurangabad became an emblem of an altogether different India: the booming, increasingly urbanized economic powerhouse filled with ambition and a new desire to flaunt its wealth.
A group of more than 150 local businessmen decided to buy, en masse, a Mercedes-Benz car each, spending nearly $15 million in a single day and putting this small but thriving city on the map. Frustrated that the usual Chamber of Commerce brochures were slow to attract new investment, the businessmen decided to buy the cars as a stunt intended to stimulate investment in Aurangabad, one of several largely unknown but thriving urban centers across India’s more prosperous states.
“In and around Aurangabad there are companies worth a thousand crores,” an amount of Indian rupees equivalent to about $225 million, said Sachin Nagouri, 40, a hyperkinetic local real estate mogul who came up with the idea. “But Aurangabad is not known even in this state. There is plenty of money here. We just need to show it.”
The clergymen stood inside the Lansdowne gun shop on Hollins Ferry Road, in front of a glass counter containing what they called the “instruments of death” responsible for turning the streets of Baltimore into a killing field.
“The city is devastated by violence ”” gun violence,” pressed Rev. Eugene Sutton, a bishop with the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, whose group protested this store on Wednesday. “We’re trying to get the illegal guns off the street. Too many people are dying. It’s destroying Baltimore.”
Bill and Clyde Blamberg, owners of Clyde’s Sport Shop for more than a half century, listened politely but firmly told the group to seek help elsewhere ”” change the laws in Annapolis before attempting to change the minds of gun shop owners.
Our role in Iraq has also been to help win the hearts and minds of Iraqis through humanitarian missions and establishing local relationships with religious leaders. One such local leader is the Rev. Canon Andrew White.
Canon White is the rector (pastor) of St. George’s Church of Baghdad, the only Anglican Church in the country, established during the time when Iraq was a British territory. Canon White, also titled the vicar of Baghdad by the Church of England, plays an important role as a peace ambassador in the Middle East. He has been kidnapped. He has been beaten. He has lain on a floor with body parts scattered around him. Yet, he faithfully continues to preach and works for peace in one of the most dangerous places in the world today. He faces such persecution because he is one of the few vocal Christians in the city working for the good of Iraq.
Given Canon White’s persecution in Baghdad, I have reflected on what the situation would be like if it were reversed. What would the situation be like for those who are not the religious majority of a country?
Police agencies across the country are recruiting thousands of civilians for a growing number of duties previously performed by uniformed cops, in an unusual concession to local budget cuts.
The positions ”” some paid and others volunteer ”” are transforming every-day citizens into crime-scene investigators, evidence gatherers and photographers in what some analysts suggest is a striking new trend in American policing.
“It’s all being driven by the economy and we should expect to see more of it,” says University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, who analyzes law enforcement practices. “As budgets are squeezed, an increasing number of duties are going to be moved off officers’ plates.”
“Because of the national interest in the project, we felt that we should try to really educate people about what this project is all about and a picture speaks a thousand words, as they say,” El-Gamal told NPR’s Scott Simon.
The project will include much more than a mosque. El-Gamal says the nearly 120,000 square-foot center will include a Sept. 11, 2001, memorial, an athletic facility and other features. The facility, he says, is tailor-made for one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in New York state where there are “more strollers than briefcases.”
“All that we’re looking to do is provide a much-needed community center in Lower Manhattan,” he said.
Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers’ plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers’ beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles.
Concerned residents staged demonstrations, some of which turned bitter.
But cooler heads eventually prevailed; the project proceeded to completion. And this week, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan ”” the locus of all that controversy two centuries ago and now the oldest Catholic church in New York State ”” is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone.
Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, dodged financial disaster last month by getting money from the state to make a payment to its bondholders.
It did so even though the state warned that the money had to be used for city workers’ pensions.
Now Harrisburg is calling on the state again. On Friday, the city said it could not meet its next payroll without money from the state’s distressed cities program.
Across the country, a growing number of towns, cities and other local governments are seeking refuge in similar havens that many states provide as alternatives to federal bankruptcy court. Pennsylvania will have 20 cities and smaller communities in its distressed-cities program if Harrisburg receives approval. Michigan has 37 in its program; New Jersey has seven; Illinois, Rhode Island and California each have at least one. This is on top of troubled housing, power and hospital authorities.
My God is better than your God.
That’s the dispute at the heart of recent hearings in a lawsuit aimed at derailing the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. What started as a zoning issue has turned into a fight over theology and the role of government in recognizing religion.
Mosque opponents say that Islam is not a real religion. They argued in a Rutherford County courthouse last week that the world’s second-largest faith, with its 1.6 billion followers, is actually a political movement….
Eleven months out of the year, the parishioners of New York City can safely attend Sunday services with no reasonable fear of interlopers, television cameras or quizzical members of the press.
But this is the electoral playoff season of October, when aspiring statesmen show up on doorsteps more often than jack-o’-lanterns. That means politicians are descending on the pews.
By noon on Sunday, three churches along a single two-mile stretch of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, had played host to three of New York State’s more prominent elected officials: the state’s attorney general and comptroller, both of whom are running for statewide office, and the mayor of New York City.
Coincidence? In campaigns, there may be no such thing.
The nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert here in the 1940s.
Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state.
Unemployment in Nevada is now 14.4 percent, the highest in the nation and a stark contrast to the 3.8 percent unemployment rate here just 10 years ago; in Las Vegas, it is 14.7 percent.
August was the 44th consecutive month in which Nevada led the nation in housing foreclosures.
“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.
We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.
“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”
Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson requested enrollment in Pennsylvania’s recovery and oversight program for distressed municipalities, saying the capital city stands “on the precipice of a full-blown financial crisis.”
Harrisburg faces “imminent and inevitable” defaults on about $44 million in bond payments due by Dec. 15, according to Thompson’s application for the state’s Act 47 recovery program. The city of 47,000 will miss payroll within a month, as well as its payment to the police pension fund due by Dec. 31, unless it obtains short-term loans, the application says.
Harrisburg officials have been weighing bankruptcy after the city missed debt payments for a trash-to-energy incinerator. Under Act 47 protection, Pennsylvania would help the city devise a recovery plan and give it priority in seeking state aid. The designation might also bolster the city’s standing in the credit markets through guarantees of financial support, Thompson said.
Real democracy is messy. It’s got protestors and agitators and banners and manners and morals and financial pressures and gossip and policemen on horses keeping an eye out to make sure it doesn’t turn violent. Oh, yes, it’s also got government, but apart from paying for those policemen, government ought not to be too deeply involved as these things sort themselves out. If what the Muslims want to do is not illegal, than government should have nothing more to say.
That does not mean, however, that everyone else should also have nothing more to say. The attempt to build a large, new mosque and Islamic center anywhere near the site of the World Trade Center is so offensive, so bizarre, and so deliberate that it should be stopped.
And stopped it will be, through the offered mediation of New York’s Archbishop Dolan, or the skittishness of the financial community, or the disturbance of the neighbors, or the anger of the protestors, or the refusal of the building contractors. It will be messy, and it will be sharp. Inspiring and disturbing, with loud shouts on the streets and a few quiet words in the back rooms.
But that’s democracy””it’s how things get done when you accept that government shouldn’t do everything. The churches and the synagogues have long experience with this kind of democratic negotiation. Time for the mosques to learn how to do it, too.
Police departments have collected thousands of handguns through buy-back programs in communities throughout the country. Now they want the contents of your medicine cabinet.
Opiate painkillers and other prescription drugs, officials say, are driving addiction and crime like never before, with addicts singling out the homes of sick or elderly people and posing as potential buyers at open houses just to raid the medicine cabinets. The crimes, and the severity of the nation’s drug abuse problem, have so vexed the authorities that they are calling on citizens to surrender old bottles of potent pills like Vicodin, Percocet and Xanax.
On Saturday, the police will set up drop-off stations at a Wal-Mart in Pearland, Tex., a zoo in Wichita, Kan., a sports complex in Peoria, Ariz., and more than 4,000 other locations to oversee a prescription drug take-back program. Coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration, it will be the first such effort with national scope.
The take-back day is being held as waves of data suggest the country’s prescription drug problem is vast and growing. In 17 states, deaths from drugs ”” both prescription and illegal ”” now exceed those from motor vehicle accidents, with opiate painkillers playing a leading role. The number of people seeking treatment for painkiller addiction jumped 400 percent from 1998 to 2008, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
North Charleston City Council opened the door Wednesday night for gambling boats to sail out of the Cooper River, rejecting the idea of a citywide referendum next year.
In a series of votes, council gave initial approval to the casino boat package. And since Mayor Keith Summey appears to have the majority six council votes he needs to pass the final measure, the boats could begin operating from the waterfront as soon as this winter if all of the necessary City Code changes pass in the coming weeks.
Speaking to a council committee, Summey said the boats would not be a radical introduction of the vice of gambling, pointing out that the state already backs games of chance by running a lottery.
Soothing misunderstandings between American Christians and American Muslims begins with a renewed national commitment to the free exercise of religion. In no way should the government try to prevent the building of the Islamic center at Ground Zero. With this safeguard in place, it should be easier to move the discussion to questions of propriety. With the anniversary of 9/11 upon us, America needs no more gratuitous statements or actions from either Christians or Muslims. Enough damage has been done already, by both Christians and Muslims.
Thankfully, there are very few things that, as Americans, we don’t have the right to do. But just because we can do (or build, or burn) something doesn’t make it a good idea.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf promised on Monday to resolve the fierce dispute around plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks from ground zero, and he gave personal reflections about Islam and terrorism and about his identity as an American and a Muslim.
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, he promised to find a way out of the current impasse around the planned center, which opponents say is insensitive to the memory of 9/11 and which supporters say sends the opposite message, that Muslims, like other Americans, object to and were victims of the attacks.
“Everything is on the table,” he said. “We really are focused on solving it” in a way that will be best for everyone concerned, he added. “I give you my pledge.”
On “The Early Show on Saturday Morning,” Jasser regarded the rallies being planned at Ground Zero, for and against the center, and said he thinks, “Today is especially a day, as we remember and reflect upon 9/11 and looking over that pit of devastation there and feeling that, today, we look through that lens as Americans, not as a Muslim, not as of any faith. I don’t look through this lens of trying to repair my – trying to promote Islam. It’s about fighting the forces that caused this, and I think, if we’re able to unite under that, that’s why 71 percent of Americans are against (the Islamic center).
“It’s not because they don’t want mosques there, there [are] even other mosques closer. Many of us have built over 2,000 mosques in the United States with very little problem. But, I think what unites us is the freedoms and liberties our Constitution gives us, and it’s time for Muslims to look less about promoting ourselves, (have) less of a victimology and (be) more about feeling the pain of the families of 9/11 and understanding what we have to do to repair the house of Islam.”
After a long absence while controversy over the mosque near Ground Zero smoldered, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf finally held forth this week both in the New York Times and on CNN.
Imam Rauf and his supporters are clearly more interested in making a political statement in relation to Islam than in the mosque’s potential for causing community division and pain to those who lost loved ones on 9/11. That division is already bitterly obvious.
As someone who has been involved in building mosques around the country, and who has dealt with his fair share of unjustified opposition, I ask of Imam Rauf and all his supporters, “Where is your sense of fairness and common decency?” In relation to Ground Zero, I am an American first, a Muslim second, just as I would be at Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy Beach, Pearl Harbor or any other battlefield where my fellow countrymen lost their lives….
Gainesville, after all, is a university town that until a few months ago was best known for producing college football champions, Gatorade and rockers like Tom Petty.
Educated and progressive, with a gay mayor and a City Commission made up entirely of Democrats, Gainesville is a sprawling metropolis of 115,000 people where smoothie shops seem to outnumber gun shops.
Fanatics can come from anywhere, Gainesvillians will tell you, but why did this one have to come from here?
“He doesn’t represent the community,” said Larry Wilcox, 78, reading the newspaper at a local Panera restaurant. “This guy is obviously a publicity hound and a weirdo.”
Opposition to building an Islamic cultural center near the site of the former World Trade Center springs from those “who feel threatened by what they do not understand and by what they have not had time to process,” according to the Rt. Rev. John B. Chane, Bishop of Washington.
“In many ways, our psyche as a nation was attacked,” Chane said during “Park51 Islamic Center Near Ground Zero: Issues in Conflict,” a panel discussion held Sept. 7 at Georgetown University.
“We have never been able to grieve” collectively as a nation, he said. “The current fear should not surprise any of us.”
We have all been awed by how inflamed and emotional the issue of the proposed community center has become. The level of attention reflects the degree to which people care about the very American values under debate: recognition of the rights of others, tolerance and freedom of worship.
Many people wondered why I did not speak out more, and sooner, about this project. I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad. It would be better if I addressed these issues once I returned home to America, and after I could confer with leaders of other faiths who have been deliberating with us over this project. My life’s work has been focused on building bridges between religious groups and never has that been as important as it is now.
We are proceeding with the community center, Cordoba House. More important, we are doing so with the support of the downtown community, government at all levels and leaders from across the religious spectrum, who will be our partners. I am convinced that it is the right thing to do for many reasons….