#Committee on Finance

[connectthegeekvillage]

The Money Tree: My Thoughts on TIF and Mayor Johnson's $1.25 Billion Dollar Economic Development Plan

Since February, I have been attending the Committee on Finance meetings in Chicago, virtually as a Documenter with City Bureau’s’ civic program, and have witnessed what seems like a miracle until a bit of digging is applied. These meetings mainly cover the municipal government allocating funds towards community development projects and handling settlements, primarily centering around the…

[transformativeworks]

Five Things Cesy Said

In Five Things Cesy shares her journey from a volunteer involved in closed beta for AO3 in 2009 to her current role as a member of OTW Finance committee. Read more at https://otw-news.org/bddpzvr5

[alwaysbewoke]

[jeromepowell]

I will take poll results into account next week. I’m sure the FOMC will be very grateful to hear your responses, valued citizens of the Tumblr ^.^

[lgbtiwtv]

haunted that lestat is like 21 yrs old leading a society. the other vampires should’ve iced his ass years ago on basic principle. well… i guess they tried several times but like a roach he persevered. I feel like they keep him around bc he’s the only one bringing interesting events to the community he’s like a human soap opera he’s like the personification of Murphy’s law. like he should be sucking and fucking his way across the globe having the vampire equivalent of a spring break trip to malibu as god intended but instead he’s doing paperwork and ruling a society….that’s cruel and unusual punishment for him AND the society like that is NOT his natural environment……..they should put him down humanely….send him to a nice farm upstate where all the other problem-causers run free in the fields etc but no he has the endurance capacity of a New York City roach with immortality to match and he just keeps getting more powerful and more manic-pixie-dream-girled so vampiric society gives up on trying to squash that gay bug and instead puts him in a jar to observe in captivity because the bug is easily the most thing to happen to their society in centuries. he’s like the sliced bread of vampires they’re like what did we even DO before lestat???????? and none of them can even answer because the worlds two oldest living vampires are ALSO obsessed with him. I’d tell them to get well soon but it’s just unrealistic at this point

[comite-de-salut-public]

You seem to have thoughts on this new calendar system. Do you perchance, have qualms with it yourself?

I actually quite like it. The plants of the day have been very amusing to track, and I'm looking forward to the multiple-day New Year celebration at the autumnal equinox. This seems to be one of the occasional positive things Citizen Fabre d'Églantine has accomplished as of late.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQ Nation:

Republican attorneys general in Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas have been using “abusive legal demands” to collect transgender patients’ medical records in pursuit of “ideological and political goals,” according to a 10-page report recently released by the staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic majority.

The report accuses the attorneys general of using misleading legal pretexts to make civil investigative demands of gender-affirming healthcare providers. The investigations have contributed to hostile anti-LGBTQ+ social and political climates and have also worsened queer people’s mental health, leading to “suicidal ideation, severe depression, and intense anxiety,” the report added. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s investigation alleged clinicians’ misuse of Medicaid funds as a “money-making scheme.” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey both alleged that gender-affirming clinics had violated consumer protection laws. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton demanded records from clinics in his state, Georgia, and Washington state without ever explaining why. All four states mentioned above have passed bans on gender-affirming care for minors. “In their sweeping anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns, Attorney General offices demand a host of invasive items such as unredacted physical and mental health records, photographs of children’s bodies, correspondence to hospitals’ general email addresses for LGBTQIA+ patients, and lists of people referred for transgender health care,” the report stated.

A 10-page report from the Senate Finance Committee revealed that 4 Republican AGs committed abusive privacy-eroding practices to obtain trans patient data as part of their crusade against gender-affirming care for trans minors.

The 4 Republican Attorneys General named in the report are: Todd Rokita (IN), Andrew Bailey (MO), Ken Paxton (TX), and Jonathan Skrmetti (TN).

[anotherpapercut]

if you're a sane human being who possesses a reasonable amount of common sense with extra time/a flexible schedule consider applying or nominating yourself to be on a library board

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

enablers standing by

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 8, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

Andrew Restuccia, Richard Rubin, and Stephanie Armour of the Wall Street Journal today published a preview of President Joe Biden’s budget, due to be released tomorrow. Their article’s beginning sent an important message. Biden’s budget plan, they wrote, will “save hundreds of billions of dollars by seeking to lower drug prices, raising some business taxes, cracking down on fraud and cutting spending he sees as wasteful, according to White House officials.” Those officials said that, over the next ten years, the plan would cut deficits by close to $3 trillion. Reflecting the needs of Ukraine to fight off the 2022 Russian invasion, as well as tensions with China, Biden will call for a larger defense budget. As he outlined yesterday, part of the budget plan will fund the Medicare trust fund for at least another 25 years, in part by increasing tax rates on people earning more than $400,000 a year. “That is not going to happen. Obviously he knows that,” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) told the Wall Street Journal reporters. “Republicans are not going to sign up for raising taxes.” Without a budget plan of their own to offer, House Republicans appear to be trying to steal the president’s thunder. They told Tony Romm of the Washington Post that they are getting ready for the House Ways and Means Committee to begin consideration tomorrow of a bill to prioritize the national debt in preparation for a national default. House Republicans continue to insist they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling to pay for expenses already incurred—many of them under Trump—thus forcing the U.S. into default for the first time in our history. They are suggesting they could rank the debts in order of importance, but as Brian Riedl, an economist at the Manhattan Institute, told Romm, the computer systems were written with the assumption the country would, in fact, pay its debts, and they do not have programs that would let them prioritize payments to one group or another. In any case, the White House has refused to negotiate over paying the nation’s bills. It remains eager to discuss the budget with Republicans and to negotiate over it—which is how the process is supposed to proceed—but insists the Republicans cannot hold the nation hostage by threatening a default that would spark an international financial crisis and destroy the American economy. Indeed, the willingness of the Republican Party to default on the country’s debt shows how thoroughly radicalized it has become. Even the Republican leaders who do not embrace the racism, sexism, religiosity, nihilism, and authoritarianism of the hard-core MAGA Republicans appear to believe they cannot win an election without the votes of those people. And so the extremists now own the party. They continue to support former president Trump, who at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend promised “those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” The party is now one of grievance and revenge, feeding on their false conviction that Trump won the 2020 election. The Fox News Channel was key in feeding that Big Lie, of course, and filings from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against the Fox News Network have revealed that Fox executives and hosts alike knew it was a lie. They continued to spread it because they didn’t want to lose their base. On Monday, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, who has found himself badly exposed by the Dominion filings, threw himself back into the Trump camp. He showed a false version of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, suggesting it was a mostly peaceful tourist visit rather than the deadly riot it actually was. Carlson’s false narrative was possible because House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave Carlson exclusive access to more than 40,000 hours of video taken in the Capitol on that fateful January 6, illustrating that there is no daylight between the lies of the Fox News Channel and the House Republican leadership. Outrage over that transaction has sparked a backlash. Former officer of the Metropolitan Police Michael Fanone, who was badly injured defending the Capitol on January 6, published an op-ed at CNN saying he knew for certain that Carlson’s version of that day was a lie. “I was there. I saw it. I lived it,” Fanone wrote. “I fought alongside my brother and sister officers to defend the Capitol. We have the scars and injuries to prove it.” Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted that if the House Republicans want new January 6th hearings, “bring it on. Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year. But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence.” Senate Republicans also spoke out against Carlson’s lies. Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) aligned himself with Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger, who called Carlson’s piece “offensive.” McConnell said: “It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.” Democrats, along with the White House, also condemned Carlson’s video. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said the White House supported the Capitol Police and lawmakers from both parties who condemned “this false depiction of the unprecedented, violent attack on our Constitution and the rule of law—which cost police officers their lives.” Bates went on: “We also agree with what Fox News’s own attorneys and executives have now repeatedly stressed in multiple courts of law: That Tucker Carlson is not credible.” But McCarthy says he does not regret giving Carlson access to the tapes, and Carlson indicated that anyone who objected to the false narrative he put forward on Monday had revealed themselves as being allied against the Republican base. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) are organizing a visit for members of Congress to visit the jail where defendants charged with crimes relating to the January 6th riot are behind held. In the past, Greene called those defendants “political prisoners of war.” Today the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. It warned that transnational “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” (RMVEs) continue to pose a threat more lethal to U.S. persons and interests than do Islamist terrorists. RMVEs are “largely a decentralized movement of adherents to an ideology that espouses the use of violence to advance white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and other exclusionary cultural-nationalist beliefs. These actors increasingly seek to sow social divisions, support fascist-style governments, and attack government institutions,” the report said. They “capitalize on societal and political hyperpolarization to…mainstream their narratives and conspiracy theories into the public discourse.” They are recruiting “military members” to “help them organize cells for attacks against minorities or institutions that oppose their ideology.” Finally, John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News reported that 81-year-old Senator Mitch McConnell fell at an event at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C., tonight and has been hospitalized.

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[transformativeworks]

OTW Finance: 2023 Budget

OTW's Finance Committee has released our 2023 budget.  They detail where donations go and what our expected income is this year.  Find out more about what it takes to run the organization at https://otw.news/af6503

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[carlocarrasco]

DBCC adjusts Philippines GDP growth targets for 2024 to 2028

Recently the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) adjusted its economic growth targets for the Philippines covering the next few years in relation to varied factors, according to a BusinessWorld news report. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the BusinessWorld news report. Some parts in boldface… THE Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) on…

[wausaupilot]

Wausau passes 2025 budget with modest tax increase

Wausau, we have a budget - and the Council avoided a wheel tax and some proposed cuts along the way:

Damakant Jayshi The Wausau City Council on Tuesday approved the city’s 2025 budget, setting a levy of $37.4 million and a mill rate of approximately $8.50 per $1,000 of equalized property value. District 2 Alder and Finance Committee Chair Michael Martens said that the 2.47% levy increase comes in under the mayor’s target of 2.5%, marking the lowest levy increase in over a decade. “The good…

[bitcoinversus]

South Korea Forms Committee to Review Bitcoin ETFs

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) has taken a significant step towards approving spot cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds (ETFs), officially announcing the formation of a Virtual Asset Committee on October 10, 2024. The committee, composed of public and private sector experts, will act as an advisory body to review and approve Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs, alongside addressing…

[townpostin]

JNAC Plants 200 Saplings for Clean Air Day 2024

Deputy Municipal Commissioner leads tree plantation drive at Domuhani Park Key Points: • 200 saplings planted at Sonari’s Domuhani Park for Clean Air Day • NGOs, banks, and local community join JNAC’s environmental initiative • JNAC commits to planting 5,000 multipurpose trees across the area JAMSHEDPUR – The Jamshedpur Notified Area Committee marks Clean Air Day 2024 with a community-driven tree…

[southsouthcooperationday]

Multi-stakeholder round table 8: Science, technology, innovation and capacity-building.

7th Plenary meeting (continued) - Round table at the First Session of the Preparatory Committee for the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 22-26 July 2024. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda (Addis Agenda) recognizes science, technology, innovation (STI), an...

Watch the Multi-stakeholder round table 8: Science, technology, innovation and capacity-building!