Thread: Liberal cities across America collapsing into Third World status, including Seattle

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Blue Cities Across The US Are Spiraling Into Financial Collapse

Sunday, May 03, 2026 - 10:45 PM

Many people are familiar with the "blue state exodus" over the past several years, but are they aware of the blue city business exodus?
It might be one of the biggest economic stories in modern US history, and Democrats are trying to keep it as quiet as possible. There is a blood letting going on in blue cities; a financial disaster in the making. And, like most financial disasters, it will probably be ignored until the house of cards comes crashing down completely.
For this examination let's look at three very different examples, all facing similar crises. We start in New York City, where taxes have been consistently increased in order to offset the loss of billions in public revenues due to citizens leaving. NYC has experienced a net loss of around 220,000 residents since 2021, but it's not the number of residents that is most important. Rather, it is the wealth of those residents that matters.



In the past two years alone, NYC has lost around 6000 businesses to closure or relocation, and the region is suffering from significant wealth decline. These losses represent tens of billions of dollars in tax revenues, erased from NYC coffers. And what did New Yorkers do? They elected Zohran Mamdani, doubling down on the far-left policies that caused the crisis in the first place.
Today, Mamdani is launching his much hyped "wealth tax" with the intention of funding the many socialist programs he promised to implement during his campaign. Sadly for the new Mayor, he is only now starting to realize that the more he taxes successful residents the more they will simply leave.



Potential fallout over Mayor Mamdani's tax-the-rich plan

Companies including Apollo Management, JP Morgan Chase, ARK Investment, Wells Fargo and Citadel are all establishing primary corporate offices in Texas and Florida with rumors swirling that many other corporations are planning to leave NYC entirely. While Democrats deny this is a threat, the real test will be the wealth tax - Companies have been waiting to see if Mamdani will actually be stupid enough to follow through, and yes, we now know he is.
A microcosm of the blue city taxation problem is readily available in Seattle, where the business exodus is crushing city revenues and expanding the debt crisis.
Washington State has one of the higher business failure rates nationally. Surveys show rising concern, with 17% of businesses considering leaving the state (up from 9% in 2025) due to taxes, costs, and regulations. Small businesses report worse conditions than during the pandemic peak.
Seattle is leading the way, with a net loss of 13,000 jobs in 2025 in the downtown area alone. Multiple corporation have reduced their footprint and moved HQ in recent years, including Amazon and Starbucks. Coffee giant Starbucks, which got its start in Seattle, is now leaving. They have recently announced a new corporate office in Nashville, TN and it is likely that they will relocate out of WA in the near future.



Policy experts believe city taxes could have played role in Starbucks new HQ decision

Voters in Seattle also elected a far-left activist mayor, Katie Wilson, who famously claimed she was going to "Trump-proof" Seattle. She currently faces a budget crisis with a projected $250 million shortfall and tax revenues in decline. Wilson (as of early 2026) directed departments to prepare 5% to10% budget cut plans for 2027. Like Mamdani, she is also calling for her own brand of "wealth tax" as a means to cover deficits; this will only cause more businesses to leave the area.
Finally, we get to the most Democrat of all blue cities, Hollywood. Tinsel Town is experiencing mass layoffs from Paramount, Warner Bros., Discovery, CNN, Disney, Sony, Bad Robot, etc. Tens-of-thousands of jobs are on the chopping block going into 2027. Productions plummeted by 16% in 2025 alone.
In the case of Hollywood, tax incentives have actually been increased and the film industry is being protected by California, but it does not seem to matter. The leftist hives in the greater Los Angeles area committed suicide by ideology, refusing to listen to the public and hammering the US with woke propaganda at the behest of Democrats.
By extension, DEI initiatives have driven out top talent and replaced creative workhorses with mediocre minds in order to increase minority representation. Hollywood apologists argue that "tech and AI" is the cause of their distress, but just like Seattle and New York, Hollywood's misery is of their own making.
Recent efforts to save the industry by catering to what audiences actually want might be too little to late. Insiders are suggesting that people seeking jobs in film and TV will have to search outside Hollywood. Like most blue towns, the economy is dying.

Blue Cities Across The US Are Spiraling Into Financial Collapse | ZeroHedge

Failed liberal policies are driving businesses out of blue cities and states

05/04/2026 // Lance D Johnson // 900 Views

Tags: blue cities, business exodus, conservative reform, corporate flight, crime crisis, DEI failure, economic suicide, education decline, financial collapse, housing failure, liberal policies, Los Angeles, New York, public disorder, Seattle, tax burden, urban decay, Washington DC, wealth tax, woke ideology



The narrative of American decline is not a story of national weakness but a tale of self-inflicted wounds, concentrated in the Democratic strongholds that once defined the nation’s economic power. Beneath the glossy surface of New York City’s skyline, Seattle’s tech hubs, and Los Angeles’ entertainment empire, a silent bloodletting is underway. It is a fiscal and demographic hemorrhage that Democratic leaders refuse to acknowledge, even as their own policies accelerate the exodus. The core truth, obscured by media spin and political deflection, is that blue cities across the United States are not merely struggling; they are spiraling into a state of managed collapse, driven by a trinity of liberal failures: punitive taxation, the abandonment of public order, and a cult-like adherence to social engineering over economic reality.Key points:

• New York City has lost over 220,000 residents and 6,000 businesses since 2021, with major financial firms relocating to Texas and Florida.
• Seattle faces a $250 million budget deficit and a net loss of 13,000 downtown jobs, as even hometown giant Starbucks prepares to leave.
• Hollywood is bleeding tens of thousands of jobs due to plummeting production and a stubborn commitment to woke ideology over audience demand.
• The common thread across these cities is a refusal to learn from history, repeating the same tax-and-spend, crime-tolerant policies that devastated urban America in the 1970s.
• A "wealth tax" is being weaponized by far-left mayors in New York and Seattle, a move that will only accelerate the destruction of their tax bases.

The taxation trap: How the pursuit of free money destroys the golden goose

The fundamental error of modern urban liberalism is the assumption that the public sector is the engine of growth, rather than a parasite on the private sector. This was the fatal conceit of the Great Society, and it is being replayed in real time in New York City under Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Since taking office, Mamdani has doubled down on the very policies that drove 220,000 residents and 6,000 businesses out of the city since 2021. His signature proposal is a "wealth tax," a mechanism designed to extract more revenue from the city’s remaining high-income earners and corporations.
This has led to a great migration. Apollo Management, JP Morgan Chase, ARK Investment, Wells Fargo, and Citadel have all established primary corporate offices in Texas and Florida. These moves are the rational response to a jurisdiction that views wealth creation as a resource to be mined rather than a condition to be cultivated. The economic analysis is clear: high tax rates act repel the most productive members of society. Eight of the ten major cities that lost population during the 1990s had per capita tax burdens above the national median. The fastest-growing cities had burdens well below it. Yet the response from city hall is not to lower taxes but to threaten higher ones, a strategy that ensures only the least mobile, most desperate populations remain to shoulder the burden.
Seattle offers a microcosm of the same disease. Mayor Katie Wilson, elected on a platform of being "Trump-proof," now faces a $250 million budget shortfall. The city’s response, predictably, is to prepare 5 to 10 percent budget cuts for 2027 while simultaneously calling for a new wealth tax. The result is a self-licking ice cream cone of decline. The city loses 13,000 downtown jobs in a single year. Amazon and Starbucks reduce their footprints. Surveys show 17 percent of businesses are considering leaving the state, up from 9 percent in 2025. Small businesses report current conditions that are worse now than they were during the COVID tyranny. The political class responds not by making the city more attractive to business but by reaching deeper into the pockets of those who have not yet escaped.
The moral collapse: When permissivism becomes a suicide pact

In Los Angeles, the entertainment industry is collapsing under the weight of its own ideological rigidity. Production plummeted 16 percent in 2025 alone. Major studios including Paramount, Warner Bros., Discovery, CNN, Disney, Sony, and Bad Robot are engaged in mass layoffs. The official narrative blames technology and artificial intelligence. The economic reality is more damning. The leftist hives in the greater Los Angeles area committed suicide by ideology, stifling creative expression for DEI initiatives. DEI initiatives drove out top talent and replaced creative workhorses with mediocre minds. Audiences rejected the product. Now the industry is dying, and tax incentives cannot reverse the damage because the problem is not cost but culture.
This pattern extends well beyond Hollywood. "Community action" programs in the 1960s degenerated into efforts to organize poor people into political lobbies that demanded money and favors, often by threatening violence. The "riot ideology" born in that era persists today in the form of grievance-based politics and a police force that has been demoralized and defunded in all but name. The result is a city where public spaces are abandoned, public transit is avoided, and commercial districts are hollowed out. In Washington, D.C., the capital of the free world, the population has fallen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Ten of America’s 25 largest cities have lost population during the 1990s, and the trend has only accelerated in the 2020s.
The housing catastrophe: When government destroys the ladder of opportunity

Perhaps no policy failure illustrates the disconnect between liberal intentions and outcomes more clearly than housing. For example, "urban renewal" efforts in the 1960s tore down 126,000 homes and built only 28,000 new units in their place, with average rents three to four times higher than the units they replaced. Private builders, by contrast, constructed 12 million new housing units during the same period and halved the amount of substandard housing. Yet the federal government, propelled by liberal ideology, continued to bulldoze neighborhoods and erect high-rise slums that separated the poor from the corner grocer, the parish priest, and the cop on the beat. The result was the creation of de facto adjuncts to prisons, where crime rates are three times higher than surrounding neighborhoods.
Today, this legacy is compounded by restrictive zoning regulations that limit the development of new housing, creating a supply-demand imbalance that drives up costs and increases homelessness. Blue cities have made it nearly impossible for the private market to function, cutting off the bottom rungs of the housing ladder. The working poor, who might once have used cheap housing as a stepping stone to the middle class, are now trapped in a system that offers no escape.
The education failure: The final nail in the urban coffin

The disparity in the quality of public education between the central city and the suburbs is so huge that no middle-class residents can be expected to raise families in central cities unless something dramatic is done. The data is stark. In Maryland, 63 percent of suburban eighth-graders score at the basic level for math, while only 9 percent of urban eighth-graders do. The policy response from liberals has been to double down on the failed experiment of busing and to resist school choice, even as surveys show that half of parents who leave cities cite poor schools as the primary reason.
For example, from a Calvert Institute survey out of Baltimore, of half of those who moved out, 80 percent of blacks in that group said they would likely have stayed if the city had offered school choice. The policy, which could keep more than 4,500 people a year from fleeing the city, is resisted not on economic grounds but on ideological ones. The same institutions that were most discriminatory in one era have become the most preferential under changed political conditions. The commitment to a failing system is not about outcomes. It is about control.
But liberal leaders eventually lose that control, as minds naturally seek to produce, to defend life, liberty and property, to raise families in safe environments, and learn news ways to succeed and give back. Blue cities are becoming shells of what they once were because they discourage all of these virtues.
Sources include:
Zerohedge.com
Governing.com
Hoover.org

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Failed liberal policies are driving businesses out of blue cities and states – NaturalNews.com

Democrats In Illinois Just Lost Hundreds Of Violent Criminals

Friday, May 15, 2026 - 09:50 AM
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

In yet another glaring example of failed “criminal justice reform” in blue cities, Cook County, Illinois officials have admitted that 243 dangerous criminals have gone completely AWOL from the county’s pretrial electronic monitoring program.



These include individuals charged with murder, attempted murder, and sexual assault — all supposed to be tracked by ankle monitors while awaiting trial instead of sitting in jail.
The revelation comes straight from Cook County Chief Judge Charles Beach II’s new transparency dashboard, which shows roughly 3,048 people currently on the program with 8 percent unaccounted for.

🚨 HOLY CRAP!! Cook County, Illinois Democrats ran a pre-trial program for murders and sexual assaulters so they WOULDN'T BE IN JAIL awaiting trial...

...and 8% OF THEM JUST WENT MISSING! Untraceable.

243 criminals — including murderers, attempted murderers, and sexual… pic.twitter.com/bou1YVobHu
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 14, 2026

Of the criminals that have gone missing, 21 have been charged with murder, 13 with attempted murder, 103 with sexual assault, and 173 with aggravated battery.
A former Illinois police chief summed it up bluntly: “They have NO idea where they’re at. NONE. ZERO.”

🚨 THIS CANT HAPPEN! Cook County, Illinois just admitted they LOST TRACK of 243 criminals on ankle monitors, including 21 MURDERERS and 13 attempted murderers.

One of them was out on monitoring when he shot and killed a police officer and injured another during an armed robbery… pic.twitter.com/vPbE1ACawK
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 14, 2026

The criminals were supposed to be on ankle monitors. Instead, they’re lost, prompting what the report called a “wild goose chase.”
State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke called the figures alarming and warned of more victims if safeguards aren’t tightened.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s justice reforms — including elements of the controversial SAFE-T Act that pushed pretrial release over detention — are now under fresh scrutiny.
As one Illinois lawmaker noted in a follow-up post: “2,450 defendants on ankle monitors. 590 charged with violent crimes. 210 charged with aggravated weapons offenses. 85 felons caught with guns. 21 MURDER defendants. And 8% are just… gone. AWOL. Nobody knows where they are. THIS is Pritzker’s justice system.”
This isn’t some isolated glitch. The same program was ignored by a known career criminal with 72 prior arrests. He violated curfew, boarded a Chicago train, and set a stranger ON FIRE — exactly the kind of preventable horror that keeps repeating under these policies.

Chicago’s Revolving Door Of Doom: 72 PRIOR ARRESTS Revealed For Train Torcher

These repeat offenders keep being enabled in blue cities:




When Will This HORROR End?
83-year-old Air Force veteran dies after illegal migrant shoves him onto NYC subway tracks

modernity



Recent cases like the cop-killing by an EM violator and the train torching show exactly where this leads. Illinois Democrats sold the public on “fairness” and “equity” in pretrial release.
What they delivered is a system where violent offenders roam free until they strike again — or simply vanish. The ankle monitors were meant to be a safeguard. Instead, they’ve become a joke.
Chief Judge Beach says more data and stricter violation reporting are coming. But after years of the same revolving-door failures, residents aren’t holding their breath.
Blue-city leaders keep doubling down on policies that prioritize criminals over victims. The body count — and the missing-persons list — keeps growing.
This is the predictable result of putting ideology over public safety. Until voters demand real accountability and law-and-order leadership, expect more of the same in Chicago and every other city following the same failed blueprint.

Democrats In Illinois Just Lost Hundreds Of Violent Criminals | ZeroHedge

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Shurk: Prominent Democrats Must Go To Prison

Sunday, May 24, 2026 - 11:20 PM
Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Until then, it’s open season on all of us...



Reports last week confirmed that former special counsel Jack Smith “secretly arranged” to preserve evidence in his criminal cases against President Trump in order to maintain the threat of future prosecution once the president leaves office. This is not a big surprise.
Democrats have thrown every civic norm out the window in their ruthless efforts to target Trump’s businesses and send him to prison for life.
In his quest to imprison an American president, Jack Smith accused Trump of engaging in a conspiracy to “overthrow” the 2020 election, as well as retaining possession of classified documents after leaving the White House. Both allegations are ridiculous, and Smith’s own words make him sound like a lawfare hitman and anti-MAGA zealot. He told members of Congress in January, “Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, it was foreseeable to him, and that he sought to exploit the violence.”
Smith stated emphatically that Trump committed “serious crimes.”
Serious crimes? You mean like using the FBI to spy on all the Republican presidential primary candidates in 2015 and 2016? Oh right, that was President Obama. Or fabricating intelligence in order to justify a counterintelligence operation against candidate Trump? Oh, that was Obama’s corrupt CIA director, John Brennan. Or paying British Intelligence operatives to manufacture a fake “Russia collusion” dossier implicating Trump? Oh, that was Hillary Clinton. Or using the FBI and CIA to frame President Trump as a Russian spy? Oh, that was Obama and Clinton, too. Or sabotaging President Trump’s administration by using a Democrat spy on the National Intelligence Council to construct a false story about an innocuous phone call in order to trigger a bogus impeachment? Oh, that was Intelligence Community Democrats attempting to hide Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine by, again, framing President Trump for a quid-pro-quo “crime” he never committed. Or submitting fraudulent documents to the FISA Court in order to maintain spying operations against President Trump? Oh, that was corrupt James Comey, corrupt Robert Mueller, corrupt Andrew Weissmann, corrupt Norm Eisen, corrupt Mary McCord, and their Democrat accomplices in the FBI and DOJ who covered up Obama’s illegal spying operations while framing President Trump as a criminal, spy, and traitor.
Listening to Jack Smith call President Trump a “serious” criminal sounds ridiculous when serious criminals Obama, Clinton, Brennan, Comey, and legions of their Democrat colleagues, subordinates, and co-conspirators in the DOJ, FBI, CIA, D.C. courts, and FISA Court (see Judge James Boasberg’s impeachable offenses) have never been properly investigated or punished for undermining President Trump’s election, sabotaging his administration, and framing him for treason. The most powerful Democrats in the country organized a coup d’état in broad daylight and dragged the country through a barbed-wire field of partisan propaganda for the last ten years, and Jack Smith wants Americans to be upset that President Trump retained documents that he was entitled to possess? It’s just such lunacy. The constant gaslighting from D.C. operatives is equally infuriating and exhausting.
Glossing over the Democrats’ monstrous Russia Collusion Hoax, their relentless efforts to subvert the Trump-led government, and their continuing obsession with tossing the president in prison for imaginary crimes is bad enough, but Jack Smith does what all Democrats do: He pretends that the January 6, 2021, protest for election integrity was an attempt by Trump and his supporters to overthrow the government. This lie is so brazen that it’s astonishing how Democrats can keep telling it with straight faces.
The people who showed up at the Capitol that day had one objective: to express their strong belief that mail-in-ballot fraud, violations of multiple states’ electoral statutes, and numerous voting discrepancies had tainted the 2020 election. Several senators intended to make these very arguments before the certification of the election’s results. The people who gathered outside the Capitol were exercising their First Amendment right to assemble peaceably. They were unarmed. Most had no criminal records. A large number had served their country in various capacities. Most who entered the Capitol walked around as tourists, took pictures, interacted in a friendly manner with Capitol Police, and posed no threat to anyone.
Only after law enforcement officers chose to fire flash-bang grenades on the assembled crowd did a section of the protest turn into something that could be described as a riot. Trump supporters — not police officers — died on January 6. Ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional rights were thrown into a state of fear of being hurt or killed.
Nevertheless, Smith continues to propagate the lie that the three-hour event at the Capitol was somehow the greatest threat to the country since 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Civil War (real comparisons that Democrat propagandists continue to make). Smith and his fellow Democrats desperately wish for Americans to believe that a hot-chocolate-drinking gathering of grandparents, revelers, and veterans was somehow going to topple the government of the United States. If a crowd of retirees is capable of overrunning Washington, what’s the point of a trillion-dollar military budget?
Smith’s perpetuation of the Democrats’ J6 propaganda is bad enough, but the fact that he treats that day as equivalent to the Civil War is all the more preposterous given that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their fellow Democrats openly encouraged Black Lives Matter domestic terrorists to burn down neighborhoods, loot businesses, and murder civilians throughout the summer of 2020. If President Trump “caused Jan. 6” and the events of that day were “foreseeable” to him, then the violence and mayhem of 2020’s so-called “summer of love” were certainly foreseeable to Democrats. The BLM riots of 2020 were the most costly in American history, and Vice President Harris encouraged Democrats to donate money to a bail fund that put arsonists, rapists, and murderers back on the street.
Were the Democrat-organized riots of 2020 “foreseeable”?
Of course.
Did prominent Democrats “exploit the violence,” as Smith accuses Trump of doing with January 6?
They absolutely did.
Biden and Harris ran for the White House on the message that the violence would end once they were elected.
Will preening, self-righteous Jack Smith investigate, harass, arrest, or prosecute any of these Democrats? Of course not. Will Democrat rioters be tossed into pre-trial solitary confinement and refused bail by partisan prosecutors and judges? Definitely not. To this day, Democrats celebrate BLM and Antifa domestic terrorists as champions for civil rights. When Democrats burn cities to the ground, the arsonists get statues. When MAGA Americans protest for free and fair voting, they are condemned for crimes they never committed.
Unfortunately, this is how leftists all over the world now operate.
Brazil’s communist President Lula has imprisoned his predecessor, President Bolsonaro, for supposedly trying to overthrow the government. French President Macron has permitted his political opposition, Marine Le Pen, to be prosecuted and convicted for similarly bogus “embezzlement” crimes. Germany has flirted with designating the popular anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany, a “terrorist” organization and banning its candidates from running for office. When the “wrong” candidate won Romania’s presidential election eighteen months ago, the country’s Constitutional Court annulled the outcome by blaming “Russian interference.”
If President Trump hadn’t possessed the financial resources and sheer grit to face down the onslaught of malicious and meritless prosecutions against him, he would likely be in a courtroom or a prison today. If he hadn’t been re-elected a third time, January 6 defendants would still be awaiting trial or serving time in prison for an imaginary “insurrection.”
Screw Jack Smith. He’s no lawman, and he has no principles. He’s nothing but a corrupt propagandist, partisan hack, and lawfare assassin.
Nothing will change until prominent Democrats are prosecuted and convicted for their crimes. Until then, it’s open season on all of us.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Shurk: Prominent Democrats Must Go To Prison | ZeroHedge