Podcast: Play in new window
Seth Grossman is regular guest on WPG Radio. Listen to March 8, 2025 episode.
Liberty and Prosperity Has Breakfast Discussions in Somers Point Every Saturday Morning at 9:30:
We meet every Saturday morning from 09:30 to 10:30 at the Sal’s, pizza in Somers Point, and everyone’s invited to participate in discussions. And we talk about issues, and then we agree on the most important issues, and then we try to tell the public and public officials what we have to do to make things better here. And we decided to actually focus on the 11 most important things and make a list and we posted it and we have a literature that we’re handing out the 11 top issues that we reached after months of discussion where we not only talk about problems we want to talk about solutions. And these are posted at libertyandprosperity.com and anyone who wants to subscribe to our email updates that we send every week, go to info@libertyandprosperity.com.
We Are Focusing On 11 Key Issues In 2025:
This is our 9th most important issue:
9. Protect Public From The “Homeless”. Restrict the freedom of those who deny clean and safe parks, sidewalks and other taxpayer-funded public spaces to others. Institutions for mentally ill. Jail for criminals. Shelters for temporary poor.
Last Tuesday, the Tropicana Casino issued a public statement that it is “overrun” with homeless. The homeless keep walking into the casino. They aggressively refuse to leave. They’re scaring away customers, they’re really interfering with the business. And so if you’re going to have a resort town, you can’t have a world class resort and a sanctuary for the homeless at the same time. It’s not possible.
When people go on vacation. They want to forget about a lot of things. They and their children, their wives, their girl all want to feel safe and comfortable. You don’t feel safe and comfortable if you’re being approached or stepping over people who are so called homeless. Because most of those homeless are mentally ill, many are on drugs. Many are just not thinking clearly. They could snap out at any time and hurt somebody. Many are carrying diseases.
You can have them in certain areas. However, you can’t have them in resort areas if you want tourists to visit your town. And the Tropicana pointed that out.
Our “Woke” Prosecutor Is Taking The Gavin Newsome, Governor of California Approach To The Homeless.
Now what are we doing about the homeless in Atlantic City? Well, we have this woke prosecutor called Bill Reynolds that Republican Senator Vince Polistina has given us. And what is he doing? He’s taking the Gavin Newsom, governor of California, approach to the homeless.
We have to have outreach. We have to find, spend more money to get housing for them. He’s working with, someone from the state. He’s working with someone from Jewish Family Services. And last January, they made their big plan for the homeless. So where is all this is going to take us? Do you know what they said?
“Well we have 595 homeless people wandering around Atlantic City. They did a survey. There’s 12 homeless on every Boardwalk block. They’re big plan for the next year is to reduce the number of homeless per by 20%. What does that do? After a year, it gets the homeless down to only 476 next year. How can we survive?
I think it took a lot of courage for the casino, the Tropicana to say, “We can’t stay in business if this goes on”. We’ve got to do something about it. So that’s, I think, turning into one of our most important issues because now the summer’s coming up. And what are the homeless going to do to Atlantic City this summer.
We hear about, you know, online gaming hurting Atlantic City. We need to spend money on free concerts, an air show, to attract conventions. But what’s the point of spending all that money if, people are afraid or uncomfortable walking on the Boardwalk or going on the beach?
What what do suggest or what is your group suggest that we do about it? Do we find them jobs or what do we do?
Look at the details at the article we posted: “Woke” Prosecutor Makes “Homeless” Normal On Atlantic City Beach And Boardwalk. – Liberty and Prosperity It makes no sense finding a job for someone who doesn’t want to work, or who is too mentally ill to work. We need to do what they’re doing in Florida and Las Vegas.
We need to go up to them and say, “Well you don’t have a place to stay because you abuse everyone you live with? We’ll give you a place to stay. But you won’t be able to come and go when you please. When you interview these people, you find out that two thirds have some mental illness. About 38% are addicted to alcohol. Roughly 26% abuse drugs.
We’ve got to remind people that freedom is not a right. Freedom requires responsibility. And if you want to freely walk around, you have to have obligations not to use a public boardwalk or a public beach or a public sidewalk as your personal bedroom, living room, and bathroom. You have the responsibility of finding yourself a home so you don’t impose on others. And if you are too mentally ill to have a home, we have to put you in a place like Ancora or an institution where we could feed you, make you comfortable, but you can’t freely go around if you don’t have that ability. T
Then you have other people who are not mentally ill, but they’re just criminals. They say, I don’t wanna work. I don’t wanna pay money. I want to be on drugs. I want to be out on the street so I can steal from people, beg from people, intimidate people and so on. Well, we have jails for people like that.
It’s only a tiny, tiny percentage of people who are just down on their luck. They had a bad day or a bad week. They lost everything they owned at the casino. They lost their job. Something bad happened to them and they need a few months to get back on their feet. That’s the only people who should be in shelters.
Ironically, I always talk about the evils of communism and socialism. Well they actually have a law I like. They make it a crime to be a parasite. That’s probably the only good idea that the communist came up with.
But you you can’t be free if you don’t respect the rights of others to enjoy, public property. And we have to understand the idea of public property. Why do we pay taxes for sidewalks? Why do we pay taxes for parks and boardwalks? Do we pay taxes so people who don’t want to work, who don’t have the discipline to, to have their own home? People think they are entitled to property that belongs to We The People for us to enjoy?
We have to change the whole attitude. And, right now, nobody is doing anything to solve this problem. We have, again, our woke prosecutor in Atlantic County. Instead of doing his job of prosecuting criminals and enforcing the law, this Bill Reynolds decided to make himself the, the homeless czar.
He wants to do everything they did in California to deal with the homeless here in Atlantic City. From the Gavin Newsom School.
Did 2016 Atlantic City Casino PILOT Law To Cover Up Christie Misconduct With 10 Years Of Hush Money?
Meanwhile there’s another issue. The Casino PILOT in Atlantic City. PILOT means “Payment In Lieu of Taxes”.
Atlantic City casinos, like everybody else, have real estate that’s supposed to be taxed. In New Jersey, those casino properties are supposed to be assessed at their true market value and pay real estate tax at the same rate as every other property in the city. This is done for all real estate. Homes, condos, factories, stores. Everybody pays real estate taxes this way. However, since 2016 we have been told that Atlantic City casinos are different.
Why should they be taxed differently? And of course there is no reason. You have casinos all over the world. They all have, properties. They all get assessed for real estate taxes. They all get assessed for a lot of other things: sales, mortgage loans. For everything.
But the article in, last week’s Press of Atlantic City made it clear that this special law about taxing casinos has nothing to do with how we should tax casinos. Click Here For Link: Talks over casino PILOT on hold as budget uncertainty looms
The headline was “New Atlantic City Casino Pilot Talks On Hold Due To Budget Uncertainty”. So what the heck do budget talks have to do with how you assess casinos for real estate taxes. That’s when you realize, at least in in my opinion, that the whole idea of the of taxing casinos differently is really a sham. What really happened, and we talked about this before, as that for five years governor Christie had taken over Atlantic City. And during those five years, the casino properties and every property in town had lost most of its value because we were having a worldwide financial crisis and because there was competition from casinos in Philadelphia.
So Atlantic City had to drastically cut its spending because everybody in town was broke. But the city kept spending more money because Chris Christie was running for president and wanted to prove how he got along with unions, he got along with Democrats, and he would be a new kind of Republican.
And so the state illegally forced Atlantic City to borrow $420 million in complete violation of every state budget law, of every state bond law, and they stuck Atlantic City taxpayers with this $420 million debt back in 2016.
So in my personal opinion, the only reason we had all this nonsense with the P.I.L.O.T. and special arrangements for taxing casinos was to legally take $200 million in state taxes that was supposed to be spent on other things, and to pay down half of Atlantic City’s $420 million of illegal debt during the past ten years.
Think of what would have happened if the state didn’t do that. Think of what would have happened if Atlantic City said, “Hey! All this debt is illegal! The state had no business approving it! Let’s take it to court! Let’s file for bankruptcy!”
In my opinion, if Atlantic City did that in 2016, there would have been investigations. Wall Street and Federal investigators would not want to know how Atlantic City under state supervision broke every single budget law on the book and got away with it for five years. They would have held somebody responsible. Some people probably would have gone to jail.
So in a way that whole casino P.I.L.O.T. law looks like $200 million of hush money to cover up all of that for ten years. Ir worked. Nowe it’s too late to hold those people responsible for what they did.
And isn’t it a coincidence that now after ten years when it’s too late to hold those people responsible, we have Senator Vince Polistina, County Executive Dennis Levinson, and other politicians saying — we don’t have to spend another $200 million to keep paying off that debt for the next ten years. Let’s spend it on stuff that we want!
Yes, they paid that hush money for ten years. The statute of limitations expired. They don’t need to pay that hush money any more. So now the big question is who will get stuck paying that $200 million? Will it be all of the taxpayers in Atlantic County? Or just taxpayers in Atlantic City? And if you do that, the casinos don’t get stuck with any of that debt because they won’t pay real estate taxes anymore!
We’re talking about a food fight that has nothing to do with how we tax casinos. So that’s the best way I can explain that mess.
International Women’s Day: Another Fake Holiday To Attack Families, Weaken America, And Promote “Woke” Socialist Agendas
Next, let me wish let let me wish you a happy International Women’s Day, March 8, and that’s another fake socialist holiday invented by Communists in Russia in 1922. It was part of that same leftist propaganda to tear down institutions in free countries. They want to divide and break up families. They want to break up churches. They don’t want people able to handle their own problems on their own. They want to portray everybody who is unhappy as being a victim. They want every unhappy person to blame someone else for his or her misery. They want all these victims to support a Communist Party, or a Socialist Party that will take care of them. If you do the research, you see that’s what this so-called International Women’s Day is all about.
And they’ve been remarkably successful! Look at how many white upper-class college educated women that they’re victims of the same, so-called white Christian, toxic heterosexual men who supposedly oppressed Blacks, oppressed the LGBT, oppressed the Palestinians, minorities, the Third World, and on and on. So all these people are victims. The whole purpose of this so-called Women’s Movement is to get middle class women who should know better, to vote for leftist, politicians who want to destroy their way of life.
Socialists Did The Same Thing To The Black Community Since The 1960s.
This is very similar to what socialists did with the Black community since the 1960s.. There was another interesting article in the Press of Atlantic City last week with the headline: Black South Jersey Preachers Seek To Provide Hope During Turbulant Times. It interviewed three prominent Black preacher preachers: Reverend McLaurin of the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Pleasantville, Rev. Thelma Witherspoon in in Atlantic City and also Reverend Days of the Second Baptist Church Atlantic City.
Click Here For Details: Black South Jersey Preachers Claim To Provide Hope, But Deliver “Woke” Failure – Liberty and Prosperity
And they’re all saying we all know, how Kamala Harris was the best qualified president. And 78% of black men and 92% of black women voted for Harris. And we made so much progress, with the Democratic Party and and now they lost and and things are so tragic for the Black community. And those Republicans are getting rid of Diversity Equity and Inclusion. How can we possibly handle it?
The whole article is about how the Black community should deal with these setbacks, when the truth is just the opposite. If you look at progress in America, Black Americans lost ground since that so-called Civil Rights movement started in the 1960s.
There’s a book called Losing Ground by Charles Murray that explains it.
That so-called Civil Rights movement made Black Americans dependent on politics and the Democratic Party for everything. Now there’s more crime, there’s more poverty, there’s more misery. But instead of saying we in the civil rights movement took a wrong turn in the 1960s, these three Black preachers in Atlantic County are saying “Oh, the rest of the country doesn’t understand us. We have to just keep trying and take over next time.
What is interesting is that two of those three preachers are Democratic Party politicians. Thelma Witherspoon was an Atlantic County Commissioner. Now she is on the Township Committee in Hamilton Township, Mays Landing. Reverend Days is running for District One Commissioner in Atlantic County.
So these black clergymen, they’re all wired into the government. They’re all wired into politics. Yet Democrats blame Republicans for mixing religion and government.
And and the only real solution is to look back at where America was in the 1960s when we relied on you know one parent could support a family when housing was only 25% of income when 95% of all men worked, there was 95% participation in the job market.
That is one of our goals at Liberty and Prosperity. We these Black leaders to have some self-awareness. We are telling them: “No! You and your movement made everything worse!”
Reverend McLaurin said, “We, the Black Church have always stood up for God”. But his is not true. The opposite is true. We are not afraid to say that. This is what makes us a little controversial.
Ocean City, NJ: What Should Be Built On Site Of Old Wonderland Pier? Let The People Who Own The Property Decide!
Before I leave, let me just mention what’s going on in Ocean City. And, you know, they’re the big issue in Ocean City is that, that Eustace Mita wants to build a luxury hotel where, you now have a, an abandoned amusement park called Wonderland. And it it the whole community is saying we’ve got a rally behind Wonderland because, you know, who knows what, you know, type of development this hotel will bring. And and we have to ask ourselves the whole issue, you know, why, do the people why can’t someone who owns property and bought very expensive property and is willing to put their heart and soul into building a business there, why not let that person decide what’s best for his own property? This whole idea of zoning that says and remember, America never had zoning laws until 1929. And the only the only reason we have the zoning in Atlantic City in South Jersey is because somebody wanted to build a hotel in the Chelsea section of Atlantic City, and the the, other hotel owners didn’t want the competition. So they got Atlantic City to make a zoning law that said, nobody could build new hotels South Of Albany Avenue. And, and all you get from zoning is everything gets more expensive, everything gets rundown, nothing new is built, and the only people who build things are people who get paid by the government to build things. And when you have that, you get guys like Blatstein gets a hundred million dollars to, to build a water park that nobody is using, and he’s not paying taxes. So we’ve got to get back to the golden age of the American city. And and the idea should be that if your property is not like a fish processing plant, if it’s not putting fuse on your neighboring property, you should be allowed to build what you want. And if it succeeds, you should make the money from it. And if it loses you lose the money and you tear down what you built you build something else that is free enterprise and we don’t have it in America anymore and that’s why things are are the way they are anyway you gave me two extra minutes and I rambled on and that’s the minute on top of that So let me get back to Liberty and Prosperity that meets every Saturday morning, 09:30 to 10:30 at Sal’s, coal fired pizza in, in in the Summers Point, the the website libertyandprosperity.com. Thank you very much. Thank you, Seth. Seth Grossman, liberty and prosperity, and again the website libertyandprosperity.com. I’m John DiMasi. It is Talk with a Purpose every Saturday, nine till noon, WPG Talk Radio ninety five point five.
