-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Zion is staggering. Crushed by the loss of half its property-tax base when the power plant was closed in 1998, it faces the foreseeable future as a nuclear waste dump. People can’t sell their houses because of the taxes so they rent them. About two-thirds of them are now rental units. A particularly well-done but sad article.
Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s control of legislation is unparallelled in the nation. On Wednesday lawmakers will decide whether to continue his reign. Even if they pick someone else, reducing the concentration of power will take longer.
Is there no end to the punishment Illinois has to endure? She’d probably make Tehran a sister city of Chicago. If she got elected, people wouldn’t just leave, they’d enlist for battle against us.
Workshops and training seminars have been eliminated and, when the state does book local hotel rooms, bills go unpaid for months. At least one hotel project that was announced last fall has been put on hold until the market improves.
A Korean-American professor filed a lawsuit against the University of Illinois at Chicago last week, claiming that officials in his department “systematically harassed” him because of his ethnicity and forced him to teach a math class because he was Asian.
Comment: It’s being negotiated primarily by Democrat John Cullerton and Republican Christine Radogno. Cullerton has been running circles around Radogno for years. Among other problems, she simply doesn’t understand the pension system.
Comment: Easy to substitute “Illinois” for “California.”
“I could not look at my wife, my daughters or my grandson in the eye if I sat there and attended as if everything that candidate Donald Trump had said about women, Latinos, African-Americans, Muslims … is OK or erased from my memory,” Luis Gutierrez said in a statement Thursday. Memo to Mr. Gutierrez: Don’t insult the guy who you’ll be asking for money from.
A detailed look at his impact on the city.
“When the librarian was let go, parents volunteered to help. But that’s a union job only, we were told.”
By: Mark Glennon* The figure I deeply admire in The Big Short, Mark Baum (Steve Eisman was his real name), had a simple reaction when financial screens began to bleed red as the subprime mortgage market collapsed and the Great Recession began: “It’s happening.” Illinois’ descent isn’t like that. No single day, month or even year will be marked on a chart to stick in the history books. But it is happening. Illinois is gradually bleeding out through ever deeper wounds inflicted by its own government. The most common question I get here is when it all blows up, but
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