Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller said since 2000, property taxes have gone up a whopping 87 percent in her area, despite what many believe are actually declining property values. “It’s negatively impacting our district, because people are just walking away from property.”
Mark Konkol: “To define Hooker by his connection to the ComEd scheme alone would sell short the clouted journey of a West Side nobody who became a trusted friend of the Chicago Democrat Machine’s corrupt status quo.”
“This is a very leaky ship and nobody has figured out how to plug all the holes in it yet,” one victim said.
“We realize it may seem redundant, but we have to preach patience as we await more data and direction from the state,” said IHSA Executive director Craig Anderson.
“Prosecutors may not get higher on the food chain as they investigate corruption in the ComEd case and others. As Lausch said during his news conference last year, corruption is a ‘stubborn problem.’ But the pressure from the public to hold them accountable, and to understand how favors and influence help those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom, also is part of this unfolding scandal.”
Pritzker didn’t say if he’d call a special session but unprompted said Thursday the pay-to-play conduct outlined in the indictments is “unspeakably wrong” and Madigan must answer questions.
“The County has been able to balance its budget this year through a combination of federal revenues, vacant-position eliminations, health system layoffs and reserves set aside in prior years.”
“At no time has the CDC suggested school should be closed… All school should remain open. It is the safest place for children to be….. It is counterproductive to close schools.”
Mamie Cosey and her family are victims of a growing malaise impacting cities across Illinois, where residents are taxed out, services are being slashed, police and firefighters are losing their jobs, and public pensioners are losing their retirement security. A recent law that garnishes city tax revenues to pay for pensions is making things worse.
“But now federal prosecutors have raised the stakes by charging individuals, an act that threatens not just their reputations but their freedom. And in doing so, they have taken a major step toward securing something that charging the corporation could not give them: potential witnesses who might be able to help them lock in a case against Madigan himself.”
The lawsuit includes graphic photos and video screenshots of the alleged abuse. A city spokesperson said “these are allegations at this stage and not proof.”
State Rep. Will Guzzardi, D-Chicago, said from his count, there are fifteen House Democrats that now publicly committed not to vote for Madigan. “That only leaves 58 Democrats,” Guzzardi said on Twitter. “It’s time to start talking about who can get to 60.”
“If there was credible evidence that I had engaged in criminal misconduct, which I most certainly did not, I would be charged with a crime. But I have not, and with good reason because there is nothing wrong or illegal about making job recommendations, regardless of what people inside ComEd may have hoped to achieve from hiring some of the people who were recommended.”
Madigan has not been charged with any crimes. He said in a statement Thursday, “The indictment returned Wednesday does not allege any criminal misconduct on my part. I have not been accused of or charged with any wrongdoing.”
The mayor’s $12.8 billion spending plan sailed through the Budget Committee on a 26-8 vote after Lightfoot agreed to remove plans for 350 layoffs. Lightfoot’s budget team also agreed to scale back plans to require furlough days for non-union employees.
“If Illinois is going to make a clean break from the speaker’s decades of corruption, it needs to break the institutional structures that have propped him up for so long.”
The indictments are the closest yet to Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan’s inner circle. Now enough Democrats are pledging they won’t support him to cost him the speaker’s gavel.
There were 67,158 new unemployment claims filed across the state last week, the week of Nov. 1, and 53,138 new unemployment claims filed during the week of Oct. 19 in Illinois.
“There’s just no substitution from being in a class where you’re able to get feedback from a teacher right in the moment. That’s much more difficult to do in a Zoom call,” the school’s academic director said. “We’ve learned that you can do a hybrid model and keep people safe. We’re strict about it.”
“Here in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville, and in places like it throughout the country, Guatemalan teenagers like Garcia spend their days in class learning English and algebra and chemistry. At night, while their classmates sleep, they work to pay debts to smugglers and sponsors, to contribute to rent and bills, to buy groceries and sneakers, and to send money home to the parents and siblings they left behind.”
In a Nov. 11 conference call with the City Council’s Black Caucus, for instance, the mayor threatened to play hardball when choosing projects in her $3.7 billion capital plan. The message was, if you don’t support my budget, your ward won’t be prioritized. Or, to put it another way: “Don’t come to me for shit for the next three years” if you don’t support the budget, several aldermen recalled her saying.
Wirepoints found that 351 of Illinois’ 643 downstate public safety pension funds did not receive their full contributions in FY 2019. Without pension reform, local funds will either end up closer to insolvency, or city services will go unfunded in an attempt to keep failing public safety pensions afloat.
Props to the reporters who pestered the city into finally coming clean.
The fifty-page indictment spans nine years of alleged wrongdoing by ComEd’s four representatives, shedding new light on actions first alleged in a deferred prosecution agreement against ComEd itself filed in July.
What’s publicly known about federal efforts related to speaker’s political operation stretches back to at least May 2019. Subpoenas or raids have touched lobbyists, legislators, private companies and members of Madigan’s political operation.
“We’re all struggling with the pandemic about what to do and how to be safe, how to keep others safe. But the arrogance of the political class that flouts lockdown rules is galling. It encourages the rest of us to flout them too. And it causes me to think of a very different kind of politician.”
Local lawmakers say the fact that the agency that handles employment and job placement cannot find employees is not only ironic, but absurd. “IDES knows where to find people that are unemployed,” State Sen. Steve McClure, R-Springfield, said. “The fact that they can’t fill these positions when there has got to be thousands of people that want to take these jobs is ridiculous.”
SIGN UP HERE FOR OUR FREE WIREPOINTS DAILY NEWSLETTER