-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
A white male former UIC professor has sued the school for racial discrimination, claiming he was targeted for retaliation and fired for voicing concerns about allegedly illegal anti-white racially discriminatory hiring and career advancement policies and programs at Illinois’ second largest public university.
Education funding, protections for immigrant students, and expanded special education are some of the top issues to watch during Illinois’ 2025 legislative session, which began in January. The wild cards during this legislative session are the policy changes that President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress are making or discussing.
Just after Aspen Institute leaders announced they would move their flagship climate change event from Florida to Chicago, Pritzker said, “You are not the first to make this choice to move from Florida to Illinois and you certainly won’t be the last. No offense to Floridians — but [in Illinois] we have beaches and we believe in science.”
Former state Rep. John Fritchey, one of the first Democratic legislators to openly take actions to oust Blagojevich, said, “One thing everyone can agree on is that Rod is, was, an excellent campaigner, and he campaigned hard for this part.”
Current business closures impacted two-thirds of workers and standard layoffs accounted for the remaining 801 job cuts. The state data shows nearly all these layoffs will be permanent.
Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson would rather pay billions to attract migrants than change policies that lead to the high crime, high taxes and bad schools that caused over 1 million residents to leave in the first place.
The effort marks a major test for O’Neill Burke, who was sworn in in December, as rank-and-file prosecutors seek fulfillment of a campaign promise the former appellate judge made to provide voluntary recognition to a union if a majority of staff demonstrate interest.
“While Henry Hyde was a very well respected Republican elected official, the Hyde Amendment is very offensive to women, particularly women in Illinois,” said Conroy, a Democrat. “I think, overwhelmingly, women in Illinois believe that all women have the right to health care, regardless of their ability to have private insurance.” The new measure, if approved, would rename the building the DuPage County Judicial Office Facility.
“The fact remains Mayor Johnson has no comprehensive affordable housing strategy, if you exclude his efforts to house illegal migrants. Johnson’s ostensible regulatory reforms have amounted to deceptiveness thus far and his massive affordable housing subsidies to politically connected developers should send progressives into a frenzy.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson is subject to the city’s ethics ordinance and prohibited from accepting most gifts worth more than $50, the Chicago Board of Ethics announced Monday. The inspector general has yet to gain access to the mayor’s “gift room” at City Hall in order to “inspect the manner in which gifts are stored, audit the presence of gifts that were purportedly stored in the gift room as stated in the gift log, or to review controls around access to the gift room.”
The draft policy prohibits officers from conducting investigatory stops or protective pat-downs “based solely on a person’s race, ethnicity, color, national origin, religion, disability, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, homeless status, marital status, parental status, military discharge status, financial status, or lawful source of income, without any other specific and articulable facts that the person is, has, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity.”
“It is not because he is looking for trade fairness. It appears, likely, that this is about paying for the tax cut that he intends to provide to the wealthiest Americans,” Gov. JB Pritzker said.
When asked about cost, State Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado said infrastructure deserves investment. “I don’t know how often we talk about how much it takes to pave a road or how much it costs to build a mile of new road or rehab a mile of new road,” Delgado said.
In Illinois, the few fiscal notes the state does produce are posted online. But Illinois law allows the sponsor of a bill to determine if it needs a fiscal note. If another lawmaker disagrees, he or she needs to gain the support of a majority of members to generate the price tag.
The Illinois Freedom Caucus accused Illinois House GOP leader Tony McCombie of taking punitive action against them, including denying them access to their state websites and emails. McCombie’s spokesperson said the matter has been resolved and that it was an internal family issue.
“Even after spotting the UI’s Chicago campus its special taxpayer add-ons for the hospital that it manages, under President (Tim) Killeen’s general operations allocations, the students of the Urbana campus end up effectively subsidizing the UIC campus.”
Jim Dey: “Denouncing Trump at every turn, (Gov. JB) Pritzker has been effective in drawing not just state and local media attention, but national headlines. But one effective move stands out. That’s his decision to ban any recipient of a pardon for their actions in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection from working for the state of Illinois. … Legal analyst Andrew McCarthy concluded that Pritzker’s move was not only inconsistent with Illinois’ criminal-friendly state law but a probable violation of a human-rights act that Pritzker supports.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to issue $830 million worth of general obligation bonds to bankroll a year’s worth of capital projects cleared a City Council committee Monday amid questions about borrowing that much money when federal funding is at risk and the impact of the city’s recently reduced-bond rating. Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski said the liabilities S&P cited in the downgrade include Chicago’s $37 billion pension crisis.
If you reflect soberly on Illinois and Chicago’s problems – corruption, ever-higher taxes, declining services and a shrinking population – you’ll quickly reach the conclusion Illinois needs a DOGE of its own. If you’re not convinced, take a look at the mess at Chicago Public Schools.
“A Cook County working group just released a third-party study of commercial assessments by my office and the Board of Review. It looked at nearly a thousand sales of commercial properties between 2021 and 2023, measuring them against our valuations. The single most important result? Commercial properties in Cook County were found to be underassessed. Specifically, the report found a tendency for commercial assessments coming out of the Board of Review to be too low.”
The $1.15 billion project in the Des Plaines River near Joliet is seen as a vital way to stop invasive Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes. According to Gov. JB Pritzker’s office, the state has paused contracts and put nearly 70 infrastructure projects on hold.
“This market will have almost like a multiplier effect in that we could support local entrepreneurs and food producers in our own neighborhoods that will essentially now have a place to sell their goods,” Deputy Mayor Kenya Merritt said. “This model, I think, came out of a desire to be more impactful than just a public grocery store.” Still, details are scarce about when such a market would open, how it would be funded and operated and where it would be located.
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