-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
A Chicago investor’s plan to convert part of a landmarked Loop office building into a data center received its first city approval last week, a move Chicago’s leading preservationist group called “a dangerous precedent.”
“What the mayor has to do… is to say to our union partners, `We’re not gonna take away your pension, but it will fail,’” Quigley said. “You call the unions in and tell them,`I want you to come to this meeting and I want the word `yes’ in your vocabulary… If we don’t make some honest trade-offs” — including “how much people pay in, when they start collecting” — then a “slight blip in the economy” could jeopardize their retirement checks altogether.
“The Chicago Teachers Union’s cupidity in enriching itself, and the dismal results of Chicago’s public schools, have drained the public’s reservoir of goodwill. Among the reasons for the CTU’s downfall is a school named for someone who, as a slave, taught himself to read — a skill poorly imparted by Chicago teachers, when they teach.”
An $11 billion Amazon Web Services data center campus
The most recent assessment results show that 53.1% of third- through eighth-grade students met proficiency standards in English language arts on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness in 2025. Just 38.5% were proficient in math. Those rates are troubling on their own. They’re even more concerning because the state lowered the performance levels used on the IAR in 2025.
“Five years of gains, and Illinois’ largest teacher fund still can’t cover half of what it owes,” Rogers writes disdainfully.
On July 24, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump struck down parts of three Illinois laws that allowed eligible undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates at community colleges and public universities and to receive state financial aid.