CN Sep 12, 2013

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Ken

So why do we keep talking about eradicating the “billion dollar deficit” at CPS by taking away benefits from teachers? Why can’t we lay the blame with Mayor Daley, Paul Vallas and the complicit legislators who allowed tax levies specifically earmarked for pensions to be spent on school operating expenses? In other words, since we taxpayers allowed two decades of “pension holidays”, should we be shocked that the pension system is in chaos? And, we asked Tribune Ed Board member Paul Weingarten, shouldn’t the taxpayers have to shoulder some of the burden of fixing this?

“For us, when we talk about raising taxes and all that, on the Tribune Editorial Board we come from a natural point of being, you know, not usually receptive to that idea,” Weingarten carefully explains.

Weingarten, who most often takes the lead in writing education editorials for the Trib, was not terribly open to our assertion that a major source of urban school system troubles is that, over time, they have become home to large numbers of impoverished children who are victims of at least historic, if not current, racism.

That is something that Karen Lewis has often said… We don’t want our teachers evaluated, we don’t want our kids tested until we solve poverty in America. To me that is a complete cop-out.” he retorts.

So what to do? Is there a way to find new revenue, or do we have to cut our way out of the deficit?

“Things are not gonna get better budget-wise,” he asserts. “If you look at the mountain they’ve gotta climb, they’ve got 5-6 hundred million dollar payments every year…and they start to get into the 650 million range going through the end of the decade. You can’t solve any of these problems until Springfield gets its act together and we have some pension relief, because I think once you see broad pension relief the City of Chicago and CPS will all be a part of it.”

But Community Media Workshop’s Thom Clark thinks new revenue shouldn’t be completely off the table.

“The state has been facing a structural budget deficit for some time,” he says. “And with our flat rate income tax, even the temporary increase we got a few years ago, not only didn’t let us catch up with our bills very much (which was the excuse for doing it), but it really didn’t allow us to get even, much less ahead. We need to reform how we produce revenue to pay for basic services. the flat tax isn’t doing it.”

For example, he says, “this is one of the few states where services are not subjected to sales tax.” In addition. the flat sales taxes and other sin-taxes raise too little money while aggravating the public.

“So we do these annoying things that end up pushing the public away from engagement with trying to make government work better because they’re getting a $100 ticket for going 28 miles in a school zone,” he says.

Weingarten concedes that teachers have paid their dues through the years, while the state and city have not. And that teachers and other school personnel don’t get Social Security, because their pensions were supposed to support them in their retirement.  But there has been, nevertheless strong support in Sprinfield to cut teacher benefits.

“There was a proposal to move some of that onto the teachers. That failed because they rightly said why do we have to take the burden of all this mismanagement. But I think unfortunately when pension reform comes, you’re gonna see a lot of workers getting their benefits cut.”

Deficits aren’t the only education topic, however. Clark laments the way CPS has deliberately moved away from the 90’s model of  Local School Councils.

“The stories of that time were about the four or five schools where there were conflicts,” he explains. “We never heard about the sixty percent of  schools where research showed there was fairly dramatic improvement in performance because of that engagement with parents and community leaders and teachers…the real story we should have gotten out of the 90’s experiment with local school councils was that this was something that was getting folks engaged.”

Today, he says, there’s frustration that engaged parents are being left out of the decision-making.

“I think there’s growing public consensus that there’s been too much teaching to the test, that kids aren’t really learning how to learn, and that standardized tests have gotten out of control,” he says.

We conclude with a conversation about guns in restaurants.  “It may be something Texans are comfortable with, but I am not, as a Chicagoan, comfortable with what we’re being forced to do on concealed carry. It surprised me when it came up, and I can’t believe where we’re headed,” Clark concludes.

The Tribune’s Paul Weingarten sums it up succinctly.

“Allowing guns in public places, I’m not for that. “

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN Sep 5, 2013

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Ken

Ed Koch famously stopped New Yorkers to ask “so how’m I doin’?” Our mayor doesn’t do that, but we thought we’d do it for him, as a public service. We started by discussing Fran Spielman’s recent critique of the Mayor in the Sun-Times.

“I’m frustrated by him, and I think there’s a confrontational approach that’s not always necessary,” explains Sun-Times Editorial Page Editor Tom McNamee. “Certainly with the schools. I mean, just some sort of acknowledgement that teachers don’t get into this business to get rich, like most of his friends who fund his campaigns. That would be nice.”

But despite the frustration, McNamee says Emanuel was dealt a pretty lousy hand.

“When you’re running a big city,” he says, “and a big city that’s going down the tubes financially – I think it’s accurate that he’s going to have a one billion dollar pension deficit in a year and a half – when you run a big city where the population’s been in decline for a couple of decades and the school scores are in the basement, and were in the basement before you came in, and where the crime rate was 600 people murdered well before you came into office…I would ask people, find me the mayor who, in about two years, can do anything about that and look like a hero.”

Our conversation, which also includes Chicago Magazine’s Carol Felsenthal, turns to the inevitable comparison between the current mayor and the one before – the one he never names. That former mayor, we observe, seemed to be a long-range thinker and planner. Someone who had a vision of what he wanted Chicago to be in ten or twenty years. Emanuel doesn’t appear to think that way.

“He doesn’t have time to be a dreamer,” says McNamee. “He has to figure out how to pay the bills.”

Yes, we add, and in the last four or five years, Mayor Daley (see, we named him) didn’t have time to be a dreamer, either.

“No, he didn’t,” agrees McNamee, “which is why Rahm’s stuck. Because Daley was looking the other way while we were going further and further into debt, building up these pension obligations and not paying them. Maybe if Rich had been a little more like Rahm we wouldn’t be in this spot right now.”

That said,” he continues, “I think Rahm’s model is all these venture capitalists who think they can fix the world because they learned how to get rich. I think he’s surrounded by people who have great wealth…and now they’re sitting in these incredible high-rises, in Trump Tower or wherever they live – on Astor Street – and they’re talking about, my God, I could fix that school. Let me go to it.  I think he’s enamored of that world of people, and he sort of buys into the idea that if you can create this wonderful big business you can fix anything. And I think what he’s finding out now is, it doesn’t work that way.”

Speaking of businesspeople wanting public office, Mayor Emanuel might have divided loyalty in the upcoming governor’s race.

“Rahm is working, clandestinely, to raise money for his friend Bill Daley,” Felsenthal asserts. “I thought he was raising money clandestinely for Bruce Rauner, his other friend. In fact, the Emanuels and the Rauners have vacationed together. They are more than just casual friends.”

“But the Bill Daley connection is a very interesting one,” she says, because it might be helpful to Emanuel in the future. “The Chief of Staff job, the helping Rahm get into this Mayor job so he can get the executive experience that he needs to move on…maybe start out in the V.P. slot…”

But can Bill Daley beat Pat Quinn in the Democratic primary?

“I’m waiting for the Daley press conference where he tries to attach the $700,000 copper clad Capitol doors to Quinn,” she says. “Quinn was the person in charge. It went by his desk.”

A quick summary of our panel’s current take on the Governor’s race: Quinn can beat Daley. But if Rauner emerges as the Republican candidate – and polling indicates that’s a long shot – he can beat Quinn.  But Rauner has a tougher time against Daley, who’s also a successful businessperson, but with greater name recognition.

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN August 29, 2013

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Ken

Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George isn’t happy about the way the press has covered the pope’s “who am I to judge” comment about same-gender marriage. And the Sun-Times’ Mark Brown got an earful on the topic when the Cardinal invited him to the mansion for a little talk.

Brown tells us he never thought the pope was being a theological revolutionary. “Clearly the pope wasn’t changing church doctrine, he was just setting a nice new tone. The Cardinal didn’t like that. He likes the old tone,” he says.

But the Cardinal feels that the press, and presumably Brown, just got the remark all wrong.  “The pope wasn’t really saying you can’t judge whether homosexuality is right or wrong or gay sex is right or wrong,” he explains. “It’s sinful and it’s morally wrong, the Cardinal says, and the pope wasn’t saying anything about that.”

But Brown, who was invited for a chat after some critical columns, says George explained to him that his objection to gay marriage isn’t a theological, faith-based argument. “it’s a matter of reason. That nature tells us that only men and women should get married. (Men and women) have roles. And as I pointed out in today’s column, in your and my lifetimes those roles have changed a lot.”

What upset the Cardinal was Brown’s column about how the Catholic Campaign for Human Development  (which is a part of theCatholic Bishops’ Association) stopped funding some Chicago community groups.

“This isn’t just direct charity, they fund community organizations to do community work. And a lot of this money goes to immigration groups. Well, a lot of these immigration groups, in turn, are part of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights,” he explained.

“This immigraton group decided to endorse the same-sex marriage legislation that’s pending in Illinois. So the church cut off funding to all these little community groups  that are part of this coalition…Some politicians jumped on my story and published a letter in the Tribune that scolded the Cardinal and that really made him mad.”

But Brown said his hour-long meeting with the Cardinal was very cordial, despite their differences of opinion, and the Cardinal was a gracious host.

Matt Farmer, the activist lawyer, writer, musician and blogger, joined us to talk about why hundreds of parents protested yesterday in front of the CPS offices. “Their schools are getting cut to the bone,” he says. “Their programs, particularly in light of this new ‘full day’, in art, music, etc., are disappearing. They realize they were sold a raw deal.”

The first few days of school have, so far, been uneventful along the “Safe Passage” routes, where workers in brightly-colored jackets monitor the nearby streets. “The kids all know that the yellow-jackets can only do so much for you,” says Brown. “If there’s a problem, the yellow-jacket is not gonna step in. They’re supposed to get on their walk-talkie and get somebody who’s equipped to deal with the problem…the kids know this. And in places where they’ve had Safe Passage, they can’t always get there in time.”

As we’ve all seen, it’s been an “all-hands-on-deck” approach as the school year began. “We’ve had everybody short of the Bears offensive line out protecting these kids in the first couple of days of school,” says Farmer. “And if J’Marcus Webb keeps performing at the level he is, he’s soon gonna be out there. So the question is sustainability, and also that’s gonna dovetail with whether there’s continued media interest in this in October or November.”

But the program could have political benefits for the administration, Brown adds. “Where do these Safe Passage workers come from? Well they come from community groups.  So it’s a way for the Mayor to get the community groups or the churches or whatever, to buy in – because they put people on the payroll.  It’s smarter than Daley’s ‘give the churches the vacant lots’ program.”

There’s been so much discussion in the past few weeks about the safety of children traveling to the so-called “welcoming schools”.  And some have claimed that there might be gang violence in the schools as rival populations are merged. But Brown has some confidence. “From what I’ve seen of the Chicago Public Schools, the school buildings themselves are the safest part of these kids’ day. Even in the worst schools, there are so many good people trying to look out for the kids.  It’s the coming and going from the schools where you have issues, and those are real,” he explains.

We also spend some time discussing the recent demolition of the field-house adjacent to  Whittier School in Pilsen. It had for three years been the site of a community center that was once occupied by a group of parents protesting the lack of a library in their school. “They’ve been trying in one form or another to demolish this building since at least 2010 and I believe it goes back before that,” says Farmer.

But the demolition was unexpected and pretty dramatic.

“It was under the cover of darkness, all very expedited, and the after-the-fact explanation, the mayor was out of town that weekend, was this needed to be done because kids were in danger, kids’ lives were in danger,” he tells us. “Now the credibility of the folks who were spinning that tale can be evaluated by what we heard this week for Channel 5 news. They found that, in terms of child safety, eleven of these so-called welcoming schools have not had fire inspections. One of them for the last four years, several for the past three years. They found that none of these schools across the city have filed Emergency Preparedness Plans with the State Board of Education for the past seven years.  So when we’re talking about child safety issues, we’ve gotta take this with a grain of salt, particularly when the City said they had an inspection last spring (at the Whittier field-house) that found essentially the same kind of conditions. Well, why did you allow kids and parents to occupy that building for the last few months?

We wind up the show with a brief discussion about teacher pensions.

“Everybody’s gonna have to give a little,” says Brown. “The unions are gonna have to take a hit, and the taxpayers are gonna have to take a hit. A lot of people are trying to make this solely on the backs of the workers, and they might get away with it, I don’t know.”

And Farmer declares himself perplexed by a Democratic super-majority that doesn’t stand up for the teachers. “The inability to use that legislative bloc to really accomplish much of anything – I don’t know what the point of accumulating this power, this majority is – unless you’re actually gonna wield it. And to sit an wait and say, well, we need a bunch of Republicans to sign off on this just seems like a cowardly way to lead.”

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN August 22, 2013

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Ken

 

 

If you happen to live anywhere north of North Avenue and in a broad swath hugging the lake to just south of UIC – congratulations. You live in one of the safest contiguous collections of urban neighborhoods in North America. If your place is near, say 63rd and the Red Line, or perhaps Chicago and Pulaski, well you can attest to what researcher Daniel Hertz calls “basically two completely separate cities.”

Hertz, a Masters’ Degree candidate at the U of C’s Harris school of Public Policy, is referring to his recent research on the segregation of violence in Chicago. Among his conclusions: people in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods are fifteen times more likely to be victims of violence or homicide than people in the safest neighborhoods. But in the late nineties, that ratio was 6:1.

“We know that overall homicides have gone down tremendously over the last 20 years,” he explains. “From the peak of the crack epidemic they’re down almost fifty percent in Chicago. Something that’s hard to keep in mind because there’s still a lot of murders by any objective standard…I was interested in whether that decline had been enjoyed equally by the different neighborhoods.”

His conclusion? As you might guess, it hadn’t.  This map tells a dramatic story:murderchange1-e1375601010679

Although homicide went down slightly in the neighborhoods that comprise the most dangerous third of the city, in the “red areas” crime actually went up as the City-wide rate was dropping by half. And the crime data closely tracks economic data. The disparity between the richest and poorest neighborhoods has grown in a similar pattern. “Poor people in Chicago are more segregated from other people than in almost any other city…and that level of disparity is new,” Hertz concludes.

Salim Muwakkil, who has written and talked about these matters for decades – most recently as a host on WVON – refers to the “almost apartheid nature of this crime situation”.  And he sees a very big-picture solution, one with which he knows many don’t agree.

“My answer is essentially reparations, in the form of a Marshall Plan in the black community,” he explains. “We have not addressed the injuries of generations of socialization for subservience in our community. Slavery and Jim Crow apartheid. And the lack of a cultural capital that we haven’t been able to develop because of our constant reacting to assaults on our humanity. And so until we deal with that in a serious and comprehensive way we’re gonna always have these problems, I think.”

“In many communities,” he adds, “a lot of black people are successful and have done well in this society. But increasing numbers are not. And I think if you trace that distress, it can only go back to one thing, and that’s our history in this country. And we have been resolute in avoiding this conversation. We have to begin to be more explicit.”

Robert Starks, Professor Emeritus at Northeastern’s Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies, tells the panel that the disproportionate crime and violence is being fueled by forces well outside these ravaged neighborhoods.  “Nobody wants to face up to the fact that drugs and guns were deliberately dumped into the African-American community,” he asserts. “We don’t grow drugs in rooftop gardens in Chicago.  We don’t manufacture guns in the basement. Somebody’s putting them there.”

And Starks thinks Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s call for increased punishment – and mandatory prison time – for the use of a gun while committing a crime – is not well thought-out. “I think Sup’t McCarthy would be better suited if he were to look at who’s bringing the guns into the community,” he says.  “I am absolutely convinced that, given the NSA and all the surveillance techniques, that they could find who’s bringing the drugs in, and who’s bringing the guns in. These guns don’t just appear out of the sky. And young kids can tell you where to go and get a gun. They can tell you where to get the drugs, and where to get the guns.”

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN August 15, 2013

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Ken

Driven along South Kedzie or West Foster lately? How fast were you going? Mayor Emanuel’s speed cameras already know, and they could be mailing you $100 speeding tickets very soon.  And if it was a school you sped by, between 7AM and 4PM when the speed limit is 20, you could be welcoming a $100 ticket if you were doing as little as 31miles an hour.

The City has been testing cameras for the past month, and has just selected a vendor to install the new devices. So the Tribune wanted to know how the tests went.

“We learned that four test cameras, up for a month, nabbed 93,000 potential speeders,” says the Trib’s Bill Ruthhart, who’s been working on the story. “And that’s not just going one mile an hour over the speed limit,” he explains.  “This is six miles an hour or more, which is the threshold to receive a ticket…22 % of the speeders were going more than 11 mph, so that ticket’s a hundred bucks.  So you add it up, these four cameras, if they were live and issuing tickets it would’ve been about 4.7 million dollars for four cameras in just one month.”

“This year they want to do fifty of the speed cameras,” adds WBEZ’s Alex Keefe. “State law allows for 300 eventually. And it’s not in the intersection. It’s a whole s stretch of road…So I think as these begin to roll out people could begin to feel the effect much more than the red light cameras.”

“These can be within one-eighth of a mile of any school or park in the city,” says Ruthhart. “We’ve done previous stories – it could cover almost half the city. And there’s a provision for them to have mobile units on a van, so there’s – we don’t know how many of those there could possibly be.”

Keefe tells us that the city is projecting 40 to 50 million in revenue from the cameras next year. “But” says Ruthhart,  “These four test cameras alone, it’s 56 million for four cameras.”

The City explains that the revenue won’t be anywhere near as high as the tests indicate, because at some locations 10% of the speeders are emergency vehicles, or the camera doesn’t catch the license plate. Also, only about 75% of the fines are ever collected, and people will learn to drive more slowly over time. “But still,” he says, “it’s a good chunk of change when you get up to 300 cameras.”

Ruthhart tells us that he had an interesting discussion with 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale, who had voted in favor of the cameras. “Immediately after we told him what these numbers were he told us he was changing his mind, he no longer supported it, he was going to do everything he could to put the brakes on this. Good luck, it’s a five year contract – and he’s talking about putting up aldermanic signs in his Ward that say ‘warning, speed trap ahead.'”

Speaking of South Side elected officials, there’s been some chatter lately about Kwame Raoul, and whether the 13th District State Senator might run against Pat Quinn and Bill Daley in the Democratic governor’s race.

“I’ve had my eye on him for a while because politics-wise and policy-wise he’s been someone who seems to be on the make,” says Keefe. Raoul has been chairing the high-profile joint committee in search of a bipartisan pension solution, and has been quite visible in the news lately. “So he seems to be doing all the right things to try to jump up to higher office,” Keefe says. “Whether he’ll actually pull the trigger, I don’t know.”

There’s a reason that he’s being scrutinized, says Ruthhart. “The unions don’t really have anybody to fall behind yet. They’re angry with Quinn. They look at Daley and see the architect of NAFTA, Commerce Secretary, they’re not in love with either one of them.”

Because he might be able to energize African-American and possibly younger voters, he might be a better candidate against well-heeled Republicans like Bruce Rauner, who could argue that it’s time for a level-headed, fiscally conservative businessperson to take charge. But Raoul still has to navigate the special committee, which could vote out a punishing pension solution that’s anathema to organized labor. Says Ruthhart: “I’d be a little surprised if he jumps in at this point, but there’s definitely been some whispers lately.”

And finally, “Welcome to Chicago” was the sentiment expressed in New York City media after the federal court struck down NY’s “stop and search” laws. Many commentators and politicians jumped on Chicago, saying that NYC’s low crime and murder rate can be credited to Stop and Search, and without it, New York would become another Chicago.

Ruthhart shrugs it off. “When you’ve been getting the national headlines that Chicago has for the better part of two years because of your homicide numbers, you’re going to be the negative poster child wether you like it or not.”

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN Aug 8, 2013

Posted on August 15, 2013 by Ken

 

Did Pat Quinn do the right thing by withholding paychecks for Illinois legislators until they pass pension reform? Neither Chris Robling, a Republican strategist/commentator, nor Dave Lundy, a Democratic strategic/commentator, think he did. It sets too ugly a precedent for any future governor who’s upset with something the legislature does or doesn’t do, they say, and it’s a clear violation of the separation of powers.

Lundy and Robling debate the likelihood that Governor Quinn will see a serious Republican challenger, and talk about ways to make the Metra Board more accountable. And Chris Robling reminds us that Maypr Daley spent hundreds of millions of dollars constructing a train station under Block 37 that will never be used because it has no  tracks to anywhere.

Our thanks to Ethan Michaeli for hosting the show and leading this week’s discussion.

 

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN Aug 1, 2013

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Ken

Is there a connection between private prisons, charter schools, relaxed fracking laws, tougher abortion regulations and Stand Your Ground?

Yes, and it’s a strong one. It’s called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s a 501(C)3 “educational” organization that’s been called a “dating service” linking America’s largest, wealthiest corporations with state legislators. The whole idea is that, if you have enough money, it’s easier to influence a couple of thousand state Senators and reps in the fifty state capitols than it is to navigate the completely stalemated, dysfunctional federal government. And since the state guys handle taxes, licensing, education, prisons and and all sorts of other sensitive matters, it’s just more effective to deal directly with them.

ALEC has been around for forty years, and during most of that time it’s been nearly 100% invisible in the American media. But it’s been involved in some high-profile issues lately, becoming a lightning rod when it quickly distributed and guided to passage “Stand Your Ground” laws in over 20 states. So it’s finally coming under some scrutiny.

ALEC’s having its 40th Anniversary meeting in Chicago August 7-9, so we thought this would be a perfect time to welcome three highly knowledgeable people into the Newsroom to share ALEC’s history and accomplishments.

“It’s a sort of amalgam of the right-wing social agenda and corporate America’s economic agenda,” explained Joel Bliefuss, editor/publisher of In These Times, which wrote several landmark stories about ALEC. “And I think its ultimate aim these days is to de-fund the public sector and transfer public assets into private hands. They do it very secretly, because they pass legislation around the country through what’s called “model legislation” that’s reproduced in state houses around the country, particularly where Republicans are in control.”

But, says Rey Lopez-Calderon, Executive Director of Common Cause/Illinois, ALEC exploits a significant loophole in tax law. ALEC’s primary contact with legislators is at large, elaborate “conferences” around the country. “If ALEC was to send somebody to talk to a legislator  and buy them a beer, that has to be reported. But they don’t have to report it as lobbying if they send a bunch of legislators to an ALEC conference and you get somebody up there from the NRA or another organization saying – I want you to pass this bill. If you pass this bill, here’s how industry’s gonna  be helpful..we believe that that’s actually tax fraud.”

Bill Moyers has produced a series of documentaries on ALEC, in which he presents video of just such presentations being made from the ALEC podium.

But Lopez-Calderon stresses that ALEC is primarily about corporate influence. “It’s not all Republicans in ALEC…We have some very conservative Democrats that are members, and we have most of the same corporations that also give money to the Democrats. It is about corporatism and less about partisan politics.”

One of the most important methods for asserting this influence, he claims, is getting control of campaign finance law. “Campaign finance laws, little by little, have been eviscerated,” he says. “Even before the Supreme Court started tinkering with the first amendment. We’ve had campaign finance laws in many states that have been killed or adjusted because of model legislation by ALEC. But if you asked the voters, and we’ve done that in several states including solid red states like Montana – if you ask them, do you think the states have a right to regulate campaign finance, they say yes in huge majorities, like 74, 75%.”

A major thrust for ALEC, according to Bliefus, has been the highly successful drive to develop for-profit prisons. “It’s been greased by ALEC from the get-go. And it’s an example first, of promoting the criminalization of large swaths of the American population, and taking a public resource, the prisons, and turning them into profit-making entities – which have an interest in keeping people in jail.”

For-profit prisons and charter schools are two areas where ALEC has had considerable success here in Illinois, according to Bryan Echols, who founded Concerned Black Men of Metropolitan Chicago. “I am looking at ALEC’s partners in education, and one is K-12,” he explains. “K-12 just kicked off here in Chicago with Chicago Virtual Charter School. Interestingly, they’re currently at 600 slots. They will go live around August 28. Their charters have been exended to 2016, and they’re coming in under Renaissance 2010. The unions are against it because it takes away jobs. 52% of the students currently are African-American. And that’s because some of those students have been pushed out of schools by zero-tolerance policies, and those are a residue of ALEC.”

Echols says that ALEC-inspired school and prison policies use a “divide and conquer mentality” with respect to African American and Latino populations, often playing the interests of one against the other. He cites the locations of Illinois’ prisons so far away from Chicago as an example of a way in which the law can tear families apart when an incarcerated relative is hundreds of miles away, equating that with increasingly harsh immigration policy that’s hurting Latino families.  His organization, he says, attempts to “go downstate and work our legislators for the benefit of both communities” by building coalitions. “The Latino Caucus is wondering, why are we voting on prison redistricting, and the Black Caucus is wondering, why are we fighting for drivers’ licenses for immigrants?”

Can these organizing efforts realistically stand up to a force as powerful as ALEC? “There’s money power and there’s people power,” he concludes.

ALEC has been around since 1973, but its spiritual ignition came later, according to Lopez-Calderon. “I really believe we ought to think of Margaret Thatcher being the creator of ALEC,” he says.She’s “the person who got Reagan to think this hybrid, public/corporate idea of capitalism was a good thing. I call it an abomination. It’s not even capitalism. It’s not free market. It’s cronies and particular corporations buying the market and cornering the market for themselves. It’s worse than monopoly. Its – we’re gonna call this private, but everyone’s getting public dollars.”

And by pushing for the early adoption of charter schools in Illinois, ALEC had a profound impact here. “What they’ve been able to do very quietly is they’ve been able to completely change the face of education in Illinois, and nobody knows that they did it.”

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN July 25, 2013

Posted on July 26, 2013 by Ken

So what were Karen Lewis and Rich Daley talking about during that little “huddle” Tuesday at Gibson’s?

“Maybe she’s trying to find out – you wrote the playbook, Mayor. Tell me how to beat it. He’s badmouthing you all around town,” guesses DNAInfo’s (and Pulitzer Prize Winner) Mark Konkol. But maybe, according to the CTU’s Jackson Potter, it’s something more serious. “I can imagine that it’s somewhat to do with his brother running for governor, and there was likely some talk about, that this didn’t need to happen. You didn’t need to have these massive cuts. There were alternatives,” he speculates, pointing out that the State of Illinois could have found additional revenue.

“We’re one of the few states – we’re an outlier – where our sales tax doesn’t include services,” he says. “Well, all kinds of money goes out the window. We’re one of the few states – seven in the country – with a flat tax, that doesn’t have any progressive qualities to it whatsoever. So the wealthy and their fancy lawyers, pay less than we do. It’s an outrage. ”

Potter says that there’s a central issue on which the CTU and CPS agree. “We wouldn’t deny the fact that there’s a deficit,” he explains.  “There’s a lack of investment in our schools. And that’s  a structural problem. But we would take issue with the contention that they’ve always been honest and above board. We know they’re playing politics. We know their ultimate goal is to try and blow up our pensions and dismantle them. And creating a crisis helps them do that.”

Mayor Emanuel, the CPS administration and even some editorial pages repeat the sentiment that the cause of this “billion dollar deficit” is the rising cost of teacher pensions. But as Konkol and Potter explain, the real culprit is state and city government, acting in concert to stop paying their lawful share into the coffers years ago.

“I started covering Chicago City Hall for the Daily Southtown in 1999,” says Konkol. “I saw Mayor Daley roll out the big charts that said – here’s where the pension is, and we’re fine, and we need to rebuild all this stuff, so we’re gonna pay that off later.”

As a result, Potter says, a pension fund that was “99% funded” in the early 2000s is today so depleted that CPS must pay $400 million this year just to begin the process of catching up.

Today, in addition to the funding shortages, there’s an effort on the part of many business and civic leaders – and CPS itself – to add the CTU to so-called Senate Bill One. That’s the Mike Madigan Bill that would cut pension benefits state-wide. As currently written, it would have no effect on Chicago teachers, since their fund is the only one in Illinois funded locally by the school district (CPS).

The real reason CPS wants to join its pension fund with SB1, says Potter, is benefit reduction. “Reduce or eliminate cost-of-living adjustments, increase the retirement age, increase employee contributions, that’s the set of things they’re trying to do”, he says.

There has been much said about the potential conflict between rival gangs after fifty schools are closed. There’s potential trouble both along the routes  and within the receiving schools. Konkol’s DNAInfo has assembled a detailed interactive map that identifies the gang turf around the affected schools.

As Konkol puts it: “As Karen Lewis always says about her only meeting with Rahm Emanuel, that when they met he allegedly told her – 25% of these kids are not gonna make it and I’m not gonna invest in 25% of the kids. And then go look at that map.”

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN July 18, 2013

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Ken

Mike Madigan was never all that excited about Lisa’s political career. When she first wanted to run for State Rep, he didn’t like that idea. And she had to fight him and push through to get him to take her seriously. That’s a story recounted by Laura Washington on CN this week, as she describes a conversation she had a couple of months ago with Lisa Madigan.

Laura, who in addition to her Sun-Times column and her Channel 7 political commentary is now Interim Publisher of the Chicago Reporter, tells us that Lisa Madigan, in deciding against a run for governor, was probably reacting to the “piling on” of issues regarding her father: the lack of ability to deliver pension reform and other legislation, and now the revelations that he was meddling in Metra personnel decisions.

“And I think she was trying to send a message to him as well,” she adds, “by specifically nailing him as the reason.” Was that message received? “Yea,” she says. “But he doesn’t care. Obviously. That’s why she’s not running.”

Metra, the once-proud railroad, is a mess.  But for political junkies, Wednesday’s RTA hearing was a feast of name-calling and recrimination. Former CEO Alex Clifford made serious charges about political interference in his job and was paid a lot of money to resign.

It was more than  the Tribune Editorial Board could stand, and board member Kristen McQueary explains why today’s editorial calls for the resignation of every Board member.

“These are people who have a job to run a railroad,” she asserts. “Here, they’ve let $718,000 walk out the door in what we’ve called hush money. Why should they stick around? Why should taxpayers be paying their salary and pension benefits if they’re not really experienced in running a railroad?”

There’s reference to Carol Marin’s Sunday column, in which she points out that Deb Mell, now in consideration for Alderman and currently chairman of the committee investigating the Metra mess, could call Mike Madigan before her committee. Or perhaps ask Lisa Madigan to investigate. But she’d be investigating her own father, and by the way, her brother-in-law is Metra’s Chief of Staff.

But Chris Fusco, investigative reporter for the Sun-Times, tells us there’s another issue. Many of the Metra Board members are also conflicted in subtle ways. “If you look at Larry Huggins, Riteway Construction, minority contractor at O’Hare Airport on the People Mover, lots of clout, lots of campaign contributions,” he explains.  “Brad O’Halloran, Metra Board Chair, Orland Park Village official, works for the University of Notre Dame, has some sort of transportation development company – these are guys who are flying under the radar…and that’s what’s gonna be fun to watch as you see scrutiny of the Board members as well.”

Fusco also takes us on a step-by-step tour of the intriguing story he and Natasha Korecki wrote last week about a court case that alleges Dick Mell actually had a one-third ownership in the infamous landfill that spurred the family feud between Mell and Rod Blagojevich. If the allegations prove true, it could mean legal trouble for Dick Mell, who just left the Council after nearly 40 years. He has always maintained that he never owned any part of the landfill. Fusco’s explanation is deep and detailed – more than can be encapsulated here – so it’s really worth watching.

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

CN July 11, 2013

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Ken

What if Springfield had passed comprehensive pension reform? How would that have affected the Chicago Public Schools this year? Would it have restored toilet paper to Von Steuben’s operating budget?

That’s actually a serious question, because in the past few weeks CPS has been saying repeatedly that the classroom-level cuts the schools are experiencing is  due to the fact that they have such a huge pension bill to pay this year. But unless the relief came in the form of another “pension holiday” – a process that only shifts the burden into the future and makes everything more expensive – it’s hard to see how making teachers pay more into health-care or cutting some benefits would make much of a dent in that “billion dollar deficit”.

Catalyst’s Sarah Karp puts things into perspective. “Even if you paid four hundred million this year (into the pension fund), you still have a six hundred-million dollar deficit,” she explains. “The real reason why the schools are seeing cuts, I believe, is that they want to make these schools more efficient.”

CPS has instituted a new budgeting method that’s based on a set amount per-pupil. “I think before if you looked at how the per-pupil played out, it varied a lot,” she says. “Even though you might have (in the past) had a formula for determining how schools were getting their budgets,  you also had a lot of times when they’d get special programs, they’d get grants…they had a lot of ‘extras’ at every school…I think that Tim Cawley, who’s the Chief Administrative Officer, he knew darn well that this was going to happen. That there would be a lot of cuts. And I think that he just thinks that schools need to be more efficient. I don’t really think it had that much to do with the so-called deficit. I mean we have a deficit every year. And come the audit – the yearly audit, we almost always have a surplus.”

Ben Joravsky (Chicago Reader) also joins us this week, so it’s a perfect time to ask the journalist who’s most associated with reporting on TIF funding about the recent calls for Mayor Emanuel to plow some unused TIF money back into the schools. But the Sun-Times reports in an editorial that there’s only about ten million dollars in surplus right now, and that wouldn’t be of much help.

“We don’t know how much money is in these TIF reserves,” Joravsky tells us. “There’s the $457 million which flies out the window every year into the TIF fund, half of which the people of Chicago think they’e paying for schools, when in fact they’re paying into the TIF.” 457 million is the number County Clerk David Orr released today, along with an announcement that, henceforth, TIF contributions will, indeed, be listed on County tax bills.

The issue is how much money that’s left over from year to year is unspent, and Joravsky says over the decades it has really added up. “And, if you count – each TIF, every year, has an annual budget – so if you were to go through the 160 of those budgets and count up the reserves they claim are sitting in a fund, you get $1.7 billion as of 2011,” he claims. “We know this because there have been some reformers…who’ve actually gone through and counted them.  The City is now claiming that, in actuality, even though the annual reports say there’s 1.7 billion in reserves, that money has been committed to projects. What projects it’s been committed to, they won’t tell us. Those projects are not itemized in the annual reports…so the reality is that it’s  one of those things where we’re just going to have to take the Mayor at his word.”

And, if the Mayor is to be believed, there’s only about ten million dollars left – not enough to make a difference for the struggling schools.

Joravsky says he latest deal that approved Wrigley Field signage might be a kind of tax Trojan Horse. “They’re eventually going to figure out a way to have the public subsidize this,” he speculates. “Probably through giving it a landmark designation that enables them to avoid paying property taxes. So I’ve always believed that they’re they’re trying to figure out how they can plausibly foist this on the public in a way that  the public believes is revenue-neutral.”

And finally, the Tribune is moving all its newspapers into a new company, separating hem from their other businesses.  Joravsky has some thoughts about that, too.  “I know its not because they’re trying to promote good journalism. I’m sure it’s all about sales price and taxes and that kind of thing.”

Posted in Chicago Newsroom past shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment