I found this while at the Khan Academy.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tczu_dvVuuk]
Category: Business
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Quinn Spends Another $1.5 Billion We Don’t Have
Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn on Thursday signed into law an extra $1.5 billion in spending for road construction and child welfare investigations, even as Republicans decried the measure as including ill-timed, pork barrel money.
via Chicago Tribune.
What is wrong with this guy? Really?
Quinn already stopped a bond auction because the rates for Illinois bonds are too high (and only going to go higher.)
Illinois already has $9 billion in unpaid bills. There’s also the looming pension time-bomb that no one wants to talk about.
What does The Machine not understand?
STOP SPENDING MONEY!
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Illinois Never Met a Tax it Didn’t Like: Sneakers? Really?
The cost of a new pair of basketball shoes could jump by 25 cents under a proposal floated this week by an Illinois lawmaker.
State Rep. Will Davis, D-Hazel Crest, wants to create a new tax that would generate an estimated $3 million annually for a youth job preparation program. He said the added cost would likely go unnoticed by most consumers, while helping finance a program for kids during tight budget times.
via St. Louis Today.
Embarrassing that we have these people represent us.
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Bacteria Creates Microscopic Gold Nuggets
Among the more peculiar organisms that inhabit our Earth exists a bacterium that turns water-soluble gold into microscopic nuggets of solid gold, scientists said Sunday. …
The answer, suggest researchers in Canada, lies in a molecule excreted by the microbe that both shields the organism and transforms the poisonous ions into particles.”This finding is the first demonstration that a secreted metabolite can protect against toxic gold and cause gold biomineralisation,” the process by which living organisms produce minerals, they wrote in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
The molecule, delftibactin A, is capable of achieving this feat within seconds in pH-neutral conditions at room temperature.
Study co-author Nathan Magarvey of Ontario’s McMaster University told AFP the study was not designed to show whether it would be viable to use germs to grow gold from water in the lab.
But such processes seem “distinctly possible,” he said in an email exchange.
via Business Insider.
Nature Rocks!!
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Red-Light Camera Co.’s Chicago Corruption
The chairman of the Australian company behind Chicago’s red-light program resigned this week and trading in the company’s stock was suspended amid an intensifying investigation into allegations of corruption in its Chicago contract.
Redflex Holdings Ltd. announced the extraordinary actions just days after board members were briefed by an outside legal team hired to examine ties between the company’s U.S. subsidiary and the city official who oversaw its contract, a relationship first disclosed in October by the Tribune. …
The internal probe found that company executives systematically courted former city transportation official John Bills with thousands of dollars in free trips to the Super Bowl and other sporting events, sources familiar with the investigation told the Tribune. …
The internal probe and a parallel investigation by city Inspector General Joseph Ferguson are also raising more questions about the company’s hiring of a longtime Bills friend who received more than $570,000 in company commissions as a customer service representative in Chicago, the sources said.via Chicago Tribune.
The Tribune got the OK to print this story because John Bills was one of Daley’s guys. Since Daley is gone Rahm gave the nod.
Hello Lisa Madigan? Anita Alvarez? Either of you awake?
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What Quinn Didn’t Say
“Yes, we are going to continue
milking Illinois taxpayers like a dairy cow…”
what Gov. Quinn didn’t tell you
State of State Address
February 6, 2013
Word cloud of State of State Address (what we heard)Yesterday, Gov. Quinn gave the “State of the State”. Here’s the rest of the story…
The growth of state payroll is exploding. In 2012, the State of Illinois payroll went from 79,451 (2011) to 115,388 employees. We questioned the numbers, Quinn’s administration defended them. See chart here.
No stopping salary abuse, even from state officers. The Chief Investment Officer at Teachers Retirement System (TRS) salary spiked from $209,697 (2008) to $357,500 (2011). See salary history.
The College & University payroll is padded with patronage. In 2000, the Illinois College and University system employed 51,439. Today, the system employs 90,213; but, student enrollment is up only 7%. Taxpayers and students are stuck with the bill- that’s called “generational theft”.
In 2011, the 7th highest salary went to the president of Moraine Valley Community College: $674,210. The junior college chief out-earned the Chancellor at the University of Illinois. See Top 8 Illinois College/University Salaries here.
Governor, the taxpayer is abused at every level of Illinois government…In 2011, a DuPage County engineer cleaned off $340,147, tops among 197,000 local- municipal employees across the state. Click here.
In 2011, 57 village/city managers out-earned all governors of the 50 states. The village manager of small Grayslake topped them all- $259,252. Click here.
Where are the Republicans? Milking the same dairy cow…
Senate Republican leader Christine Radogno just doled out six $20,649 “perks” for “leadership” – those cashing in include Sen. Kirk Dillard and Sen. Bill Brady. Now they make $87,000 plus. In Texas, legislators make a salary of $7,200! Read Alton Telegraph Editorial.
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New Manufacturing Institute Coming to Chicago
Gov. Pat Quinn will announce today in his State of the State speech that the Urbana-Champaign school, in partnership with its National Center for Supercomputing Applications and private companies, will be forming an Illinois Manufacturing Lab likely to be located in the central area of Chicago.
The facility will be a somewhat smaller, more applications-based version of the UI Labs tech-research center that was announced in January by U of I President Robert Easter and others. The prime goal will be to make the state’s manufacturers more competitive, something that has become increasingly challenging as overseas firms take control of many of the world’s factories.
Quinn thinks this is going to be like 1871 for manufacturing. It won’t be.
Manufacturing is going high-tech. There was a story (I’m too lazy to find right now) a few weeks ago about the new Apple factory in the U.S. is much touted and “moving tech. manufacturing back to U.S. soil.” However the details are such that the new Apple plant will have very few workers. All the manufacturing will be done by machines, robots. Humm….
That is the future. The old days when some dude (or dudette) got paid a decent wage to assemble something complicated are gone. The more complicated the design to more automation is used in place of human labor. The robot never needs to use the bathroom. The robot doesn’t eat lunch, or have a sick kid, or get carpel tunnel. And one person can manage several dozen robots.
What Chicago really needs is to lower the cost of doing business so that a paper plant on the west side can hire 100 workers to do meaningful low skill work for a decent wage. Multiply that by 50 and you got a nice little recovery in Garfield Park. Repeat in Lawndale, Pilsen, Rogers Park, Pullman, etc.
We need to get 25-30 thousands people working. Very few have the skills to be a computer programer (a la 1871.) But nearly all can learn to drive a fork truck, run a hydraulic press or a large paper cutting machine. Most can learn how to operate a CNC machine or a laser/plasma cutter.
It’s time to get this place working. But it can’t happen until the broken and corrupt Illinois government gets out of the way.
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Quinn’s Motto: Move Your Business Out
Today’s Local Bad News:
Illinois companies warned in January that they may lay off as many as 1,200 workers in the next two months, according to filings with the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.
viaChicago Tribune.
The economy sucks and the media doesn’t want to talk about it. Manufacturing in Illinois is on life support. It’s questionable if it can be revived.
To this mess we add:
Quinn wants Illinois’ minimum wage to increase from $8.25 to $10 an hour, according to a source familiar with the planned remarks. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but Illinois’ rate has been higher for years.
via Chicago Tribune.
That will not help growth. It will not help poor communities. It will not help high school drop-outs or college professors. It’s an inflation creator and job killer. We don’t need the cost of fast food going up. We don’t need the cost of goods at Target going up. We’re taxed to death already. The state is $100+ billion in the red and he’s upset that some kid’s making $8.75/hr making pizza’s.
Illinois is dying. The Machine is driving full speed off the edge of the cliff.
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Crain’s Propaganda on Illinois vs. Indiana
My comment on a brainless story:
Since when is Crain’s the new PR mouthpiece for Quinn and Rahm?
Except for the graphic this piece is nearly 100% opinion. So Indiana spent $300k on a campaign and got 20 or so companies to move. Those companies may provide several millions worth of tax base; yielding a huge ROI for IN. But the author just sweeps that under the rug.
Yes, IN does not have the “white collar” talent pool that Chicago has. But it will develop it over time. Success is a long term game; not a lottery ticket.
The Illinois Machine has driven us to the edge of insolvency. Rahm appears to have a plan. Quinn is a headless chicken. But sooner or later the taxpayers are going to get a tax bill the likes of which have never been scene before. Then we’ll see how many more people decide to move East and North.