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.
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!!
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?
… by law, utilities must hand over customer records — which include any billing and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data — to the DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is “relevant” to an investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this month.
Meet the administrative subpoena (.pdf): With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.
In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books (.pdf) passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative subpoena, according to interviews and government reports. (.pdf) …
With the data the Alaska utility handed over, the DEA may then use further administrative subpoenas to acquire the suspected indoor-dope growers’ phone records, stored e-mails, and perhaps credit-card purchasing histories — all to build a case to acquire a probable-cause warrant to physically search their homes and businesses.
via Wired.com.
It’s out of control.
A rebellion is coming.
Hundreds of people jostled for free vegetables handed out by farmers in a symbolic protest earlier on Wednesday, trampling one man and prompting an outcry over the growing desperation created by economic crisis.
Images of people struggling to seize bags of tomatoes and leeks thrown from a truck dominated television, triggering a bout of soul-searching over the new depths of poverty in the debt-laden country.
“These images make me angry. Angry for a proud people who have no food to eat, who can’t afford to keep warm, who can’t make ends meet,” said Kostas Barkas, a lawmaker from the leftist Syriza party.
Other lawmakers from across the political spectrum decried the images “of people on the brink of despair” and the sense of “sadness for a proud people who have ended up like this”.
People have seen their living standards crumble as the country faces its sixth year of recession that has driven unemployment to record highs.
Greece has been forced to push through painful wage and pension cuts demanded by its European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders as the price of bailout funds to avert bankruptcy.
FARMERS ANGRY
Greek ships sailed again from the busy ports of Piraeus and Rafina on Wednesday after the government ordered seamen to end a six-day strike aimed at securing wages and union rights.
At dawn, smiling passengers who had been stranded at Piraeus carried their luggage across the port, relieved to be boarding the ships.
But in northern and central Greece, farmers protesting high production costs and fuel prices placed their tractors on the sides of highways, threatening to block the country’s main road artery if not satisfied.
In the capital, bus and trolleybus workers held a four-hour work stoppage, as did journalists at state broadcasters.
The free food handout in Athens began peacefully as hundreds of Greeks lined up in advance outside the agriculture ministry, where protesting farmers laid out tables piled high with produce, giving away 50 metric tonnes (55.11 tons) of produce in under two hours.
Tensions flared when the stalls ran out of produce and dozens of people – some carrying small children – rushed to a truck and shoved each other out of the way in the competition for what was left.
One man was treated for injuries after being trampled when he fell to the ground in the commotion.
“I never imagined that I would end up here,” said Panagiota Petropoulos, 65, who struggles to get by on her 530-euro monthly pension while paying 300 euros in rent.
“I can’t afford anything, not even at the fruit market. Everything is expensive, prices of everything are going up while our income is going down and there are no jobs.”
via Reuters.
I’m willing to consider any logical and rational explanation as to why this won’t happen here. But frankly, I don’t see how it can be any other way.
Our debt to GDP ratio is now just over 100% in that we have over $16 trillion in debt and a estimate 2012 GDP of $15.8 trillion.
As recently as 2007 Greece’s ratio was a mere 105.1. Today it’s 157. How did this happen so quickly? Because the debt kept growing faster that the economy was expanding; they economy was actually contracting for awhile (as was ours.)
Spend a few minutes over at Shadow Government Statistics and you’ll see that sound economists believe this is exactly what is happening here. Our debt keeps growing and growing and the economy is actually shrinking.
This wouldn’t be the first time your government was lying to you.
Tough times ahead. Plan accordingly.
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.
A 15-year-old boy with nearly 20 arrests on his record has been charged with armed robbery after he held up a man near his home, police said.It was Jesus Castaneda’s 19th arrest, according to police, and his second gun-related charge. He was last arrested in August 2012 for unlawful use of a weapon, police said.
via Chicago Tribune.
Where’s Anita Alvarez on this? Where’s the court system on this?
Why has the Tribune disabled the comments for this story?
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.
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.