QUOTE OF THE DAY
Chicago Tribune: A censure for speaking out
If you serve on the College of DuPage board of trustees, your responsibilities include overseeing the finances and guiding the future of the Glen Ellyn-based community college.
You’re also expected to sit down and shut up.
The COD board recently censured one of its members in a resolution that reads like a teeny-bopper temper tantrum.
Public Sector Inc: Pensions: When you can’t trust the trustees
Last week the board of trustees of Calpers, dominated by six beneficiaries of the pension fund, voted to essentially undue some of Jerry Brown’s modest 2012 pension reforms with their liberal interpretation of the new rules. I have a piece in the LA Times today describing how this is not just a California problem. Many pension funds are directed by boards dominated by beneficiaries, with little representation for the taxpayer who is ultimately responsible for paying off pension bills when a system is mismanaged. Detroit, Houston and New Orleans offer a number of other examples of the consequences for taxpayers of actions of some of these public-employee dominated pension boards.
A big part of the Calpers mess is a function of its badly managed, public employee dominated board. Things went awfully wrong in California, for instance, when elections helped transform the board of Calpers. The board consists of six government workers and retirees elected by members of the pension system and various political appointees and elected officials, including the state treasurer and controller. After union backing helped in 1998 to sweep into office several officials closely aligned with government unions, including Gov. Gray Davis, newly appointed Democrats on the Calpers board began forming alliances with government workers in a striking shift of power that prompted the New York Times to describe the new Calpers board as wearing “a union label.”
Chicago Tribune: State announces $10 million for CPS’ Safe Passage program
The state of Illinois is adding $10 million to the Chicago Public Schools’ Safe Passage anti-violence program, according to the offices of the governor and mayor.
The additional state dollars, announced Thursday, will add 27 schools and new routes for 93 schools that currently have adult monitors along designated routes to school. The new funds come on top of the $1 million in additional dollars allocated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel last month to include 13 more schools in the anti-violence program.
That means altogether 40 schools will be added this school year to the list of those getting manned Safe Passage routes.
Pensions & Investments: Illinois Teachers maps out 2015 real estate, hedge fund deployments
Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, Springfield, plans to deploy a total of at least $1 billion with real estate and hedge fund managers in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2015.
Trustees of the $45.3 billion pension fund approved the 2015 tactical investment plans for the $5.6 billion real estate portfolio and the $2.6 billion hedge fund portfolio as presented by investment staff at a board meeting Tuesday.
The real estate tactical plan calls for total new investment of $850 million in fiscal 2015 — $550 million will go to opportunistic strategies and $300 million to core/value-added approaches. Additional opportunistic real estate managers will be sought.
Sun-Times: PAC survey signals property tax hike is on the way
A questionnaire distributed to aldermanic candidates by a superPAC created to re-elect Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his City Council allies telegraphs Emanuel’s plan for a post-election property tax hike, two possible mayoral challengers warned Thursday.
Ald. Bob Fioretti (2nd) and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said the mayor’s plan to sock it to Chicago taxpayers is made crystal-clear by question No. 1 on the six-question litmus test crafted by the $1.35 million-and-counting superPAC known as, “Chicago Forward.”
It asks candidates if they would be willing to support “tough but necessary steps, such as increases in property taxes or additional efficiencies throughout city government” to further reduce the city’s structural deficit and “preserve critical services.”
Slate: Netflix vs. Healthcare.gov
What could possibly have motivated the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to refuse to release even a single document about the healthcare.gov site’s security in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Associated Press? The AP announced that its request had been refused last week and, by way of explanation, cited a statement from CMS spokesman Aaron Albright that “releasing this information would potentially cause an unwarranted risk to consumers’ private information.” It’s hard to imagine that any documents the agency could have released would have generated more doubts about the site’s security than those remarks. The best way to protect the site—and its users—would be to stop defending it against legitimate questions and release some of the requested information.
There’s an episode of The West Wing in which staffer Josh Lyman sarcastically tells the White House press corps that the president has a secret plan to fight inflation. Suddenly, that’s the only thing any of the reporters want to talk about. Just replace “secret plan to fight inflation” with “secret plan to fight online intruders,” and it’s the same thing. Is there any surer way to generate a lot of interest in the security of healthcare.gov than to shroud it in secrecy?
Café Hayek: Who’d a-Thunk It? Employers Respond Predictably to a Hike In the Minimum Wage
San Jose, CA, recently raised its minimum wage. One result is that an employer reduced the size of the annual bonuses that she pays to her employees. (NPR has the story; this particular part starts at around the 3 minute, 25 second mark in the audio version of the report. [What is called at this NPR link the “Transcript” is not a complete transcript of what you’ll hear if you click “Listen to the Story”.])
Note that these particular workers are among the lucky ones. While the higher minimum wage didn’t help them, it didn’t hurt them – or at least not very much.* When bonuses are factored in, these employees were, in fact, already being paid more than even the now-higher minimum wage. So their employer merely had to rearrange the method by which she paid her employees: more in hourly wages and less in the form of bonuses.
Illinois Innovcation Index: Exports growing in Illinois’ high-tech sectors
The volume of goods and services exports is an important indicator of connectivity with global markets and, more broadly, national and local economic health. Last August, the Index highlighted how goods exports in Illinois outpaced average national growth from 2002 to 2012.
This issue of the Index focuses on state-level export data from 2009 to 2013 to understand how Illinois has performed post-recession. Since 2009, goods exports have increased 58.8 percent, from $41.6 billion that year to $66.1 billion in 2013; this growth outpaced the national average of 49.6 percent over the same period.
Chicago Sun Times: County breakdown of Illinois unemployment numbers
In July, the Illinois unemployment numbers fell for the second consecutive month, the 6.8 percent rate is the lowest it’s been since August 2008.
The unemployment rate in July 2013 sat at 9.2 percent, and the 2.4-percentage-point drop is the largest one-year decline in 30 years.
But how does the unemployment rate vary from one part of the state to another?
Wired: Creators of New Fed-Proof Bitcoin Marketplace Swear It’s Not for Drugs
When the recording industry smashed Napster with a $20 billion lawsuit more than a decade ago, filesharing morphed into Bittorrent, a fully peer-to-peer system with no central server for law enforcement to attack. Now the developers behind one software project are trying to pull off a similar trick with the anarchic model of bitcoin e-commerce pioneered by the billion-dollar Silk Road black market. And just as with Bittorrent, their new system may be so decentralized that not even its creators can control exactly how it will be used.
This weekend, the developers behind OpenBazaar plan to release a beta version of the software designed to let anyone privately and directly buy and sell goods online with no intermediary. They describe it as “pseudonymous, uncensored trade.” Rather than hosting its commerce on any server, OpenBazaar installs on users’ PCs, and allows them to list products in a file stored in a so-called “distributed hash table,” a database spread across many users’ machines. Everything will be paid in bitcoin. The result of that peer-to-peer architecture, they hope, will be a marketplace that no one—–no government, no company, not even the OpenBazaar programmers—can regulate or shut down.
Chicago Tribune: A Chicago success: More diplomas, fewer dropouts
So much of the debate on education in Chicago focuses on conflicts between teachers and district officials over test scores and educator evaluations. Or on the political squabbling between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis. Or on other concerns of … other adults.
But this week brings good news for every Chicagoan to celebrate. What distinguishes this news is that it’s about students and their rising achievement:
Chicago Public Schools improved its graduation rate in the last school year. Almost 7 in 10 CPS students — 69.4 percent — graduated over five years. That figure is up an impressive 4 percentage points in a single year, and more than 8 points in two years. That’s the largest two-year gain in district history, CPS officials say.
CARTOON OF THE DAY
