The company once fought unfair regulation—now it wants its own.

So does Uber, the smartphone-enabled ridesharing service, have “an a–hole problem” that threatens the company’s very future? The New York Timeswarns that “Uber’s hard-charging [corporate] culture…can become a losing proposition faster than you might imagine.”

That seems to be the growing consensus among observers as the company’s list of real and imagined sins starts growing longer by the minute. Some of the complaints are serious and some are frivolous. But there’s one truly anti-competitive move Uber is pulling that it should definitely called out on—and hasn’t been yet.

A cottage industry on Wall Street tries to forecast the Federal Reserve’s policy decisions. The Fed, in turn, bases its policy on how it thinks the economy will perform. The cottage industry, of course, knows that; so it is constantly engaged in forecasting the economy.

Attention nowadays is focused on the degree of slack in the U.S. labor market. The financial news is full of stories about payroll employment, the unemployment rate, labor-force participation rates, quits, initial claims for unemployment insurance, and the like. Fed staffers devote thousands of hours to combing the data for hints about how tight or loose the labor market is or might become. Investors devote millions of hours to divining what Fed Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues think about these matters.

Meanwhile, another variable that is just as important to the forecast is being almost completely ignored. I refer to labor productivity.

Illinois bonds are set to weaken after a judge struck down a plan to address the biggest pension deficit among U.S. states, according to Wells Capital Management.

Illinois 10-year obligations yield 3.68 percent, or about 1.4 percentage points above benchmark municipal debt, data compiled by Bloomberg show. At that yield spread, the smallest since July, the debt isn’t attractive given the legal developments and the potential financial strain, said Robert Miller, who helps oversee $35 billion of munis at Wells Capital.

The lowest-rated U.S. state plans to appeal the Nov. 21 ruling that its constitution protects cuts to public pensions, which face a $111 billion shortfall. The decision marks the latest challenge to emerge for the incoming governor, Bruce Rauner, who takes office Jan. 12. He also has to grapple with a $2 billion budget hole from expiring increases to income-tax rates.

The dead have voted in Chicago. Now, they’ve also signed papers swearing their kids were eligible for financial aid to attend one of the City Colleges of Chicago, documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

A dispute over whether students at Kennedy-King College got more financial aid than they were entitled to has been settled with the City Colleges repaying the federal government nearly $4.3 million, the records show.

The settlement stems from a 2009 federal Department of Education review of Kennedy-King’s financial-aid program. The agency said the City Colleges school at 63rd and Halsted needed to do more to show that students who got federal financial aid to go there between 2007 and 2009 qualified for all the aid they received.

A southwestern Illinois judge has denied a bid by a landowners group to suspend the state’s new rules for high-volume oil and gas drilling, ruling that the plaintiffs failed to show they would suffer immediate harm if the practice commonly known as “fracking” was to go forward.

Madison County Circuit Judge Barbara Crowder rejected the request for a preliminary injunction on Friday, three days after she heard arguments about the rules meant to regulate hydraulic fracturing.

Attorneys for the landowners had insisted that the rules drafted by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and approved Nov. 6 by a legislative panel were procedurally flawed, among other things because the DNR allegedly didn’t consider scientific studies and had no representative available to answer questions at statewide public hearings last year. Attorneys for the state countered that the public had had sufficient input.

On Friday, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals Panelwas set to decide on 13 applications for licenses to “establish a medical cannabis dispensary.” [If you’ll recall, there was fervent demand for applications for such dispensary licenses back in September.]

The Chicago Tribune reports that, of the 13 applications heard Friday, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals Panel approved six, rejected one, and delayed decisions on the other six.

Here’s what applicants needed in order to acquire a dispensary license:

Would you pay 25 cents more on a $100 purchase to put a bridge over the Fox River? Or repair a CTA line? Or build a road near O’Hare to relieve congestion?

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning hopes you will and is set on persuading lawmakers to raise the regional sales tax by a quarter-cent to generate $300 million a year for transportation, water and open-space projects in northeastern Illinois.

After unveiling the concept this month, CMAP Executive Director Randy Blankenhorn acknowledged Chicago and the suburbs need billions to replace, repair and improve our dilapidated infrastructure but thinks “$300 million is enough to make a difference at the regional scale.”

For fans of baseball,  teams have already announced the late winter dates for pitchers and catchers to report for spring training.

When evaluating Illinois’ recovery from the recession, economist James Glassman uses a baseball analogy.  The head economist for commercial banking with JP Morgan Chase says Illinois has only reached the fifth inning in the recovery.

“We are only half way out of the hole we are in.  It has taken five years to get where we are.  Most recoveries take seven years,” says Glassman, but to emerge from the severity of this type of recession, Illinois is on a 10-year course. Glassman’s view is that there is plenty of recovery left.