UPDATE: Madigan won’t divulge his + Bernie Madoff for financial advice? + New feature: Springfield’s Biggest Loser Legislator of the Week. + A retired teacher supports the faculty at Garfield High School in Seattle. Wearing red today. « Fred Klonsky

A retired teacher supports the faculty at Garfield High School in Seattle. Wearing red today. « Fred Klonsky:

Madigan won’t divulge his email. Tomorrow you must phone or fax.

by Fred Klonsky

Reminder that tomorrow is Call Madigan Friday.
The message: You must meat with the unions for real pension solutions.
But the speaker will not divulge his email address.
I even called his Springfield office:
“Speaker’s office.”
“Hi. Does the Speaker have an email address?”
“No.”
Click.
So you must call or fax.

Springfield Office: 300 Capitol Building Springfield, IL   62706 (217) 782-5350 (217) 524-1794 FAX District Office: 6500 South Pulaski Road Chicago, IL  60629 (773) 581-8000 (773) 581-9414 FAX

Standard and Poor’s and Illinois pensions. Would you go to Bernie Madoff for financial advice?

by Fred Klonsky

The big financial news yesterday was the release of documents by the Justice Department showing that the Standard and Poors fraudulently inflated credit ratings, “with dire consequences for the entire economy. In a series of e-mails, tensions appeared to be escalating inside the firm’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan as it publicly professed that its ratings were valid, even as the home loans bundled into mortgage-backed securities, or M.B.S., were failing at accelerating rates.”
Standard and Poor’s is not a government agency. They are a private company which is hired to assess deals, trades, the value of securities and bonds.
All they have to sell really is their reliability.
The Feds and 16 state attorneys general claim that they were

New feature: Springfield’s Biggest Loser Legislator of the Week.

by Fred Klonsky

Attending the pension forum in Wilmette on Monday night, listening to Senator Dan Biss and Representative Gabel claim that teacher pensions were at fault for “draining money from poor children,” I thought to myself, “Fred, you need a new feature for your blog: Springfield’s Biggest Loser legislator of the week.“
It will be a problem because there are so many who are competitive.
IEA Government Relations, the union lobbyists, won’t be happy with this because we are suppose to smile and be nice to all of these folks, no matter what they do, what they say or how they vote.
IPACE, our political action fund, has been throwing money at Republican House Leader Tom Cross for years. No 

A retired teacher supports the faculty at Garfield High School in Seattle. Wearing red today.

by Fred Klonsky

I now have quite a collection of red shirts to wear in support of public education.
I used to wear one every Tuesday.
But now I’m retired. And today we are being asked to wear read in support of the teachers at Garfield High School. They put the interests of their students first and have refused to waste precious instructional and class time on the MAP test.
I won’t be wearing red today to school. But I’ll be wearing red just the same.

West Chicago teachers still out. VIDEO

by Fred Klonsky

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