Tonight Jeanne Ives will join the Irish for Ives crowd at Reilly's Daughter Pub, in Oak Lawn. Today, I will vote for Jeanne Ives.
I have one vote for Governor in this Illinois Primary Election and it requires that I take a Republican Ballot to cast this vote. I am early voting today here in the 19th Ward at Mount Greenwood Park 3721 W 111th St, when it opens around 9AM. First day is always delayed, but our judges and poll watchers do a terrific job. Alderman Matt O'Shea will be on hand to make sure everything rolls-out smoothly. They usually do, here in a neighborhood Ward that takes voting very seriously.
This is the most important vote that I need to cast in years. I normally take a Democratic Primary ballot, but not this time. This is a game changing vote.
Illinois is choking to death.
My neighbors, of whom the majority hold public service pensions, agonize as they watch the IOUs passed to them from Big Jim Thompson to Bruce Rauner, turn into Confederate Money, or Illinois high-speed rail bonds.
Squeezy the Python is doing very well.
Hard working people worry about Jeanne Ives and believe the bilge given out by the media and the Rauner Campaign that she wants to take away their IOUs from Republican and Democrat grifters and oligarchs.
Illinois Public Pensions are the ultimate Ponzi Pyramid. If you worked for Illinois and have gotten out with your 85%, all is good.
The millions more of you - not so much.
Pensions were looted to make a very few people rich.
Public school teachers,cops, firemen and later AFSCME workers were treated to the following:
•Shorting pension payments to buy immediate budgetary relief. The nonpartisan Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, the fiscal research arm of the General Assembly, concluded in 2013 that the largest cause of the unfunded pension liabilities was inadequate contributions from the state. Underpayments between 1985 and 2012 totaled $41.2 billion, the agency calculated.
•Enhancing pension benefits. Former GOP Gov. James Thompson agreed in 1989 to establish a compounding, 3 percent cost-of-living increase for retirees. Another round of benefit enhancements followed in the late 1990s. In May, the state Supreme Court ruled that those changes can't ever be revoked for tens of thousands of current and retired government workers.
•Clearing a bloated state payroll by letting workers retire early. A 2002 plan created under Republican Ryan and pushed by Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan cost the pension systems at least four times more than originally billed and won't be paid off until after 2045, when early-century budgetary ills will be the stuff of history books. David McKinney in Crain's Chicago Business ( emphases my own)
That is Bi-Partisan Suicide, neighbors. The oligarchs found their solution - Soak the Rich, code for increase income and property taxes via a heavy progressive tax, or plank # 2 from the Communist Manifesto*.
I believe that Jeanne Ives intends to reform pensions. She has a plan. None of the other's have anything, except legalize weed and increase Illinois progressive taxes, while feeding empty pensions and killing off what remains of the middle class in this state for good.
Jeanne Ives is the only candidate who stands against the American Holocaust - abortion. America will never be great again, until this horror of slaughtering a babies is euphemized as health care ends. Jeanne Ives stands against abortion and the Planned Parenthood abortion industry.
I you are fine with abortion, you are OK with anything.
Jeanne Ives does not pander for votes and understands that the word illegal
means something.
I might be the only DNA in my vast family of hard-working skilled trades people to cast this vote, but I believe it will topple Bruce Rauner's place-holding tenure as governor.
Come the general election, Jeanne Ives can count on my solitary vote again.
If you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything.
Illinois has had a very long and perilous fall.
*Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, advocated a heavy progressive tax as a means of despoiling the “bourgeoisie” and softening middleclass society up for the dictatorshp of the proletariat.
