WRITE GOVERNOR RAUNER! (A Request from Kate Singletary, WLSU Legislative Chair (IRTA))

Our best advice from state legislator visits in the last two months may be surprising. When we ask, “What is the most effective thing we could do as retired teachers to help you protect our pensions,” the unified answer has been, “It would help if you all would speak directly to the Governor.”

Our first response to the suggestion was not positive—“Well what good would that do? He doesn’t listen; he seems unaware of our needs; he openly argues his anti-labor, anti-union, anti-collective bargaining stance, and he is ignoring the recent Illinois Supreme Court decision overturning Senate Bill 1— so why would letters from individual retired teachers (or police or firefighters) make any difference?

Because the Governor needs to hear your voice. He needs to hear our voices, one and many. If we are silent, we have failed in our advocacy. In this case, writing your congressperson isn’t the right choice—contacting the Governor is.

Hearing from us individually, not through our union reps or our sympathetic congressperson lends a new level of push back to the debate over the unbalanced budget and the Governor’s 500+ page plan to again attack our pensions and ask us to take a diminished benefit.

Your letter should be short and must be heartfelt in your defense of your contract with the State of Illinois to provide you with the pension you worked for and contributed toward all those working years. We need to show him that whatever he is doing is affecting us, our friends, and our colleagues. He has to find money and compromise to solve the problem.

A handwritten or typed snail-mail letter is more impressive than an email or a phone call, but the latter two could also be used. It is important in the subject line of the email to state what the content is about so it can be logged by staffers properly.

I encourage you to send Bruce Rauner a letter:

GOVERNOR BRUCE RAUNER                                        

207 State House                                                                          

Springfield, Illinois 62706                                                   

GOVERNOR BRUCE RAUNER

James R. Thompson Center

100 West Randolph 16-100

Chicago, IL 60601

Actually, send two letters—one to each office! The aides must read and count each letter that arrives and report to the Governor on the subject matter.

For questions, please contact: Kate Singletary, Legislative Chair of the West Lake Shore Unit, a local of the Illinois Retired Teachers Association, singletarykate@gmail.com

A Reiterated Commentary on This Blog:

Now is the time for citizens of Illinois to openly resist the way in which the state's politicians (without moral conscience) have chosen to regulate public morals and welfare. Now is the time to protest against the liars and thieves who have manufactured a financial crisis; to protest against the liars and thieves who have perpetuated a financial predicament through irresponsibility, mismanagement and corruption; to protest against the liars and thieves who have ignored moral responsibility and refused lawful remedy for the financial problems they have created. They will continue to steal more of your pension in the future. You must become a political activist —Glen Brown.

 

Illinois Public Pensions Are the Worst-Funded in the Nation Because of Governors and Legislators...

“It didn't happen by accident. Governors and legislators, Republicans and Democrats, repeatedly approved financially toxic changes that created the worst-funded pension system in the country…

“For more than a quarter-century, governors and state legislators, Republicans and Democrats alike, made a series of financially toxic moves in the pension systems for state employees and public school teachers. Proposals to fix the perennially underfunded pensions were based on botched calculations—or no calculations at all—and were driven by misguided rationales that weren't fully vetted. Everyone was to blame, yet few accepted responsibility. Even the public-sector unions that stood to lose the most sometimes embraced those choices…

“At worst, policymakers deliberately ignored the warning signs, punted the problem far into the future and habitually enjoyed the short-term gratification of funneling more money into schools and other operational needs instead of pensions…

“But perhaps the most enduring culprit is the “Edgar ramp,” conceived in 1994 by Republican Gov. Jim Edgar as a 50-year program to stabilize the retirement systems. Edgar set a goal of having the systems 90 percent funded by 2045. For the plan's first 15 years, payment levels were set artificially low—effectively shorting the pension systems each year—and then ramped up significantly in later years. This allowed politicians to comply with the required payments at the start while hoping that future leaders would find billions of dollars down the road.

“Now, with the systems still less than 43 percent funded, the state faces a crippling drain on its budget. In 1996, as the ramp required, only $614 million went to the pension systems. The amount due in the state's 2016-17 budget year: a staggering $7.6 billion. That accounts for roughly 1 out of every 4 dollars in the state's general fund, a trend that will continue for the next three decades…

“Gov. Rod Blagojevich borrowed $10 billion, which boosted the pension systems' funded ratio to nearly 61 percent in 2004 from 49 percent. But he used that showing to skimp on two years of payments. Surprisingly, the pension-holiday legislation was backed by the Service Employees International Union, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association. The labor unions persuaded Blagojevich's administration to back off its pursuit of a two-tiered pension system and reductions in cost-of-living increases for retirees. Teachers also salvaged an early-retirement program with several end-of-career incentives intact…

“Madigan minced no words in December 2013 after pension-cutback legislation he helped craft narrowly passed the state Legislature and was signed by Quinn. ‘The bill would not have passed without me. I was convinced that standing fast for substantial savings, clear intent and an end to unaffordable annual raises would result in a sound plan that will meet all constitutional challenges,’ Madigan said. Madigan has a reputation around the Statehouse for thinking three steps ahead of everyone else. But he got this one wrong—really wrong…”

 

For the complete report, The Illinois Pension Disaster: What Went Wrong by Dave McKinney, click here. 

Two Poems by Michael Collier

An Individual History 

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft 

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics
and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before Thorazine,
which the suicide O'Laughlin called "handcuffs for the mind."
It was before, during, and after the time of atomic fallout,
Auschwitz, the Nakba, DDT, and you could take water cures,
find solace in quarantines, participate in shunnings,
or stand at Lourdes among the canes and crutches.
It was when the March of Time kept taking off its boots.
Fridays when families prayed the Living Rosary
to neutralize communists with prayer.
When electroshock was electrocution
and hammers recognized the purpose of a nail.
And so, if you were as crazy as my maternal grandmother was then
you might make the pilgrimage she did through the wards
of state and private institutions,
and make of your own body a nail for pounding, its head
sunk past quagmires, coups d'etat, and disappearances
and in this way find a place in history
among the detained and unparoled, an individual like her,
though hidden by an epoch of lean notation -- "Marked
Parkinsonian tremor," "Chronic paranoid type" --
a time when the animal slowed by its fate
was excited to catch a glimpse of its tail
or feel through her skin the dulled-over joy
when for a moment her hands were still. 

Argos 

If you think Odysseus too strong and brave to cry,

that the god-loved, god-protected hero
when he returned to Ithaka disguised,
intent to check up on his wife

and candidly apprize the condition of his kingdom,
steeled himself resolutely against surprise
and came into his land cold-hearted, clear-eyed,
ready for revenge – then you read Homer as I did,

too fast, knowing you’d be tested for plot
and major happenings, skimming forward to the massacre,
the shambles engineered with Telemakhos
by turning beggar and taking up the challenge of the bow.

Reading this way you probably missed the tear
Odysseus shed for his decrepit dog, Argos,
who’s nothing but a bag of bones asleep atop
a refuse pile outside the palace gates.  The dog is not

a god in earthly clothes, but in its own disguise
of death and destitution is more like Ithaka itself.  
And if you returned home after twenty years
you might weep for the hunting dog

you long ago abandoned, rising from the garbage
of its bed, its instinct of recognition still intact,
enough will to wag its tail, lift its head, but little more.  
Years ago you had the chance to read that page more closely

but instead you race ahead, like Odysseus, cocksure
with your plan.  Now the past is what you study,
where guile and speed give over to grief so you might stop,
and desiring to weep, weep more deeply. 


Michael Collier is the author of eight books of poetry: The Clasp and other poems, Wesleyan, 1986; The Folder Heart, Wesleyan, 1989; The Neighbor, University of Chicago Press, 1995; The Ledge, Houghton-Mifflin, 2000; Dark Wild Realm, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006; An Individual History, W.W. Norton, 2012; My Bishop and Other Poems, University of Chicago Press, 2018; The Missing Mountain, University of Chicago Press, 2021. Prose: Make Us Wave Back: Essays on Poetry and Influence, University of Michigan, 2007; Translation: Medea, 2006; Editions: The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry, 1993; The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (with Stanley Plumly), 1999; The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology, 2000; A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations (with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch) 2004.

His poems have been published in various periodicals such as Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Tri-Quarterly, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and many others. Collier was the poet laureate of Maryland from 2001-2004. He is currently the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Money, Power and Greed in America