Lisa Madigan: We Are One is Responsible for Illinois Fiscal Mess!

Lisa Madigan: We Are One Did It!

In the opening of A New Leaf, one of my favorite Walter Matthau films, an angry and non-repentant Matthau is castigating his financial advisor for a bounced check, one that has made the one-percenter Matthau look like “some kind of indigent.”  His advisor tries cautiously to explain to Matthau that he has been overspending his inheritance annuity for the last so many years, and he has now exhausted his capital. 

Matthau refuses to accept this scenario; instead, he blames the advisor. 

Used to be funny.  Not now…

Attorney General Lisa Madigan in her “Police Powers” rebuttal to Judge Belz of Sangamon County, also fingers the victim in the first few opening pages of the refutation, blaming the We Are One Coalition for leading the legislators on and intentionally charming them into additional fiscal misfortunes.

Indeed, Madigan’s office responds, “(we) allege that the labor organizations comprising the We Are One Illinois Coalition, aware that the state had limited revenues each year, repeatedly urged state legislators to allocate greater appropriations for state employee salaries and salary increases at the expense of contributions to the state-funded retirement systems, knowing that a result of this would be both an immediate reduction in the assets in those retirement systems and long-term increases in their liabilities.”

Perhaps a Governor Walker of Wisconsin could nod in agreement with this convoluted proposition in contradiction of collective bargaining, but the historical reality of “at the expense of contributions to state-funded retirement systems” in Illinois begs some historical accuracy:

·      In fact, it was pension holidays taken by the legislators over nearly half a century that created the dizzying pit of unfunded debt to the retirement systems, not a COLA here or an ERO there.  In nominal dollars, the money not paid into the TRS retirement fund alone would be $15 billion.  Had it been paid as expected and planned for by an honorable and future-looking General Assembly, the fund would stand at approximately 86% funded ratio, not the 41% the State has created.  (http://teacherpoetmusicianglenbrown.blogspot.com/2013/04/total-state-contributions-to-teachers.html)

·      Since 1995, the state has faced limited revenues by strapping itself to an ill-conceived and foolish payback scheme for the mountain of debt it faced in paying back earlier ignored pension obligations.  Instead of amortizing the debt, the General Assembly decided to design (with the help of business interests) a balloon mortgage heading into the Great Recession.  Moreover, the General Assembly still refuses to consider amortizing the debt as one would a home mortgage, and Illinois will face exponentially increasing debt payments for its reluctance in the next decade(s).

·      Collective bargaining provides for better working conditions as well as for improvements in retirement security.  Often, students are the recipients of such efforts by unions – not just employees.  Agreements in improvements that went beyond the classroom and into the arena of fiscal security were matched by increased contributions on the part of actives working in the public sector.  These contributions jumped during my professional career from 7.5% to 9.4% of my salary by the time I retired.  Furthermore, public workers, including teachers, paid 100% of what was expected and the escalations with increased benefits.  (http://teacherpoetmusicianglenbrown.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-proposed-increases-of-trs.html)

Taking this kind of perplexing illogic a bit further, We Are One becomes culpable for acting as a union in the first place.   This is circular: you’re wrong for being who you are.

In addition, I also recall the furor that erupted when We Are One revealed Cullerton’s SB2404, and the IRTA quickly threatened to take legal action on the unconstitutionality of the bill if it were to pass.  SB2404, if you remember, was the bill that offered an additional 2% in contribution by actives as well as a forced selection between health care and a COLA for retirees.  Madigan eventually killed the bill, and categorized it as another one bringing in much too little in monetary relief. 

Pension bloggers, as I remember, were extremely wary of any deal with the members of the General Assembly, especially one that promised “to pay the normal costs from now on or you can take us to court.”  An identical promise included now in SB1 (PA98-0599 ) and one that even pension-committee-member Representative Elaine Nekritz (D-Northbrook) admitted was hollow or more likely able to be changed at the discretion of another, later General Assembly. 

And, not surprisingly, Lisa Madigan’s opinions do not end with just placing blame for fiscal irresponsibility on the We Are One Coalition.  Actually, the Attorney General is also so bold as to suggest that We Are One’s promotion of SB2404 is an indication of the collective unions’ own culpability and acknowledgement of responsibility in the state’s fiscal morass.  In her rebuttal to Justice Belz, she asserts that the We Are One Coalition tries to deny an earlier affirmation of complicity. 

“Defendants allege that We Are One Coalition and the unions comprising it publicly declared that a reasonable component of a valid solution to the State’s enormous pension liabilities and related financial crisis was a 2% increase in contributions by active members of state-funded retirement systems, but have now insisted that all of the sacrifice   necessary to solve this crisis must be borne by the State’s taxpayers and recipients of other state services and benefits.” 

This last argument is laughable if it were not representative of the moral and ethical vacuity, the complete disregard of historical truth, and disturbing conduct beneath the office of an Attorney General. 

In the end of her “Affirmative Matter” or call for Reserved Sovereign Powers in defending PA98-599 as legally acceptable before the court, Attorney General Madigan  declares the Act’s “presumption of constitutionality includes the reasonableness and necessity for its provisions in light of circumstances faced by the State and the General Assembly when it was enacted.”

Reasonableness and Necessity?

There is no mention of the usual and accepted tenets of the use of “Sovereign Powers”: public health, morals, safety, the general well-being of the State.  This is Police Power at its most raw and least altruistic – the identification of a class or group of individuals who have suffered through the political misappropriation and diversion of what was contractually owed them and now would be punished for being victims to begin with.

Continuing Letters From the Inside: Brandi Martin 2011

Continuing Letters From the Inside: Brandi Martin

A good friend and young active passed along this letter from – believe it or not – 2011, from an art teacher not in Illinois but certainly facing the same pressures and insults many in public education have endured and continue to bear.  Thanks, Kris, for the heads up.

A Letter From an Art Teacher You Won’t Forget

“I've taught art for seventeen years. I've complained about certain things at work, but I've never regretted my profession. We all knew what we were signing up for when we chose our jobs; I knew I wouldn't get rich, but I knew I'd have summers off, and a steady paycheck. So did you, actually. The summer thing is an antiquated agrarian anachronism, (read, not new), so please don't act outraged at this fresh new insult. If you became a banker or waitress or IT guy or whatever job you have that doesn't seem to mind your constant vigilance of pro union tweets, you knew it had two weeks vacation a year. You knew the salary, and the risks of advancement. When i started teaching in 1993 my contract said $20,000. I thought that sounded AMAZING. I thought a bulldozer with a haystack of twenty thousand dollar bills was going to pull up and dump them all over me. When i started getting paid I had to take a weekend job at Carmen's Pizza taking phone orders for delivery so I could pay my bills. But I had no complaint.

“To earn this $20k I taught art on a cart to 850 kids at 3 different schools every week. Almost every kid was on free lunch. My budget was $1.50 per child per year. This is *actually* possible. My classes applauded when I entered the room every single time! I took up Spanish lessons again at my own expense, so that I could say "Quieres papel amarillo, o azul? Doblalo, y desdoblalo. Ok, cortalo. Bueno!" So that the new kid off the boat (so to speak) wasn't terrified that they had to talk to the gringa teacher. We made puppets, paper mache, tissue snowflakes, and lots of chalk and tempera paintings. I loved going to work every day. I loved festooning each little school with the happy art. I enjoyed telling wide-eyed kids I actually lived in the dark, mouse-poopy art closet down the hall. I worked in the lowest paying district in a 300 mile radius, but I didn't care. I felt needed, and I knew I was making some little soul's morning, every time I went to work.

“I feel less and less that way when I read angry tweets and newspaper comments about my profession. Maybe I shouldn't read what angry tax paying trolls write and say on the internet, but I'm so appalled I keep checking to see if it's still there. I'm told I'm ungrateful. I read that I am greedy, or a tool of greedy union bosses. I am a selfish son of a bitch, one guy informed me, when I was trying to explain the details and the facts of current legislation. I read that everyone's life is going down the toilet, because I am breaking their backs. I have ruined everything. Everything is ruined.

“Please know it did not feel like ruining everything. It felt like sitting in a tiny plastic chair at a tiny table, cajoling an autistic preschooler into brushing watercolor across a white wax face i had pre drawn, then watching him laugh at the big reveal. It felt like receiving a drawing as a gift from a talented little boy who drew like an adult, but suffered crippling arthritis in his hands and for whom i had arranged free classes at SAIC. It felt like crossing a name off a roster because she and her grandmother had been raped and killed in their house near the school. It felt like a million little notes shoved into my hands and pockets from eager little people who only came up to my waist. It felt like tamales from mothers who could not speak much English, but beamed widely as they handed the foil package over.

“Now at the high school level it feels like alarmed inquiries following my every absence, it feels like a crowd around my desk, like emails during the evenings and weekends. It feels like a 6'2 kid standing up from his computer animation to announce loudly "I AM AN ARTIST". It feels like kids who come back during their lunches and study halls, spending half the day in my room, and sometimes come to school only for my class: this according to parents. It feels like emails and letters, even years later, saying I was the best teacher they ever had. It feels like all my letters of recommendation, begging for college admission or a scholarship for another fine young person. It feels like trust, or just relief that I listen.

“So guess what; I am rich, you miserable, bitter harpies. But you have it all wrong. Just because your job sucks and you can't wait to get out of there every day doesn't mean that's how I feel making my living. It's a shame, but it's a world of your own making. If you loved your job, I doubt you'd be investing this kind of time degrading mine. In contrast, I enjoy the luxurious power of changing kids' minds about school *every day*, even on eight year old computers that run on my sheer will alone.

“So do it. Reduce my pension. Make me poor, since I don't qualify for Social Security. Make my medicine unaffordable. Make my raise contingent upon proof that my art lessons somehow improved state math scores. Continue firing at my feet to see how long you can make me dance. It still won't change the fact that life did not work out as you planned and you're now a bitter little turd. AND I will STILL fucking love my job, because I am rocking this for all the right reasons. After you take every tool and incentive and support away from me, and millions like me, you won't suddenly have anything great that you don't already have. And then you will be terribly disappointed to find out that this isn't a scam after all. Whether decorated or destroyed, inside every school we run on something you can't legislate, isolate, measure or destroy. Much to your inarticulate all caps despair.

“It's love, dumbass. If you'd bother to volunteer at the little school down the street you could have a sample. I won't even tell the kids what you wrote about their teacher.”

Brandi Martin

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/09/a-letter-from-art-teacher-you-wont.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+schoolsmatter/SISc+(Schools+Matter)&m=1

Conversation Re: Illinois Union Leadership, Communication, & Membership

Conversation: Union leadership, membership and communication in Illinois and Public Sector Unions

Dear Fred, John, and Glen,

Mr. Rogers gave valuable adult lessons to children, parents, teachers, and all of us.

“I like to be told
If it’s going to hurt, 
If it’s going to be hard, 
If it’s not going to hurt.
I like to be told. I like to be told.”

…Active and retired teachers in Illinois and across the nation are besieged with attacks on basic teacher rights, salaries, working conditions, evaluations based on the scores of classes they never taught and students they never had in class, pillaging earned compensation (present and future pensions), and much more.

The technical ability to mass communicate today has never been better or easier. Are teachers being told what they need to know by their own leadership?

Illinois and Chicago have two separate teachers’ union leaderships. Chicago has the Chicago Teachers Union led by Karen Lewis. Illinois has the Illinois Education Association led by Cinda Klickna…

With SBI in court, which cuts earned income for retired teachers while continuing to mandate that teachers pay 9.4% and more into a system which is intentionally robbed (underfunded) as a quasi-legalized form of wage theft, Klickna and IEA send automatic updates of member discount coupons for Men’s Wearhouse, Brooks Brothers, Worldwide Golf Shops, IZOD, Under Armour, Texas de Brazil Steakhouse, etc…

Lewis and CTU regularly appear at every venue that gives an opportunity to update members with the truth – good news or bad news. Lewis calls for a fair tax on stocks and futures transactions to pay what is legally owed to the pillaged teacher pension systems. “We don’t have a pension crisis, we have a pension shortfall and a crisis in [legislative/political] leadership.” View and read HERE.

How the producers of the reality TV show Chicagoland attempted to intimidate her into being part of the series. View and read HERE. The racial and political abuses presented in raw power Chicago politics. HERE.

The CTU opposition to Common Core, why Rahm Emanuel and an appointed group of multimillionaires and billionaires who invest and profit from charter schools should not be Chicago’s School Board, what Emanuel’s re-election destroy in public education (HERE) and much more.

The most recent episode of Klickna and IEA taking actions and keeping members updated was the fiasco of endorsing ($50,000) the recent IL Chair of ALEC Kirk Dillard (R) as a “pro-public education, friend of teachers” gubernatorial candidate even as he spoke to right-wing groups about closing schools, firing teachers, and stealing teacher pensions. Read HERE.

Because IEA leadership has not searched for or created a candidate within the last few decades who is pro-public education, members are fed this political insanity as the old lesser-of-two-evils routine rather than as an example of a lack of effective union leadership. Leadership with long term progressive building skills.

Even worse, IEA/NEA teachers are now being given silence or updates consisting of store coupons for Men’s Wearhouse and other stuff. This is insulting on more levels than can be expressed in a single blog.

This is NOT an anti-union diatribe. This a demand for real leadership in Illinois. WE NEED TO BE TOLD THE TRUTH IN A TIMELY MANNER.

- Ken Previti

Dear Ken,

You have hit on a topic that is guaranteed to get my blood flowing. From my earliest days as a union member and union activist I have fought for the idea that a democratic organization requires that the members have access to information. I guess that is why we became bloggers.

I recall an IEA Representative Assembly a few years back when I and other members proposed establishing an internet-based system that would allow local members to contact each other for the purpose of political action and lobbying.

The leadership put the kibosh on that faster than you could say Ken Swanson. You know how that works, Ken. When the leadership wants a proposal to die, they put a price tag on the proposal that is so high that the delegates’ only response is to vote it down. However, the leadership’s real purpose is controlling the message.

Member to member contact without going through Government Relations? No way. To me, the issue of the free flow of information and communication between the leadership and the rank-rank-file is but a single part of making our union more democratic and more powerful.

Milwaukee teacher union President Bob Peterson writes in his essay, “A New Teacher Union Movement Rising”: “We promote an organizing model with a strong dose of internal union democracy and increased member participation. This contrasts to a business model that views union membership as an insurance policy where decision-making is concentrated in a small group of elected leaders and/or paid staff.”

This is the choice facing active and retired members of the IEA. Do we stay with the old business model? Or do the threats we now face demand an organizing model with internal democracy and the free flow of information?

I don’t think that the old model – which is the IEA’s current model – will get us through the next period.

Do you?

- Fred

Dear Ken, Fred, and Glen:

Received your ideas and concerns about union communication and leadership and found myself wondering what the last brontosaurus mused while munching swamp grass a hundred and forty million years ago.

Of course, Ken, your polemic against the offers of shirts and linens through the IEA internet contact was amusing, and I always did have an appreciation for the calming influence of Mr. Rogers, but the message was pretty clearly non-political, only a membership offer for consumers prior to a holiday. In fact, it included a click point to refuse receipt of further consumer materials from IEA. Just click it, Ken.

On the other hand, your and Fred’s concerns certainly mirror my own unsettling thoughts about what is coming and if we (IEA, IFT, and others) are quite prepared.

Like Wisconsin, we too could be looking at a sea change in leadership very shortly, a continuing fiscal crisis certainly, and a dubious outcome in the court battle over our benefits from pensions we worked for and deserve.

Except for the last item, it appears that neither IEA nor IFT have anticipated any of these issues, and Fred’s reference to the need for a new model is certainly fitting; but if we are to become a leaner and certainly meaner machine like Karen Lewis’ CTU, we’d better start creating and promoting a different kind of active IEA member. I hear ennui and exasperation from actives, not anger – at least in the suburban areas. That would need some serious adjustment. And we’d (retirees too) all better be prepared to do a lot more politically and educationally than we ever have before.

Union membership is less than it was in 1915 now. And our numbers are sinking about as quickly as the Lusitania. Furthermore, recent drops in public union memberships in Wisconsin and Indiana tell a very dismal tale of what happens when a Rauner-like character gets in the governor’s door. Have you seen any mobilization to stop that?

I remember a year ago, Will Lovett remarked to a group of retired IEA members that the “very atmosphere” had changed in Springfield; everything had transformed. This was more than just preparing us for SB2404; it was a truism about how a disappearing power is treated, and the legislators can feel union power and influence fading away.

Will the old top-down model survive what’s continually coming, asks Fred?

Not a chance.

- John

Dear Ken, Fred, and John:

“Are teachers being told what they need to know by their own leadership?”

Generally speaking, a union leadership will never reveal the inner workings of its clandestine decision-making process to its membership; nor should it. What cabal will share its secrets anyway, except when it might be deemed necessary to create an illusion of powerful self-restraint and intelligence to mask incompetence or diffidence? Furthermore, keeping union members in metaphoric “darkness” until leadership decides to tell them what they need to know and when to act maintains mystery and power.

Conversely, it is prudent for the IEA not to reveal the significant details of the current so-called “pension reform” litigation, and perhaps it is better for most members not “to be told if it’s going to hurt” since many retired and harried IEA members seem to prefer a leadership that allows them to live life without more trepidation.

Although it is often said that “ignorance is bliss,” history reveals quite consistently that what we do not know can “hurt” us, nonetheless. Perhaps this is why some retired and active members of the IEA demand meaningful communication from their leadership.

We can expect Illinois General Assemblies will continue their assaults on our constitutional contract. Senate Bill 1 and several antedated court cases prove chronic attempts at theft. Thus, we need a dynamic leadership with the determination to inspire and to listen to its politically-informed members when fighting against the next assaults upon constitutional rights and benefits and public school teachers.

This necessitates a current leadership that does not readily condemn differences of opinion from those who might question and challenge the IEA leadership regarding the significant issues confronting all of us. This unfortunate situation has been exacerbated by two IEA ex-presidents who have labeled any disagreements as blatant disloyalties.

As stated by John Stuart Mill: “If a [differing] opinion is right, [leadership and the membership will be] deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, [leadership and the membership will] lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error” (On Liberty).

According to author and activist Chris Hedges: “Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class struggle and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated partners of the capitalist class. They have been reduced to simple bartering tools.” Of course, when we consider the CTU’s leadership, this perception is wrong.

- glen