With a Republican Governor saying he’ll approve no new spending or taxes after having reduced taxes on the state’s wealthiest citizens, the state of Illinois is facing a financial crisis, and relying on schools to make up the difference. JoAnne Powers reports.
Public schools in Chicago are likely facing cuts upwards of a billion dollars out of a five billion dollar budget. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has announced a 200 million dollar cut to the schools budget in preparation for more cuts to come. Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey.
[Jesse Sharkey]: “It might wind up being upwards of 1400 layoffs. They’re talking about eliminating some 350 to 400 positions out of special education. Really making deep cuts across the school system. Cut teacher compensation by seven percent. We don’t get social security when we retire, and they’re talking about short changing teachers’ union pension by upwards of half a billion dollars a year.”
The School Board had hoped the fiscal crisis would justify cutting pensions, but the Supreme Court ruled that they can’t do that. In June they had to pay over 600 million dollars into the pension fund, including interest they owed from short-changing it in the past.
[Jesse Sharkey]: “Now they’re having to make a pension payment which they never intended to make. They’d hoped to balance it on the backs of retirees, now they have to balance it on the back of teachers and students instead.
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Pope Francis on Thursday called for the poor to have the “sacred rights” of labor, lodging and land. The pope decried a “new colonialism” of economic austerity imposed by institutions of the world economic order. Pope Francis said the unfettered pursuit of money is “the dung of the devil”. The pope urged the world’s downtrodden to change the world economic order. The pontiff said the economic system is now intolerable and the earth itself finds it intolerable with a man made environmental crisis. Speaking in Santa Cruz, Bolivia Pope Francis said he wants to see real, structural change to a system that he says “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.”
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Is Jeb Bush’s “people need to work longer hours” comment his version of the infamous Mitt Romney ’47 percent’ remark? Brad Woodhouse of Americans United For Change.
[Brad Woodhouse]: “The suggestion that we don’t need to do anything to help people get better wages or get in the middle class, we just need you folks to work harder – it’s disgusting. It’s inappropriate. It shows how out of touch he is. It is the quintessential “47 percent” comment of this campaign so far.”
Linda Tirado is a former low-wage worker and author of “Hand To Mouth: Living In Bootstrap America. She says American workers are already working harder than workers in any other industrial democracy.
[Linda Tirado]: “And to say, you know, we just need you to put in another ten hours, well honey where are they gonna come from? You point me to the good jobs story. You point me to the overtime, we will do it willingly. But don’t tell me I have to go out and create that opportunity for myself and that it’s a one-way discussion and that it’s entirely on the workers of America to get this done. I think there are solutions outside of just telling the American people that they’re not working hard enough.”