The Illinois House and Senate each backed its own leader’s bill; the Senate voted down Madigan’s proposal, and House Speaker Madigan then adjourned the House without calling Cullerton’s plan for a vote.  In a recent Illinois Times article by reporter Patrick Yeagle, he stated: “Practically everyone knows that Illinois’ public pension systems are only about 45% funded, but not everyone knows that 45% is actually an improvement over the 40% funding of the past.  The historical record of Illinois’ 1970 Constitutional Convention shows the state’s unfunded pension liability wasn’t considered a crisis when delegates included a clause to protect pension rights”, stating “public pensions are contractual rights that cannot be “diminished or impaired”.   The Illinois General Assembly has failed to make the required pension contributions for the past five or six decades.  “It’s absolutely a manufactured crisis”, says Ann Lousin, who participated in the convention.  Illinois lawmakers now want to welch on those hard-earned retiree “rights”.  Professor Lousin says that “unfunded liability is an unrealistic measure of a pension fund’s health because it assumes that every employee could retire at the same time”, which of course wouldn’t happen.  “An unfunded pension liability measures how much money the state needs to collect in order to pay all current and future pensions”.  “Other states fund their pension systems at around 70 to 100%, making Illinois look bad by comparison in the eyes of credit rating agencies”, says Yeagle.  “For fiscal year 2014, Illinois must pay $6.8 billion total into the five public pension systems because of a state law enacted in the mid 1990’s.  If followed, the law purports to fund the state pension system at 90% by 2045”.  “Currently, Illinois’ five pension systems can pay out benefits to existing retirees.  The TRS (teacher’s retirement system) is the largest public pension system in Illinois, and despite carrying an unfunded liability since 1953 –TRS has always paid its retirees on time, and the executive director, Richard Ingram, stated “the truth is TRS will have enough money on hand to pay pensions well into the future”.  The convention debate of 1970 was fueled by the fear caused “when many businesses began reneging on pension promises made to workers in the private sector”.  Home rule powers were “newly included in the 1970 constitution allowing local governments to levy taxes, issue bonds, pass regulations and more”.  “As a result of the General Assembly’s inconsistent pension contributions and public perception that unfunded pension liability is a crisis, lawmakers are now searching for ways to cut future contribution costs”.   As a recent state retiree myself, with 25 years of service, I expect the state to keep to the contracts agreed upon.  I worked all those years anticipating that I would have a decent retirement benefit with my health insurance premiums paid, not having to pay out half of my monthly pension to pay for my monthly insurance premium!  Right is right!  Can we expect no one to keep their word?

It’s complicated!  US involvement could quickly exacerbate further destabilization in the Middle East as the civil war in Syria is spilling over its borders into neighboring countries.  We need to seriously consider the international ramifications, and remember previous misuse of intelligence “information”, as in the Iraqi WMD fiasco.  The main opposition players to the Shia-led government of Bashar al- Assad are: Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas; so, do we want to help the Sunni-Muslim extremists topple the current President of Syria?  This conflict is spilling over into Iraq, where violent demonstrations by Sunnis against the government of Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri-al-Maliki has occurred.  Also, as Iraq and Syria share a 372 mile border, a March attack in Anbar resulted as an attempt of Syrian rebels to move the conflict to Iraq, where over 40 Syrian soldiers and government workers were killed. Lets get aid to the displaced families in neighboring countries. **************  Over a million Syrian refugees, mostly children, have fled to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.  The nearest countries are deeply affected. Complaints of shells landing in Israel were also heard at a recent UN meeting.  The collapse of Syria would be disastrous for Lebanon and Iraq.   With Russia and Iran providing military support to Bashar, and with China’s political support, the US is reluctant to intervene militarily, though they have opposed al-Assad’s rule.  However, the rebels are Islamic militants with pro-al-Qaeda sentiments, and the US is considering sending them weapons, as Turkey and Qatar have.  Chemical weaponry has supposedly come from Turkey to the terrorist group known as Al-Nusra.  Providing arms to the jihadists would seem to be a big step in the wrong direction.   We don’t need to get mired down in another Middle East battlefield, though I’m sure we will be involved in a major conflict soon with Iran, whom we cannot allow to get full nuclear capabilities.  So maybe Syria is just the stepping stone to that engagement, but I agree with former Defense Secretary Weinberger’s 6 pt national security doctrine. (Look it up).   The whole of the Middle East is the result of centuries of deep-seated cultural grudges and religious differences among tribal peoples, and is not easily sorted out.  It’s complicated!   The Arab Spring is blooming with poisonous fruit!