In baseball, it’s often said that you have to be a good pitcher to be a twenty game loser. The reason is simple; if you weren’t good, the manager wouldn’t send you out to the mound twenty times with the expectation that you’d give your team a chance of winning.

Who is the last presidential candidate of either major political party who was good enough to lose two consecutive elections? The answer is Democrat Adlai Stevenson, Jr. of Illinois. He lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

To get a sense of how progressive he was, we can examine his explanation of his religious views:

He classified himself as a Unitarian and said. “I think that one of our most important tasks is to convince others that there’s nothing to fear in difference; that difference, in fact, is one of the healthiest and most invigorating of human characteristics without which life would become meaningless. Here lies the power of the liberal way: not in making the whole world Unitarian [Universalist], but in helping ourselves and others to see some of the possibilities inherent in viewpoints other than one’s own; in encouraging the free interchange of ideas; in welcoming fresh approaches to the problems of life; in urging the fullest, most vigorous use of critical self-examination.”

This is clearly one of the main tenets of the progressive movement. He was open-minded and looked to bridge differences rather than fight over them.

Stevenson served as governor of Illinois from 1949-1953. He worked to protect civil liberties, but gained special recognition for cracking down on illegal gambling, improving state highways, and reorganizing the state police. He was remarkably popular, despite being described by many as an “egghead intellectual.” He charmed people with his self-deprecating humor.  In one speech, he joked, “eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yolks!”

When President Harry Truman decided in early 1952 to run for a second full term, he met with Governor Stevenson and, following the meeting, Truman decided to support Stevenson for president. Others had initiated a “draft Stevenson” movement. Stevenson sealed the deal at the Chicago convention, where as host governor, he gave a welcoming speech that roused the delegates, because it was so energetic and thoughtful.

Stevenson lost to Eisenhower that year, and it was not a surprise to many. Had the Democrats had their choice, Eisenhower would have been their nominee. However, after much thought and consideration, Ike decided in 1951 to run as a Republican. Stevenson was a good second choice for the Democrats, but not good enough to win. A little insight into Stevenson’s campaign can be gained by viewing a photograph that revealed a hole in the sole of his right shoe. This became a well-known symbol of Adlai’s frugality and earthiness. Photographer William M. Gallagher of the Flint Journal won the 1953 Pulitzer prize on the strength of the image.

1956 was essentially an “instant replay,” as the popular Eisenhower chose to run for a second term, and Stevenson was a satisfactory candidate for the Democrats. The party was rather splintered, particularly between the northern and southern factions. Stevenson campaigned well, but garnered only 42 percent of the popular vote, and 73 electoral votes from a mere seven states.

Stevenson still had the presidential bug in 1960 and sought the nomination. However, the top two contenders were John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Stevenson never really had a chance, as Kennedy garnered the nomination through excellent showings in the several primaries that existed at that time, as well as clever back room politicking at the convention. Kennedy then defeated Richard Nixon in the general election. The President then appointed Stevenson U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, where his oratory, laced with irony, shined, particularly in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Adlai Stevenson lives deep in the memory bank of many Americans. The oldest amongst us are fortunate enough to remember Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Others go as far back as “Give ’em hell” Harry Truman, who among other things, integrated the U.S. armed services. The baby boomers remember Kennedy and Johnson. Lost in the shuffle is Stevenson, who truly was a positive force in the progressive movement, a “happy warrior” like FDR and Hubert Humphrey; not a “grumbler like Ralph Nader. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama, who like Stevenson is from Illinois, chose to wear the progressive mantle more than he did in 2008, and he exhibited much of the joie de vivre of Stevenson. It was a good time to be a progressive in the 1950s, even if we lost, because Stevenson gave us a lift. It’s certainly a good time to be a progressive now.

The post Adlai Stevenson, the last real progressive candidate appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Mitt Romney’s campaign has come under fire for a number of gaffes recently, but one action by the company he cofounded, Bain Capital, is following a long-standing Romney tactic. Mitt Romney has a long history of exporting jobs overseas, according to Forbes magazine (hardly a liberal bastion). Vanity Fair has revealed that, while with Bain Capital before 1999 (the earliest date Romney claims having left Bain), Romney did indeed make sizable profits from sending American jobs to China, jobs that are unlikely to return. Although Mr. Romney is no longer in direct control of Bain Capital, he still makes $440,000 a week from his investments in the company.

On the same day that Americans go to the polls to vote for either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama as President, Sensata will lay off the last workers at the plant in Freeport IL. Sensata is now owned by Bain Capital. Sensata is moving 165 jobs to China and closing down the plant in Freeport, after having required American workers to train their overseas replacements. Romney will share in any profits gained by these actions.

Workers in Freeport IL have responded to the imminent loss of their jobs by protesting at a site they call “Bainport.” The protesters are asking that Romney save their jobs by demanding that the plant remain open. An alternative demand is that Romney debate Obama in Freeport, which was the site of one of the famous Lincoln and Douglas debates. So far, there has been no response from the Romney campaign, with claims that they are unaware of the situation.

Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” spoke with Dot Turner, who has worked at the company’s Freeport site since 1969. Turner described having been able to make a decent living at her job and having few if any prospects once the plant closes. Cheryl Randecker gave an account of being sent to China to train her replacements, who did not immediately seem to understand what was required to run the technical machinery. Workers at the plant believe that their jobs are being sent overseas simply to save money, with China providing the facilities for free, and workers paid at a much lower rate than their counterparts. Protesters first attempted to confront Mitt Romney at the RNC Convention, but were turned away.

Final layoffs from the plant closure are scheduled to take place on Election Day, with workers planning to vote, and immediately afterwards file for unemployment benefits.

Efforts to save the jobs in Freeport have included local Republican congressmen Don Manzullo, R-Ill., and Bobby Schilling, R-Ill writing to Sensata. The company response indicated that while the company sympathizes, they plan to shut down the plant just the same. Sensata employees have also heard from IL Governor Pat Quinn and Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill who are pushing a bill that stops tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. The Bring Jobs Home Act is currently dead, thanks to a failure to get enough votes for cloture, a necessary move to get past a threatened GOP filibuster.

Meanwhile, the protesters of “Bainport” are gathering signatures on a petition asking Mitt Romney to address the situation.

The post Romney to export Illinois jobs on Election Day appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Dr. Martin Luther King said more than once, “Laws cannot change the hearts of humans, but they can change their habits.” He probably did not have in mind casino gambling, but more than forty years after he spoke his profound words, gambling is the lesson de jour.

Gambling (or “gaming” as its proponents like to call it when they refer to it as being sanitized), is in many ways a zero sum game. The total amount of money that exchanges hands in a given geographic area is considered to be flat; i.e. essentially the same, regardless of how many outlets there are for legalized gambling. Yes, there are proportions that determine how much money government authorities receive, owners of the “enterprises” receive, and the more paltry amounts that the few winners of the “games” win. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on Sunday, June 10, 2012,

It’s called “cannibalization”— an economic term referring to businesses that grow solely at the expense of other businesses in a stagnant market. Virtually everyone in Illinois’ debate over gambling expansion agrees that some of that will occur in the Metro East if Fairmount Park [a horse-racing track] is allowed to host slots.

This is the current issue in Illinois: Should slot machines be allowed at Fairmount Park horse racing park in Collinsville – about 15 miles east of St. Louis? If so, it will be a cash cow for a horse racing track and a loss for the “boats in a moat” on the Mississippi and other rivers in Illinois. As Kevin McDermott continues to say in the Post-Dispatch, “It’s just going to take more money away from the existing casinos, and there’s not going to be that much of a net gain to the state.”

It’s possible that the demand for legal gambling was established long before “gaming” was ever made legal. One of the arguments advanced for legalizing gambling was that it already existed illegally in the form of the numbers game. It was fraught with violence, fraud, and abuse of minorities, women, and children. In a sense, legalizing gambling made sense, just as it would to permit the use and distribution of marijuana and possibly other drugs that are currently illegal. If that were to occur, there is no magic formula that the demand for marijuana and other drugs would go up. The main difference would be that it would be utilized in a way that avoided the harm and chaos of having it processed through the legal system.

As things stand now with gambling, the following is certain: (a) the owners of casinos make money, unless the supply of outlets becomes so large that the initial oligopoly that exists is significantly reduced, (b) the government collects taxes on money spent at casinos, though rarely is it used for education as initially promised, and (c) players lose money because the house is stacked against them. This situation is no different than it was when gambling was illegal.

The bill in Illinois to permit slot machines at Fairmount Park has not yet been signed by Governor Pat Quinn. He is of a mixed mind regarding the issue. He does not want the concentration of power at Fairmount and potentially other horse racing tracks, and he also wants to protect the financial viability of existing casinos.  On the other hand, Illinois is like most other states and is running a financial deficit. In a simplistic formula, the money from gambling would help the state meet outstanding financial obligations without raising taxes and potentially without cutting services.

When it came to civil rights, Dr. King was correct that laws could change people’s habits, at least prior to the renaissance of the states’ rights movement in the U.S. But the habit of gambling in the U.S. seems to be rather permanent, whether legal or not. The solutions to the problems are not easy. We teach our students about the risks of gambling about as well as we teach sex education. Abstinence without reasonable alternative approaches doesn’t work. Whatever happens in Illinois and elsewhere in the country, the winners will only be temporary, and they will never be the public. Truly a shame.

The post When casino gambling hits the race track: Who wins, who loses? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The coal gasification plant that Tenasaka Energy wants to build in Taylorville Illinois is the kind of bargain that does not seem to have the best interests of the customers at heart.

Coal gasification has been around for over 150 years, with a long history of polluting the areas around it. In the 1850s, coal gasification was developed to provide fuel for gas lighting.

The process turns coal into byproducts, some useful, others dangerous. Coal gasification begins by first turning coal into syngas, an intermediary product that can then be turned into other products, including diesel, gasoline or useful chemicals and fertilizers. The ability to create byproducts of oil without oil came in handy for the Germans during World War II and has been used in emergencies since.

An important “selling point” for coal gasification is its ability to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Unfortunately, studies have shown that even with sequestration, coal gasification creates just as much CO2 emission as oil. When the desired product is electricity, the pollution equation does no better, and in the case of the proposed Taylorville plant, there would be no limit to the amount of CO2 that could be released, while other coal plants must meet strict guidelines. Such problems have led to the Sierra Club and other environmental groups successfully suing other states to prevent the introduction of coal gasification.

Tenasaka has most recently suggested building the plant as a natural-gas-burning operation, in order to overcome objections about CO2 sequestration. Illinois would still guarantee sales and profits for the company for the next 30 years. In order to prevent a consumer groundswell of objections to the plan, there is a guarantee that homeowners would see no more than a 2 percent rate increase. While that may sound like a good protection for citizens, local businesses, municipalities and school districts would bear the brunt of the rate increases. This situation has prompted the unusual alliance of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and the Illinois Sierra Club in opposing the project.

The Illinois Chamber of Commerce opposes the Taylorville plant because its associated rate increases will hurt Illinois businesses. Proponents of the plant have touted the jobs that would be created both during the construction phase (2,400 construction jobs) and during operation of the plant (several hundred), while ignoring the negative effects that increased energy costs will have on businesses.. Higher electrical rates could cost as many as 15,000 to 35,000 jobs throughout the state of Illinois.

Proponents of the plan claim that the additional electricity generated is necessary to meet future demands, while currently Illinois generates more than enough electricity to meet needs. Electricity from the Taylorville plant would cost $212.73 per MWh which compares to wind generated electricity cost of $88 to $121 per MWh, nuclear generated electricity’s cost of $101 to $128 per MWh or traditional coal’s cost of $$141 to $153 per MWh. These comparative costs make it clear why Tenasaka Energy is demanding a 30-year commitment from the state – the electricity from the Taylorville Energy Center would be the most expensive in the state.

A rate impact study by Tenasaka Energy shows that the cost of the state’s subsidy of the plant would be more than $8.7 billion, or $314 million in 2015 alone. The 30 year subsidy  could slow or prevent construction of alternative energy sources. The inclusion of language that caps rate increases for homeowners at 2 percent is deceptive, given that ordinary citizens will end up paying for the increased cost of utilities for local businesses through increased prices on goods and services.

Tenasaka Energy was ranked by Forbes as the 16^th largest corporation in America as of 2009, and would be risking absolutely nothing if it is given the 30-year commitment it seeks. Tenaska claims the Taylorville Energy Center would sequester 50 percent of the CO2 generated, but there would be no requirements on the company as to a total amount of CO2 that would be acceptable, and no standard as to what the 50 percent refers to – like a retail chain offering 50 percent off but not telling us what the original price really was. Other options are currently available which would be less expensive and cleaner (wind for instance). More jobs would be lost than gained as a result of this project.

The Taylorville Energy Center looks like a sweetheart deal for Tenasaka Energy, and a lousy deal for the people of Illinois.

The post New coal gasification plant is a bad deal for Illinois appeared first on Occasional Planet.

America has one of the highest rates of incarceration for juveniles in the world – as of 2008, the US rate was five times that of South Africa, which ranks second. This is an expensive policy: Illinois’ annual cost of juvenile incarceration jumped from $71,000 per child to $92,000 per child over the last few years. At Murphysboro, the cost soars to $147,000 per child because the  facility currently runs at less than 50% occupancy.

Those imprisoned are frequently jailed inappropriately:  Up to 70% of children imprisoned in Illinois have a mental illness diagnosis. This fact is particularly disturbing given the possibility of suicides among juvenile offenders, when combined with jailer-to- inmate ratios as high as 60 to 1, instead of the recommended 10 to 1.

The high cost of incarcerating young offenders is aggravated by the “get tough” policy of throwing any and all offenders into prison for as long as possible. This has led to the construction of more facilities, which in turn has led to officials leaning on incarceration as a primary policy strategy, because “that is what we’ve got.”

This policy works poorly for the offenders and for the general public, because imprisoning a juvenile is associated with higher chances of reoffending. It is important to remember that children who are incarcerated for offense that are sometimes not offenses for adults (known as a status offense), will be returning to their communities sooner or later, usually sooner.

Illinois separated the adult and juvenile portions of the justice system in an attempt to deal with the high recidivism rate among juvenile offenders, along with the high costs of incarceration. This separation has not included the probation officers, meaning that officers who mainly deal with adult offenders also work with young offenders with an entirely separate set of needs. Many youths in the system do not have basic life skills that are taken for granted in adult populations and non-offending youth populations.

The juvenile detention system of Illinois is accused of being particularly filthy and dangerous for the youth detained in it. Cook County’s juvenile detention facility has had lawsuits, due to violent behavior of staff towards inmates, as well as violence between inmates. Children do not have access to clean clothing and are frequently exposed to rodents and insects. The American Civil Liberties Union attributes conditions to the use of the facility as a form of patronage, with little interest in correcting management issues. The ACLU is pursuing lawsuits aimed at conditions in the juvenile justice system in an attempt to force corrections to the issues.

There are good models for reducing recidivism , costs and actually offering assistance to youth in trouble. Simply assessing children who are being placed on probation for mental illness has been shown to reduce recidivism. This saves society money, reduces crime and benefits the children and families who receive the resources needed to relieve the worst effects of mental illness. Redeploy Illinois also attempts to interrupt the patterns of incarceration for at-risk youth by connecting children in the system with the resources they need to succeed and avoid incarceration.

Avoiding the incarceration of juveniles has the potential to save states billions of dollars, at a time when budgets are straining to provide essential services to citizens. The attitude of “lock them up and throw away the key” has led to unsafe facilities that do not prepare youth for their eventual release, meaning higher crime rates for the community. Unsafe and filthy facilities have resulted in lawsuits that will cost the citizens of Illinois, and other states, millions more in costs. There are better alternatives available, but there seems to be little political will to do what is necessary to fix a broken system.

The post Kids in prison: Illinois’ expensive, dangerous and failed policy appeared first on Occasional Planet.

At a time when the greed of the one percent is on the minds of Americans, several Illinois corporations are threatening to leave the state if their taxes are raised. GOP legislators have proposed cutting taxes in half for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which is threatening to leave the state over their tax bill. Although official tax rates may seem high, there are so many loopholes in the tax laws that most corporations pay only a fraction of the official rate anyway.

Caterpillar’s CEO Doug Oberhelman has stated, “Legislators in Illinois have created an environment that is unfriendly to business and investment,” while his company paid less than  one percent in taxes. Many of Illinois’ top corporations pay less than 5% in taxes to the state, possibly helping to explain the state’s continuing debt crisis.

Much of the current problem is that the state of Illinois changed its tax codes to benefit companies like Caterpillar that record their transactions where the sale is made, rather than in the state of Illinois. If Caterpillar sells a tractor in Missouri, the taxes are levied in that state. On the other hand, the CME records all stock transactions as happening in the state of Illinois, no matter which state or nation it occurs in. As a result, the state is being asked to give CME a huge tax break. CME wants the same kinds of tax savings that other Illinois corporations have seen as a result of the sweetheart deals cut by powerbrokers and businessmen, with little or no input from the regular citizens suffering because Illinois can’t pay its bills on time.

Another aspect of the issue is that catering to just the larger corporations is leaving smaller companies to carry more than their share of the burden. Governor Quinn is already saying he will do whatever it takes to keep big employers like CME and Sears in the state, while ignoring the needs of smaller companies. The Small Business Administration says that smaller companies produce an equal share of jobs as the large corporations the state is bending over backward to accommodate. It seems likely that small companies will continue to be overlooked, since no single company has enough clout to either threaten the state or make the kinds of campaign contributions that so often gain access to legislators.

The post “Overtaxed” Illinois corporations threaten to leave state appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The state of Illinois originally began to delay payment for services and goods as a way of dealing with budget shortfalls on a short-term basis. The plan was to use the technique as a stop-gap until the politicians could figure out how to fix the ongoing problems with the budget. The practice has continued to the point where the state now owes billions in past-due bills, and that is harming businesses, charities and schools that rely on the state for income.

Many charity groups and businesses have been forced to lay off employees, take out loans with sometimes crippling interest rates, and cut services to ordinary citizens due to lack of resources. One of the main complaints with the “system” is the allegation of favoritism towards groups and businesses with the right political connections getting paid first, rather than debts being paid in the order received.

Right now, Illinois is sitting more than 166,000 unpaid bills, with still more awaiting approval to be paid. Only after being approved as a legitimate expenditure does a bill go into the state’s twilight zone of non-payment The total on the bills is well past $5 billion dollar,  a record amount for any state’s unpaid bills.

Illinois owes service providers and others in Madison and St. Clair counties more than $75 million. These businesses, charities and service providers are essentially providing interest-free loans to the state for the privilege of doing business  with Illinois. Specific examples include the East. St. Louis School District [$4.85 million], SIU-Edwardsville [$3 million], Memorial Hospital of Bellleville [$850,000], and Gateway Regional Medical Center  [$1 million].

The old saying is that you cannot escape death or taxes, but the State of Illinois is avoiding paying for death with taxes by delaying payment on $2.8 million in burials for indigent citizens.

The results of the payment delays are evident throughout the state. Businesses have had to close because the monies they were legitimately owed by the state were not paid on time, while their own creditors insisted on payment, regardless of problems with the state. In other cases, monetary problems caused by payment delays have resulted in employee layoffs.  Also, when expected services are cut back or eliminated entirely because of lack of state funds, citizens of all types suffer. Unfilled positions contribute further to the economic downturn that lies at the heart of Illinois’ budget crisis in the first place.

Governor Quinn proposed borrowing money to allow the state to catch up on its bills. The Illinois legislature shot down that proposal, and it appears that the state will instead continue to lean on those least able to lend for the funds it needs.

The post Illinois is behind on its bills, and citizens are paying the price appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Illinois prisons have a worsening problem, with a ratio of inmates to guards that is producing conditions dangerous to guards, inmates and the citizens outside of prison. The “John Howard Association” is reporting that Menard prison is experiencing a growing number of assaults and serious injuries as a direct result of this trend. Menard has the worst prisoner-to-guard ratio for maximum security facilities, and is the second oldest prison in Illinois. The prison is currently at 117% of capacity, with prisoners spending 21 to 22 hours a day in their cells with little to no access to rehabilitative, medical or psychiatric services. State budget constraints and problems with the state budget are causing continuing difficulties in keeping the prison adequately staffed. Menard has been on lockdown for roughly half of this year.

Menard prison has a larger than average number of inmates who suffer from a variety of mental illnesses, but there is little to no access to psychiatric assistance. Instead, pre-existing conditions are being aggravated through prolonged isolation from normal human interactivity and exposure to situations likely to cause further trauma. With 3,614 inmates, there are less than six full-time mental health professionals at Menard prison.

The psychiatric damage to the prisoners is aggravated by the stress placed on the understaffed guards, who must attempt to manage the situation. Inmates and their families report that guards assault prisoners with little or no provocation. Although the administration attempts to maintain proper discipline among the guards, the inability to find replacements in a timely manner aggravates the problem.

The problems at Menard are indicative of the statewide problem with prisons that began after Governor Quinn ended an early release program for political reasons. Much was made during the last gubernatorial elections of early release being “soft on crime.” The Governor made the political calculation that continuing early release programs would put his political future in jeopardy and therefore ended not just the new program that caused the problem, but also an early release program that had been operating for more than 30 years. This move resulted in prison populations jumping, as inmates continue to enter the system at much the same rate, but are now staying in the system longer.

As state budgets are being slashed in apparently vain attempts to balance them, prisons represent the second greatest increaser of expenditures after Medicaid. There is little evidence that holding prisoners for longer periods makes the general public safer, with 69% of prisoners being incarcerated for drug related and other non-violent crimes. In 2003. the cost to incarcerate an individual in the prison system was $22,000. This works out to $246 million each year to lock up non-violent offenders in the Illinois prison system. State prisons offer very little in the way of substance abuse treatment, a known effective measure at reducing recidivism, so the expenditure is basically to warehouse people until their time is up and then release them unchanged (other than trauma, etc. caused by the prison experience) into the same environment with no new coping mechanisms. It is no surprise that recidivism rates are in excess of 51%. In fact, it is surprising they are not even higher.

In comparison, substance abuse treatment for an individual costs $2,900,  which is calculated to produce an average savings to the taxpayer of $9,100 per person. This leads to the conclusion that throwing people in prison for prolonged periods is not just morally questionable (jailing people for harming themselves) but downright wasteful also.

Some Illinois counties are experimenting with sentencing alternatives, such as Madison County’s drug court.  Charges are dropped if an individual successfully completes substance abuse treatment and a period of court supervision under, relieving pressure from the legal system and prisons. Other states are successfully making use of halfway houses, electronic monitoring and intensive probation to relieve pressure on state prisons.

Illinois is witnessing a buildup in pressure at the prisons due to political posturing by both political parties wishing to either to play “gotcha” or to avoid being “got.” This situation is resulting in physical harm to prisoners and guards, as well as huge expenditures to support the misguided political maneuvering. The state is currently looking at extreme slashes to social safety net programs (35% to TANF alone), while sentencing people to prison terms that destroy future ability to get jobs, pay taxes and lift themselves and their families out of poverty. The cost of the prisons is just the starting point; the long range costs to the state are enormous.

The post Illinois prison overcrowding is dangerous for everyone appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The number of impoverished people in the state of Illinois has risen to a 20-year high of 1.8 million. In 2009, the poverty rate was 13.2%, but last year it jumped up to 14.2%. The continuing lack of economic growth particularly limits those at the lower end of the employment market from finding work. This contributes to the increased number of long-termed unemployed – those on unemployment for more than 27 weeks.

Unemployment insurance is responsible for keeping up to 3.2 million people from sinking into poverty, according to the Census Bureau. Lack of insurance continues to be severely problematic for the unemployed and those under the poverty line. 1.91 million Illinoisans are currently without any type of health coverage.

Predictable effects of the increase in poverty and long-term unemployment have been visible for some time. Food pantries are facing a rush of new consumers not previously reliant on such assistance. Some pantries report that they are swamped with food requests, with as many as a third from persons who had not previously visited a food pantry.

Poverty levels are set by the census bureau at $11,139 for a single person, or $22,314 for a family of four. These are very low levels, and do not tell the whole story. Many people are just barely getting by on low level jobs and rely on assistance that is now on the chopping block.

Illinois has cut 87% of a homeless-prevention program that last year received a modest $11 million to help 14,000 families to stay in their current housing. Even at the program’s highest funding point, applicants for assistance were turned away 34,000 times because lack of funds. Keeping people in their homes makes financial sense when compared to the costs of disruption to families, inability of the homeless to find employment, disruption to schooling of homeless children and many other consequences that end up costing the state more in the long-term.

Funding cuts are already impacting many shelters and programs devoted to preventing homelessness or assisting the homeless to get back on their feet. Shelters are leaning on churches and voluntary giving at a time when financial hardship is causing such sources to also dry up.

Hoping to save money for the state by cutting funding that assists the homeless may be a classic case of being “penny wise and pound foolish.” With homelessness expected to continue to increase, the state will see increases in “survival crimes,” such as prostitution, theft and forgery. Shelters will see continuing increases in demand for their services at a time of decreasing resources. Hospitalizations and ER visits will go up as individuals and families suffer exposure, assaults and other crimes that they would otherwise not experience if still in their homes. Most homeless do not pay taxes of any sort, so payroll, property or sales tax revenue will decrease, further exacerbating the state and local community income crisis. Reliance on public benefits will increase rather than decline or stay the same.

It has become popular in our culture to speak of “personal responsibility” when discussing poverty. This is easier for those not currently seeking employment and are therefore uninformed about just how difficult it currently is to get a job in order to be “responsible.” Children continue to be a significant portion of the homeless: 39% in 2009. Even those heartless enough to argue that the adult homeless are just “lazy” or getting what they somehow deserve will find it more difficult to argue that there is any justification for allowing children to be homeless. Perhaps we need a new Charles Dickens to dramatize and publicize the plight of this growing sector of neglect. In the state of Illinois, something is surely needed.

The post Poverty rate up, as states–like Illinois–cut assistance appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Today I joined hundreds of tourists, camp groups, families and local residents who were visiting The Bean in Chicago’s Millennium Park.  [British artist Anish Kapoor’s  highly polished, stainless steel creation is officially titled “Cloud Gate,” but after its unveiling in 2006, its shape quickly inspired the more popular, descriptive nickname.]

We walked around it and under it, touched it, and photographed ourselves, our friends, and the skyline reflected in its fun-house-mirror, stainless-steel skin.  I watched as children crawled on the ground  at the scultpure’s base, seeing themselves appear to be climbing up the inside of the sculpture. I stood underneath The Bean and looked up to see myself and others reshaped and repositioned, depending on where we were standing in relation to the varying curvatures of the Bean’s surface.

It’s an amazing work of art. The Bean’s western surface offers a compressed, fish-eye distortion of Chicago’s dramatic skyline.  On the east,  north and south sides, you can snap a self-portrait of a smaller or larger version of who you think you are, in the optically re-proportioned  plaza surrounding you. And underneath it, you might see yourself multiplied, or upside down.

The visual experience is striking. The design itself is reality altering, because despite its 110-ton weight, it appears almost to float over the plaza, like the drop of liquid mercury that inspired Kapoor.

But there’s an intangible effect, too. If one of art’s purposes is to allow us see to our world in new ways, The Bean achieves its goal artfully and subtly—not by clobbering you over the head with a message, but by drawing you in through its beauty and ingeniousness.

I loved watching people –kids and adults—playing with their reflections, waving to locate themselves on the distorting surface, and discovering the visual trickery of the sculpture’s curves.  I don’t know if Kapoor  intended this to happen, but it seems to me that we all were, mostly inadvertently, doing something very simple, but  psychologically powerful and politically important:  discovering and acknowledging that there’s more than one way to see ourselves, others and the world around us.

The post Looking at The Bean, seeing ourselves appeared first on Occasional Planet.