Cal are you going and taking irritating pictures?

Fair and balanced, lol!

Communism and Authoritarianism are the antithesis of American Values.

These people are traitorous scum with no values in common with America.

Their opinions are bankrupt, their thoughts go against home and hearth and their existence in America is an offense to anyone who stands for freedom.

This said, whomever fears these bankrupt goofs for voicing their idiotic thoughts fails to understand how powerful the argument for freedom against their message of slavery truly may be.

Go talk to them.

They’ll either ignore you, cry, run or turtle but they sure won’t engage a true American Patriot because they have no arguments.

Idiots.

Tom, I have been watching you.

Be careful with that word FOOLISH.

Our very own second coming of William F. Buckley Jr. comes out of the arrogance cave and continues his/her search of a liberal worth debating while carrying a Diogenes-like lamp around beautiful McHenry county. The catfights of this freak with our very own version of Alex Jones are legendary and, needless to say, very entertaining. Sit back, relax, and be entertained by more compassionate conservative lessons on how to be a real American patriot. 2018, is that you knocking at the door? Tic, tock, tic, tock…

Liberalism is a mental disorder, ARL is the living embodiment of that statement.

So why bother challenging him to intelligent adult debate based on facts and logic ?

To do so only makes you as much a fool as he is.

Now that is funny.

How is it you idiots prove my point so quickly.

Your best response to an open invitation to adult discussion is to revert to nanananabooboo immediately.

Well, sweetheart, you’re nothing if not entertaining.

You’re clearly not intelligent, educated or remotely mature.

You are relegated to the children’s table yet again.

We shall resume ignoring your childish pulling on my coattail for attention.

Poor little damaged child we pity your future as it is already known and no one can save you from your choices.

Nancy Zettler is a pig. ‘Nuff said.

A pop quiz for sunshine nation? What is OCD? Tic, tock, tic, tock…

Typo above.

The $99,476 starting pension for Mr. Llavona would increase by 3% annually, so after 24 years, the pension would have doubled to $198,952.

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Once again, the starting pension is based on a ridiculously conservative estimate that has not and will not receive a pay raise after 2016.

The starting pension is also based on Mr. Llavona working another 13 years (or achieving 13 years of service), as of 2016 he worked 22 years, and 35 years of service is required to retire with full pension benefits in the TRS pension fund.

Most in TRS who retire with full benefits retire with fewer than 35 years worked, due primarily to the ability to exchange up to 340 accumulated sick days for years of service credit.

In TRS, a teacher year is considered 170 days (even though most school calendars are 180 days or so).

Thus 340 accumulated sick days is equal to 2 years of service credit.

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The number of sick days a teacher receives per year is stipulated in the collective bargaining agreement.

For suburban Chicago school districts, the number varies.

The following is found in the Maine Township High School District 207 teacher collective bargaining agreement covering the years 2014 – 2020 (Mr. Llavona is employed by Maine Township High School District 207).

“Employees shall be granted twelve (12) days of cumulative sick leave per year.

Teachers shall have the right to accumulate sick leave days up to, but not exceed, 370 days.

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So if TRS accepts up to 340 days, if a teacher in Maine Township High School District accumulated 370 days, and at retirement exchanged 340 days for TRS years of credit service, would the district would compensate the teacher for the remaining 30 days?

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There’s more.

This is also in the same collective bargaining agreement.

“2. Sick Leave.

An eligible teacher who submits the resignation and retirement notice with a retirement date five (5) years in advance of retirement shall be credited with an additional 170 days of sick leave as long as, at the time of the credit, the provisions of ILCS 5/16-128(d-10) and 80 Ill. Admin Code 1650.351(c) permit a grant of sick leave days in excess of the normal allotment five (5) years prior to retirement without triggering any employer contributions.

The sick leave will be credited upon acceptance of the teacher’s notice to retire and will thereafter be charged when used after the exhaustion of the teacher’s existing sick leave and will be made available for use pursuant to TRS rules and regulations.”

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Following is the link to the Maine Twp HSD 207 teacher collective bargaining agreement covering 2014 – 2020.

http://www.maine207.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_743341/File/Human%20Resources/MTA-BOE/MTA-BOE%20Contract%202014-2020.pdf

Not hard to see who the real freeloaders are.

Thank you Mark.

In his/her bitter display of projection and OCD, our prodigious researcher overlooks the fact that Labor Day was instituted to honor and pay respect to the immense contributions American workers have made to our society and the rest of the world. Sadly, our prodigious researcher chooses to attack organized labor without realizing the strategy of intimidation and cyberbullying is not working here. To prevent further disappointment in the immense readership of our glorious sunshine blog (estimated to be approximately 17 human beings), I will allow myself to share with my compassionate conservative brothers and sisters some additional prodigious research of my own about the significance of the remembrance of this wonderful Labor Day holiday.

“As summer draws to a close and schools prepare to open their doors again, Labor Day comes around like a sweet salve to workers in the United States.

Celebrated on the first Monday in September, Labor Day is one of just 10 federal holidays in the United States and pays tribute to the American workers movement.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the holiday is “a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.” Labor Day is a “yearly national tribute” to the “contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity and wellbeing of our country.”

But while it is celebrated in modern times with BBQs, holidays and sales shopping, the holiday has a bloody history and came out of a long battle for workers’ rights in the country.

In practice, all government offices and organizations are closed, while many private businesses also shut for the day to enable workers to mark the occasion with their families.

Workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day on September 5, 1882, with a parade organized by trade unions. It was overseen by the Central Labor Union (CLU), a left-wing union that later broke up into local organizations that are members of the modern American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

But while the first rally was held in New York, Oregon was the first state to institute Labor Day as a holiday, passing legislation to that effect in 1887. Over the following seven years, some 30 states made it a holiday. In 1894, the U.S. Congress voted unanimously to approve Labor Day as a national holiday, and President Grover Cleveland signed it into law.

There is some dispute over the foundation of the holiday, according to the Department of Labor. Some records attest to Peter J. McGuire, the general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a cofounder of the American Federation of Labor, was the first to propose a holiday in honor of workers. The holiday, McGuire said, should honor those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.”

But other historians propose that another man, Matthew Maguire, a machinist, was the founder of the holiday. According to some research, Maguire proposed the holiday while serving as secretary of the CLU in New York.

The holiday evolved out of decades of tensions between workers and unions on one side, and state security forces and employers on the other. During the last two decades of the 1800s, workers carried out some 37,000 strikes in the United States; and between 1870 and 1914, up to 800 American workers were killed during strikes, almost entirely by state security forces or the military, the Washington Post reported, citing historian Edward T. O’Connell.

The tensions culminated in the Pullman strike, during which workers for railcar manufacturers the Pullman Company in Chicago went on strike after their wages were cut by almost 30 percent, but the rents and prices at company-owned accommodation and stores remained static. The strike was backed by other unions—the nationwide American Railroad Union pulled its members from trains that had Pullman Cars—and a total of 125,000 workers on 29 railroads quit rather than handle Pullman cars, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The strike came to a bloody head when the federal government sent in the military to enforce a court injunction against the strike; the riots resulted in 30 deaths and $80 million worth of damages. Just six days after the end of the strike, President Cleveland signed the bill that made Labor Day a national holiday, in an apparent bid to appease workers.

In the spirit of the founders, Labor Day is still celebrated with union-organized parades, colorful festivals and parties and picnics. Many use the last days of summer as an opportunity to have a BBQ with friends, while others use it for a last-minute getaway: the holiday is associated with heavy congestion on roads and at airports.

Less so in the spirit of the founders, Labor Day has also become something of a festival of consumerism. Many shops and online retail outlets hold week-long “Labor Day” sales and the holiday has become one of the biggest sale days in the United States”.

Now go ahead and cheer my prodigious research. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap! Thank you. Please remember Jack D. Franks is a Democrat. Tic, tock, tic, tock…

Some additional prodigious research to prevent disappointment from this sunshine blog immense readership and help our now self-proclaimed defender of American workers understand the meaning and significance of Labor Day. Interesting how far the owners of production are willing to go in order to abuse workers.

The Pullman Strike was a disturbing event in Illinois history. It occurred because of the way George Mortimer Pullman, founder and president of the Pullman Palace Car Company, treated his workers. Organized in 1867, the company manufactured sleeping cars and operated them under contract to the railroads.

Pullman created Pullman City to house his employees. It was on a three-thousand-acre tract located south of Chicago in the area of 114th Street and Cottage Grove. His workers were required to live in Pullman City. They were also expected to accept cuts in pay and not criticize workloads. Pullman charged money for use of the library. Clergy had to pay rent to use the church. “He wasn’t a man to let you pray for free,” it was claimed in The Call, a socialist newspaper.

In 1893, because of a depression, factory wages at the company fell about twenty-five percent, but the rents George Pullman charged did not decrease. If a Pullman worker went into debt, it was taken from his paycheck.

On May 11,1894, three thousand Pullman workers went on a “wildcat” strike, that is, without authorization of their union. Many of the strikers belonged to the American Railroad Union (ARU) founded by Eugene V. Debs. Debs, who was from Indiana, had moved to Chicago where he became a railroad fireman. He became aware of the working conditions of his fellow laborers. He saw men working for low wages, some of whom were injured or killed because of unsafe equipment. He was determined to make things better.

On June 26, 1894, some ARU members refused to allow any train with a Pullman car to move, except those with mail cars. Debs did not want federal troops to get involved, and he knew that if the U.S. mail was tampered with, the troops would be there immediately.

The railroads had formed an organization called the General Managers Association. They announced that no one could tell them whom to hire, whom to fire, or how they should pay their workers. The twenty-four railroads that were part of the General Managers Association immediately tried to end the strike. They announced that any switchman who refused to move rail cars would be fired.

Debs’s union announced that if a switchman was fired because he refused to move Pullman cars all the union members would walk off the job. By June 29, fifty thousand men had quit their jobs. Crowds of people who supported the strike began stopping trains. Soon there was no movement on the rails west of Chicago. In some places, fights broke out.

In order to break the strike, the railroads needed help from federal troops. Getting their assistance, however, was a difficult task. The railroads could only get help from federal troops if the President agreed. President Grover Cleveland said that he would only send the aid of government troops if a governor requested them.

The governor of Illinois was John P. Altgeld. He did not want to request troops because he believed that workers should have the same rights as their bosses. These ideas made the General Managers Association uneasy. The railroad managers started flooding the newspapers with stories that made Debs’s American Railroad Union seem like a violent and lawless gang and portrayed Eugene Debs as a radical. They claimed that unrest had always ended in violence and threatened that this strike would be the same. The railroads began sending people to work on railroads as strike breakers or scabs.

Attorney General Richard Olney supported the General Managers Association because he believed that the railroads had the right to do things their way, and if the workers disagreed with the treatment they were receiving, they could quit. On June 29, 1894, Debs went to Blue Island and asked the railroad workers there if they would support the strike. The railroad workers there felt they were being discriminated against. Angry railroad workers in Blue Island began destroying the yards and burning anything that was flammable. Attorney General Olney requested President Cleveland to send federal troops into Chicago to break the strike.

On July 2, 1894, Olney obtained an injunction from a federal court saying that the strike was illegal. When the strikers did not return to work the next day, President Cleveland sent federal troops into Chicago. This enraged strikers, and rioters began stopping trains, smashing switches, and, again, setting fire to anything that would burn. On July 7, another mob stopped soldiers escorting a train through the downtown Chicago area. Many people were killed or wounded from bullets.

On July 10, 1894, Debs and three other union leaders were arrested for interferring with U.S. mail. They were released within a few hours, but Debs realized that continuing the strike would be a lost cause because of the federal troops.

Most railroad workers resumed their old jobs and received the same wages as before. Some workers were put on a blacklist, which meant that no railroad in the United States was allowed to hire them. On July 17, 1894, Debs was sent back to jail and served a term of six months in jail. The union he had created no longer existed when he got out of jail.

The Pullman Strike was important because it was the first time a federal injunction had ever been used to break up a strike. George Pullman was no longer regarded as an enlightened employer who took care of his workers, but as a greedy and intolerant man. He was offended by his workers’ ingratitude. Pullman worried that people would try to steal what was his from him. Shortly before he died in 1897, he requested that his grave be lined in concrete to keep looters from robbing him. [Source,From Linda Jacobs Altman, The Pullman Strike of 1894; Stephen Longstreet, Chicago, 1860-1919; Albert L. McCready, Railroads in the Days of Steam.] But if you want to believe everything came from me, that’s ok too. Jack D. Franks is a registered Democrat. Tic, tock, tic, tock…

Here are your pictures Cal:
http://www.nwherald.com/lists/2017/09/05/e430d7ada8f347538be4ba0346839ae9/index.xml?page=1
Woodstock police were overwhelmed with crowd control.
A second story on the same subject same day:
http://www.nwherald.com/2017/08/25/pro-union-organizers-discuss-voting-in-next-election-immigration-rights-local-mechanic-strike/a5lne0e/
This should go over big with the majority of the commenters here: Carlos Acosta announced he is running for the board in the 5th District.

Bald? You preseume that nitwits like Angel and nob could actually read and research real history; and not just ask Siri.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4593&v=mDaKtZuOmOU

It will be so much fun taking Angel’s pension away, through Bankruptcy.

Tick Tock

Aren’t these the same folks that ran Venezuela into the ground?

Sunshine alert! In a monstrous international conspiracy to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, communist international operators in conjunction with Illinois labor unions are planning to launch an attack on American democracy and American values at large with the announcement of no other than Carlos Acosta to run as a candidate in the fifth district of McHenry county board. Fortunately, our sunshine commenters and this sunshine blog stand as a beacon of hope and determination to stop this latest assault of evil communist forces in our very own compassionate conservative, rural, family values, God fearing, gun clinging, beautiful McHenry county. This award winning sunshine blog will not tolerate even the most remote possibility of allowing a single working class, union member to disrupt the balance of complete dominance of lawyers and business owners in our county board. 2018, is that you knocking at the door? Tic, tock, tic, tock…

Really getting tired of union leaders talking about “working families”.

Over the past 35 years, “working families” have decided that they are better off without a union.

This is evidenced by facts from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that says that union membership is down from 20 percent to approximately 10 percent in the U.S.

Remember, the 7% interest to finance the $126,503.6 unfunded liability on the five state pension funds from 39.2% funded to 90% funded through 2045 is $252,080.6 billion.

The details are in comments above.

Here is an update on the actuarial projections of the five state pension systems (TRS, SERS, SURS, JRS, & GARS) for years 2019 – 2045.

The source document is the November 2018 Special Pension Briefing from the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA).

COGFA is in the legislative branch of Illinois state government.

Refer to page 13 of that document.

cgfa.ilga.gov/upload/1118%20special%20pension%20briefing.pdf

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The chart on page 13 of the COGFA Special Pension Briefing is titled:

Funding Projections for the State Retirement Systems

All Five Systems Combined

Projections Based on the Retirement Systems’ FY 2018 Actuarial Valuations

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There are annual pension projections in that chart for years 2019 – 2045.

To comprehend the taxpayer cost of having a large unfunded pension liability for decades, one first has to understand the meaning of an unfunded pension liability.

An unfunded pension liability is the amount that should be in the pension fund, but is not, as of a specific date, based on actuarial projections.

In other words, the unfunded pension liability is missing money.

Since the money is not in the fund, the rate of return is zero.

Restated, the rate of return of zero, is zero.

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That is an enormous problem, since the expected rate of return of the five funds is about 7%.

To get a general understanding of the enormity of this problem, let’s us the following overly simplistic example.

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Here is the result of adding the projected unfunded liabilities of the 5 state pension funds for years 2019 – 2045.

As an example, using rounded numbers:

2019 – $136 billion unfunded liability (40% funded)

2020 – $139 billion unfunded liability

2021 – $140 billion unfunded liability

etc.

2045 – $33 billion unfunded liability (90% funded)(the unfunded liability is projected to increase, then decrease)

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First, to understand the point being made, let’s take $136B unfunded liability x .07 pension interest = $9 billion.

Meaning, taxpayers accrue $9 billion pension interest because $136 billion is missing from the pension fund.

Using a point made earlier, the investment return in 2019 on the missing $136 billion is zero.

The missing investment returns, which can be thought of as pension interest, are absorbed into the unfunded liability in the annual actuarial calculations.

As an analogy, interest is added to a credit card balance which is not paid in full.

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Adding the actuarial projected annual unfunded pension liabilities for the 5 state pension funds from 2019 – 2045, one arrives at $3,284,561,700,000.

That’s 3 Trillion dollars.

$3,284,561,700,000 unfunded liability in the 5 state pension funds from 2019 – 2045 x .07 assumed rate of return aka pension interest rate = $229,919,319,000 pension interest.

That’s $229 billion dollars in estimated pension interest for years 2019 – 2045 for carrying such a large unfunded pension liability for 27 years.

If the pensions were fully funded, the estimated pension interest would be zero.

What a waste of taxpayer money.

Many of the Illinois taxpayers paying that interest to the state government in the form of taxes and fees (state income taxes for example) are laborers not in one of those five state public sector pensions.

The result is a higher cost of government due to pension interest.

As an analogy, when one purchases an item on a credit card and does not pay the credit card balance in full, the result is a more expensive item due to to credit card interest.