•September 5, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Three Downstate (outside metro-Chicagoland) legislators recently introduced a resolution to separate Chicago from the rest of Illinois.
Based on a recent analysis of the incidence and reflection of state revenue and spending, these lawmakers should be wary of biting the hand that feeds Downstate.
Resentment of Chicago by Downstaters goes back at least to 1870. For a graduate paper written years ago, for instance, I quoted from the diary of a man from my hometown of Toulon (Stark County), who in 1870 visited the House gallery in the old state capitol. He wrote that he was regaled by a debate on the House floor over whether to cede Chicago to Wisconsin or Indiana.
Yet, according to a report issued in July by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU, the 96 Downstate counties (outside the 6 counties that make up Chicagoland) receive dramatically more in spending from the state than they send to Springfield in taxes.
The big losers are the suburban counties that surround Cook (Chicago). The Simon Institute analysis shows the suburban counties receive back only 50 cents for every dollar they send to Springfield in taxes.
In sharp contrast, the 19 counties in deep southern Illinois, where resentment of Chicago seems strongest, receive almost $3 for every dollar folks there send in. Read More

Photo furnished
Pictured is Mother Jones.

•September 5, 2018•

By Phil Luciano
Of the Journal Star, Peoria

She lost her own family, so she adopted a new one, a huge one, lifting up the cause of labor while rising to become one of the most famous women in American history.
In the process, Mother Jones became perhaps the greatest labor force in the history of Illinois, a state no stranger to workers’ movements. Barely over five feet tall, the dynamo who was Mary Harris Jones didn’t start speaking and organizing until her mid-50s, a peripatetic rabble-rouser nationally from the 1890s to 1920s – yet always with a heart for Illinois.
“Illinois ranks as a union birthplace, and Mother Jones was a midwife in that process,” says Mike Matejka, vice president of the Illinois Labor History Society. “She formed deep friendships with Illinois workers, from miners to union leaders, and continually returned to Illinois as a home base, roaming the state to mobilize and awaken the working class.”
In her heyday, no labor leader inflamed passion like Mother Jones. Muckraker Upton Sinclair, whose “The Jungle” excoriated the Chicago meatpacking industry, summed up Jones thusly: “All over the country she had roamed, and wherever she went, the flame of protest had leaped up in the hearts of men; her story was a veritable Odyssey of revolt.”
Yet she assumed that mantle only because of circumstance, then guile. Read More