Illinois Coalition For Public Awareness

Friends, family, and colleagues:

By John Biver

For years at The Champion Foundation we’ve been highlighting the many abuses within the government-run public school system when it comes to pay and pensions.

Now another entire chapter can be written about the abuses within the Illinois public school system thanks to the hard work of a few tenacious citizens in downstate Illinois.

Recently, John Biver, President of The Champion Foundation asked me what the implications of our lawsuit are. The obvious is the expectation that a bond insurer and underwriter should reasonably be expected to exercise due diligence in their assurance that bonds are legal and valid. A favorable ruling for us in the courts would result in the insurer having to pay the investors for the guaranteed bonds they purchased. Sounds innocent enough but it gets a whole lot more complex when you look at the real implications.

Throughout our ordeal, we had made every effort to resolve this issue without filing suit. The last thing we wanted to do was to have to sue our own School District, which is essentially suing ourselves. As I have stated before, many State, regional, local, and a few federal agencies were contacted. Most either ignored us or simply dismissed us and passed us on to someone else. Until this past Tuesday, the Illinois Department of Professional Regulations belonged to the list of those who had simply ignored us.

Jeff Ferguson was recently interviewed by the editor of the site http://openrecords.wordpress.com . FOIA requests are very important and every taxpayer should know how to make one. This way, taxpayers are empowered and can get the answers they want/need from any level of government.

Check out this link for Jeff's Interview: http://openrecords.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/interview-sunshine-activist-...

Why Study War?
Military history teaches us about honor, sacrifice, and the inevitability of conflict.

Victor Davis Hanson
Summer 2007

Try explaining to a college student that Tet was an American military victory. You’ll provoke not a counterargument—let alone an assent—but a blank stare: Who or what was Tet? Doing interviews about the recent hit movie 300, I encountered similar bewilderment from listeners and hosts. Not only did most of them not know who the 300 were or what Thermopylae was; they seemed clueless about the Persian Wars altogether.

     It seems a bit more than ironic that so many people are complaining about their tax bills these days. I recall making such predictions on more than one occasion in the past 4 years. I am not a psychic nor do I possess a crystal ball, just a little common sense and the ability to understand some basic economics. It seems that if you try to spend more money than you make, you end up in debt. After a while of trying to live beyond your means, your debt begins compounding, making it more difficult to maintain even the simplest of lifestyles.