Fresh on the heels of stories about Rahm’s law-breaking motorcades and his snub of the great Whitney Young girls state championship basketball team comes the latest scandal.

Actually, it’s not a scandal.

I’m not even amazed. I just think it’s funny that Rahm, who is a millionaire from his Wall Street days, doesn’t buy his own Paul McCartney tickets.

I’m somewhat amazed that people still go to Paul McCartney concerts.

But that’s another story entirely.

Rahm has had to file his yearly report on gifts of more than 500 bucks.

And believe me when I say 500 bucks wouldn’t get you a fist bump from Rahm.

For the third straight year, Emanuel reported receiving sports tickets and transportation from close adviser Michael Sacks, CEO of the Chicago hedge fund firm Grosvenor Capital Management and vice chairman of World Business Chicago, the city’s economic development arm. Sacks and his wife…

Our economy is changing in ways that are alarming. Income inequality and wealth inequality are at their highest point in many decades; some say we are back to the age of the robber barons. Most of the gains in the economy since the great recession of 2008 have benefitted the 1%, or even the 1% of the 1%. The middle class is shrinking, and we no longer have the richest middle class in the world. The U.S. has the highest child poverty rate of any of the advanced nations of the world (and, no, I don’t count Romania as an advanced nation, having visited that nation, which suffered decades of economic plunder and stagnation under the Communist Ceausescu regime).

Forbes reports that there were 442 billionaires in the U.S. in 2013. Nice for them. Taxes have dropped dramatically for the top 1% since the 1970s. But don’t call them plutocrats…

A well-connected family helps if you want to be in Congress:

Across all Congresses — House and Senate — from 1789 to 1986, nearly nine percent of legislators came from families that had previously sent a member to Congress. The prevalence of these dynastic legislators has decreased over time. “While 11 percent of legislators were dynastic between 1789 and 1858, only 7 percent were dynastic after 1966,” the authors write. And that number has been mostly flat, according to an October 2013 analysis by Chris Wilson of Time, who found that 6.9 percent of current House and Senate members — 37 in total — come from dynastic families.

As for senators, 13.5 percent have come from dynastic families, versus only 7.7 percent of representatives. One of the key findings of the dynasty paper is that political power is self-perpetuating: “Legislators who hold power for longer become more likely to have relatives entering Congress…

Please read my commentary on what Louis C.K. has done to expand the debate about Common Core.

It was just posted on Huffington Post at the top of the page.

In my view, he has just smashed the carefully crafted narrative that the only critics of Common Core standards and tests are extremists of the right and left.

Being a comedian with 3.3 million followers on Twitter gave him a platform.

Being a parent of two children in public school gives him legitimacy.

His intervention changes the conversation. Maybe now we can have an honest debate instead of name-calling of anyone who dares to raise a voice in criticism of the CCSS.

Please leave a comment, if you choose.

This just in:

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES: April 29, 2014

CONTACT:

Emily Giles, e.giles@ihsph.org, (917) 575-2936

Emily Wendlake, emilywendlake@gmail.com, (413) 657-7255

Rosie Frascella, r.frascella@ihsph.org, (917) 767-1001

Anita Feingold-Shaw, afeingoldshaw@gmail.com, (510) 872-1712

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**Media Advisory**

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26 Teachers and Staff of International High School at Prospect Heights refuse to give NYC ELA Performance Assessment Test

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WHEN: Thursday, May 1, 2014, 7:45-8:20am,

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WHERE: International High School at Prospect Heights, 883 Classon Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11225

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WHAT: Teachers will hold a press conference to announce their refusal to administer the NYC ELA Performance Assessment. 26 teachers and staff at Prospect Heights International High School are refusing to administer a new assessment that is part of the new teacher evaluation system pushed by Bloomberg’s DOE and the UFT last spring. 50% of parents have opted their children out of the test. The high school serves almost exclusively recently arrived English Language Learners.

Under provisions of the State University Retirement System’s money purchase option, 10,000 state university employees are eligible to retire by July 1.

As a result of the Senate Bill 1 pension theft passed last December 3rd and signed immediately by Squeezy, thousands are heading for the exits to avoid loosing thousands of dollars in post retirement compensation.

Senator Dan Biss was a member of the bipartisan Committee of Ten that was assigned the job of constructing the bill. He now admits the problem, but claims it is an “easy fix.”

Much of what Senator Biss says is unreliable. That is never more true than his “easy fix” comment.

Today’s Tribune provides the numbers.

As of last week, about 1,700 university employees had filed retirement applications this year, compared with 960 during the same period last year. Not all will ultimately decide to retire, and many others will file applications in…

The Clipper’s Donald Sterling joins with Supreme Court majority. He’s caught on TMZ audio tape saying, “Don’t let Black students into state universities. No more of that f—– affirmative action.”

Gordon Lafer on Milwaukee’s Rocketship Charterscam.

Koch brothers and others influence judges to approve wage theft from teachers.

Obama rightly condemns the racism in basketball, but silent about it on the Supreme Court.

Randi Weingarten on the retirement crisis.

But, Randi.  Why isn’t this a bargaining issue with school boards?Why are we pleading with a private company, Pearson?

The Slumlord Billionairehas a healthy legal paper trail, which creates a collage of someone very good at extorting rents from the very poor. In 1986, the spiking of rents in his Beverly Hills properties—the so-called “slums of Beverly Hills”—led to a large march by tenants on City Hall.

In 2001, Sterling was sued successfully by the City of…

The legislative mandate of taking money as deferred compensation to keep it safe as a future pension while promising that it will not be there when it is needed is wage theft. Active teachers across America have this occur with every paycheck.

Retired teachers are having their constitutionally and contractually protected payment agreements re-legislated after the legal agreement. Law suits are presently underway across America to stop both forms of wage theft. The main court battles are in Republican dominated New Jersey and Democrat dominated Illinois. To be perfectly clear, it’s not about political issues; it’s about corporate greed and control.

“The courts will decide,” according to same state legislatures who have systematically stolen from public pension funds for decades.

So, the Koch Brothers, Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and other major corporations and billionaire owners are attempting to influence the judges who will make these and similar future interpretive…

The made-for-tv movie The Execution of Private Slovik – based on the true story of Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier executed for desertion during WWII – aired 40 years ago last month. Chris Walsh considers the film’s success in 1974 and ponders why today “cowardice in the military is a topic too obscure and tender for nonmilitary Americans to contemplate”:

We are willing to have other people’s children put themselves in harm’s way, but we feel both ignorant and guilty about it, and that is enough to keep us from presuming to criticize, much less punish, a deserter. Reflecting on the alleged cowardice of a soldier like Slovik leads to disturbing questions: What would we do in his place? Why haven’t we joined the fight, or more actively supported those who do — or, alternatively, joined in the debate about whether fighting is the right thing? Why did we…