"In a private club 54 floors above the convention hall they monitored the party they infiltrated."

[madfloridian]

75. A blog by an IL educator is an example of disillusioned teachers not voting.

I am really surprised at this about Pat Quinn. From blogger/ educator Fred Klonsky.

I Didn’t Vote for Pat Quinn, Because He’s Trying to Destroy My Pension

I did not vote in the election for Illinois Governor on Tuesday, and I did not vote during the period that Illinois allowed for early voting.

My abstention wasn't an act of apathy or disinterest. It was an act of conviction.

....At a 1970 Constitutional Convention, language was added to the Illinois Constitution that specifically forbid the legislature from diminishing or impairing our pensions. And yet on December 3, 2013, that is exactly what the Democratic Party-controlled General Assembly did. And Governor Pat Quinn signed it into law. The bill is currently being fought over in court.

Quinn had declared that he was put on this earth to solve the pension problem. But the problem of the one hundred billion dollar debt cannot be solved by cutting benefits—it can only be solved by raising revenue.

I am a retired teacher and a former local union president. I am now head of my local chapter of retired teachers in the Illinois Education Association, an affiliate of the National Education Association. In the two years since my retirement, I have written articles, made speeches, attended countless meetings, lobbied state legislators and generally been as much a pain in the ass about pensions as I could possibly be.

Fred quotes a Illinois state Democratic when asked why they were taking their pension money.

She answered:

A teacher in the audience angrily stood and accused Representative Nekritz of stealing money from our pension fund. A smirking Nekritz responded, “We didn’t steal it. We never put it in there in the first place.”

He states that Gov. Quinn was responsible for a law gutting tenure and seniority protection.