mouthpiece – The Progressive Midwesterner

You may remember Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner hiring Beth Purvis, a former Chicago charter school executive, to a newly-created post that could best be described as an “education czar”.

Well, you may be surprised about where the money for Purvis’s ridiculously high $250,000/year salary is coming from.

Rauner is paying Purvis’s $250,000/year salary out of the budget of the Illinois Department of Human Services (DHS). DHS is not responsible for overseeing education in Illinois (the Illinois State Board of Education oversees K-12 education at the state level in Illinois), instead, it’s a government agency that, among other things, administers social safety net programs run by the state and provides assistance to people with developmental disabilities. This revelation comes not long after Rauner authorized a funding cut of $26 million from DHS, which would make it harder for Illinoisans who need the state’s social safety net to survive and get their lives back on track to get the help they need.

Democratic Illinois State Rep. Greg Harris (D-Chicago), who is the chairman of the Illinois House Human Services Appropriations Committee, has called for Rauner to testify over cutting funding meant to help our state’s most vulnerable residents and using it to pay the ridiculously high salary of a mouthpiece for Rauner’s political agenda to destroy public education in Illinois (official letter here). I agree with Harris on this issue, because it’s absolutely ridiculous for Rauner to cut funding from the most vulnerable Illinoisans and give it to his political cronies.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist minister and mouthpiece for the energy industry who is now the senior adviser for policy and communications (i.e., press secretary) for Republican Congressman Aaron Schock of Peoria, Illinois, made racist Facebook posts referring to black people as “animals” and “hood rats” and wanting his D.C. neighborhood to gentrify (i.e., run the blacks, other minorities, and poor people out of the neighborhood):

While I strongly believe that shooting people and using or threatening to use a glass bottle as a weapon is highly unacceptable, referring to blacks as “animals” and hood rats” and calling for blacks, other minorities, and poor people to be run out of a neighborhood is racist and also highly unacceptable. Black people are not animals or rats, they’re people.

It’s been one scandal after another for Aaron Schock recently. First, he apparently violated congressional ethics laws by recently having his office decorated in the lavish style of the Lord Grantham’s room on the British TV series Downton Abbey, which airs in the United Kingdom on the British TV network ITV and is televised by many PBS public television stations here in the United States as part of the Masterpiece anthology series, and now his spokesman has been exposed as as a vile racist.