Category: News

Illinois Gulity Of Enron Accounting

How bad are Illinois’ finances? Would you believe bad enough to be called illegal by the SEC? According to The Chicago Tribune, “Illinois broke federal securities laws and “misled investors” in misstating the true health of the state’s depleted pension funds between 2005 and early 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday…’Municipal investors are no less entitled to truthful risk disclosures than other investors,’ said George S. Canellos, acting director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement in a prepared statement. ‘Time after time, Illinois failed to inform its bond investors about the risk to its financial condition posed by the structural underfunding of its pension system,’ Canellos said.”

Rod+PattiWhen you keep taking people’s money and lie to them about returns, isn’t that Enron Accounting and Ponzi Scheming? Shouldn’t you go to jail for that kind of fraud? Oh,w ait, the former Governor IS in jail. Who else should join him there?

Real Time Political Fact Checking?

From the Washington Post comes an amazing prototype tool that aims to fact check political speaking REAL TIME. It’s called Truth Teller.

Truth Teller is a news application built by the Washington Post with funding from a Knight News Prototype grant. The goal of Truth Teller is to fact check speeches in as close to real time as possible. The three-month prototype built by the Post is an enormous step in that direction.

The genesis of Truth Teller was fairly well captured in this Poynter piece, which came out around the time the funding was announced. (One note: the politician mentioned was Michele Bachmann — a she, not a he.)

Steven Ginsberg saw the future of fact-checking while listening to a politician tell lies in Iowa last summer. “It was one of those small parking lot affairs outside a sports bar and the candidate was there speaking to about 30 people,” said Ginsberg, The Washington Post’s national political editor. ”For about 45 minutes he said a lot of things that I knew to not be true, and nobody else there knew that.” Ginsberg thought there must be a way to offer people in the crowd a real-time accounting of the politician’s misstatements. He called Cory Haik, the Post’s executive producer for digital news, and outlined the issue.

For the prototype, we focused on the looming debate over tax reform, both because of timing and its import for the country. The tax debate will play out over several months and naturally lends itself to deceit and deception — even more so than many policy discussions. We hope that our application will help direct the conversation toward the truth as it is happening so that Americans get a fair shot at deciding this critical issue.

The Truth Teller app follows the text of the speech and matches claims to various data bases.
The Truth Teller app follows the text of the speech and matches claims to various data bases.

Calling All Coders

ToolsCalling all coders and web designers. help us conceptualize and build Apps For Activists at this MeetUp on Tuesday, January 15, 2013.

Calling all technologists, coders and designers – let’s meet a few Chicago community organizers and hear about how they work and see if we can build some tools or apps that will SOLVE some recurring problems they have and make their work more effective!

Chicago is the home of modern community organizing and we a hotbed of innovation and tool making. Let’s MIX these traditions and skill sets together to build a set of Apps For Activists that can be easily grabbed used, improved and re-used.

At this MeetUp let’s meet some experienced Chicago organizers and get a sense of how they approach their work. If people are interested in continuing to meet and do a design hack, we can lay the ground work for that effort.

At i c stars, 415 N. Dearborn Avenue, 3rd floor, 6pm to 8pm.