From Illinois law: “No unit of local government shall levy any tax on stock, commodity, or options transactions.” That statute has long been targeted for elimination by the Chicago Teachers Union and its allies. The CTU reliably shuns any proposal to increase property taxes across the board, instead pushing often-times “magical” solutions as alternatives. It’s one way the union has maintained its popularity among Chicago voters.

America is experiencing a non-organic, deliberate, and highly orchestrated socioeconomic destabilization whether we admit or not. The underlying agenda is to replace America's governance model as a Constitutional Republic to a global Progressive version of Neo-Feudalism, mirroring all its worst aspects and those of Marxism, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, and Monarchism. Every one of the above is a top-down model of governance with precious few haves and super-majorities of have-nots who answer to a centralized authority that owns and/or controls all resources and means of production in a society.

We're very pleased to publish Douglas Tallamay's original essay for the Reader on the importance of oak trees. For an even deeper dive we highly recommend his 2021 book The Nature of Oaks. It's full of richly produced color photos and its presentation is a work of art unto itself. Here's an excerpt from the book, regarding how and why the oak tree is the “keystone species.”

The resulting deformation of the emerging leaves is heartbreaking. Over the last 20 years, we have called several times, and asked for an inspector to come and collect damaged leaf samples for the analysis by IDALS, the Iowa department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. The results come back with a cocktail of noxious chemicals, and always include Acetochlor, Atrazine, and, in recent years, Dicamba and 2,4-D.