For the past few years, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago has been one of the most feared participants in the state's pension-reform debate.

Ty Fahner, a former Illinois attorney general who heads the Civic Committee, managed to convince both parties to elbow each other for a position of favor with him and his group.

When Fahner ended up siding with the House Democrats back in May and endorsing their pension-reform plan, including shifting costs to school districts, the House Republicans were furious and disappointed. They had been assiduously courting Fahner, and figured that since the Civic Committee is composed of several top Chicago business leaders, they'd be the natural ally of choice.

Not to mention that Fahner also formed a political action committee ("We Mean Business") to back up his word. Everybody wanted that money, so the PAC gave his position additional strength.

But those days appear to be behind us, at least for now. Fahner's histrionics last week over what he claimed was an "unfixable" pension problem have all but cut him out of the Statehouse mix. "He's made himself irrelevant," said one top Democratic official who is intimately involved with pension reform.

Pensions are among the most important investments American workers and employers make. We work for years so that when the time comes, we can retire with enough income to live comfortably, enjoy the much-deserved leisure time, and engage in activities of our own choosing.

This week's cover story examines Iowa's and Illinois' pensions, which, when coupled with health-care benefits, are in grave danger of insolvency, threatening to potentially bankrupt Illinois. This is due to the unsustainable "defined-benefit" pension plan that promises each employee a percentage of his or her annual income, regardless of the amount of contributions made by the employee, or on the employee's behalf by the employer (the state's taxpayers), over his/her years of service.

While it may be months before the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy can be fully resolved, Americans cannot afford to lose sight of the very real and pressing issues that threaten to derail the nation.

What follows is an overview of the major issues that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, despite their respective billion-dollar war chests, have failed to mention during their extensive campaign-trail stumping and televised debates. These are issues that aren't going away anytime soon. Indeed, unless we take a proactive approach to the problems that loom large before us, especially as they relate to America's ongoing transformation into a police state, we may find that they are here to stay.

There are two Scott County Board of Supervisors seats up for grabs in this year's election. Voters who want a supervisor who actually supervises and reads the materials being presented prior to a vote would do well to give Jesse Anderson's candidacy some serious consideration, regardless of your political affiliation. With experience and age, wisdom and knowledge should logically follow. Not so with the Scott County Board of Supervisors and how it has conducted business over the past several years, especially relative to big issues that impact all taxpayers in Scott County.