Chicago Teachers Challenge Emanuel With Walkout
By Tim JonesChicago teachers struck today, closing classrooms for about 400,000 students and prompting Mayor Rahm Emanuel to stop raising money for President Barack Obama’s re-election so he may devote time to settling the city’s first walkout in 25 years.
Months of tension erupted into open hostility last night when Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, called the work stoppage in the nation’s third-largest district. The teachers’ contract expired in June, and negotiations broke down over health benefits and job security. About 5 p.m., thousands of strike supporters gathered at school headquarters in the Loop business district waving placards and chanting; talks with the union, which represents 26,000 teachers and other workers, continued.
“Don’t take it out on the kids of Chicago if you have a problem with me,” Emanuel said at a church providing child care. Children stood behind him, while strikers in red T-shirts chanted outside. One held a sign picturing the mayor with horns.
The strike leaves Emanuel, a 52-year-old former chief of staff to Obama who is aiding groups advancing his re-election, caught amid conflicting interests.
Unions have been among the strongest supporters of Democrats nationwide, and are crucial to Obama’s prospects. At the same time, some of Emanuel’s wealthiest supporters have pushed for changes to the city’s education system. They include Penny Pritzker, a Board of Education member who is part of a Chicago real-estate dynasty, and Bruce Rauner, who is chairman of GTCR Rauner LLC, which manages equity investments.
Doing Homework
Emanuel is putting his money-raising super-PAC activities on hold and didn’t attend a scheduled appearance at a U.S. House Majority political action committee event today.
“The mayor’s first priority is the residents of the city of Chicago,” Thomas Bowen, director of Emanuel’s own political action committee, said in a statement. “He is committed to re- electing the president, but he must focus on his job as mayor right now.”
Emanuel, who didn’t participate directly in contract negotiations, called the walkout “unnecessary, avoidable and wrong,” and “a strike by choice.”
While the walkout provides the latest evidence of friction between public-sector unions and state and local governments, this strike occurs in one of the most Democratic cities in the nation and represents a major challenge for Emanuel, who took office in May 2011 casting himself as a nonideological problem- solver.
Romney Observes
“If it isn’t settled soon, Rahm looks like he’s not as competent as the Chicago mayoral tradition requires,” said Dick Simpson, a former alderman who is a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “If this becomes divisive enough, it could become a problem for all the unions, not just the teachers.”
Less than 12 hours into the strike, the walkout became an issue in the presidential campaign when Republican nominee Mitt Romney criticized the union in Obama’s home state.
“Teachers unions have too often made plain that their interests conflict with those of our children, and today we are seeing one of the clearest examples yet,” Romney said in an e- mailed statement.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the president’s main concern “is for the students and families” and that “we hope that both sides are able to come together and settle this quickly.”
The president is a former community organizer in the city and represented Illinois in the U.S. Senate.
Baby Sitting
Emanuel delivered on a campaign pledge to lengthen the school day and year, saying more class time would improve student performance. He also stripped teachers of a negotiated 4 percent pay raise, prompting Lewis to call him a bully.
Teachers originally sought a 29 percent raise over 24 months while the board proposed 2 percent annual increases under a four-year contract. Emanuel said the board boosted the offer to 16 percent over four years. Emanuel controls the operation of the district, which faces a deficit of about $700 million.
Today, parents were forced to cope with the strike’s repercussions, trying to arrange care for their children before they headed to work.
All Alone
“It’s really chaotic,” said El Chan, an information- technology manager at an investment bank and the mother of two. “Both of us are working, I have no relatives, nobody I can turn to in town.”
“It’s hard to understand why they can’t work it out,” Chan said. “We love these teachers but, personally, we cannot risk our jobs either.”
Parents joined teachers on the picket line at Ray Elementary School in the Hyde Park neighborhood, a block from the private University of Chicago Lab Schools that Emanuel’s children attend.
“Anyone who knows teachers in Chicago public schools knows they’ve been under-resourced and disrespected for years,” said Michael McIntyre, 54, whose 16-year-old son attends Kenwood Academy, the public high school in the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood. “It’s a horror show.”
He criticized the administration’s focus on exams.
“The only plan is to give students more and more standardized tests,” said McIntyre, who is chairman of the international studies department at DePaul University. “It’s like trying to make a calf grow by weighing it enough.”
Choosing Sides
At Stephen F. Gale Elementary Community Academy in East Rogers Park on the far North Side, about 50 teachers and supporters marched at the gate. Divisions took shape.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Amy Diaz, 29, as the picketers shouted.
Aretta Brown watched with her 5-year-old son, Michael, and 6-year-old daughter, Loretta.
“Rahm Emanuel is wrong,” she said. “He’s just wrong. He should give the teachers more money. We don’t want our kids in the street selling drugs and stuff.”
Emanuel has been on a collision course with Lewis and the union. The mayor repeatedly said that the school day and academic year were too brief and that children were shortchanged. He obtained legislative approval of a longer day.
Negotiators had been at the bargaining table since November.
Simpson, the former alderman, said there is a limited amount of time to settle the strike before positions harden.
“If it isn’t settled in a day or so, it could well turn ugly,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Jones in Chicago at tjones58@bloomberg.net
Silicon Valley isn't sharing Facebook's misery
By BARBARA ORTUTAY and MICHAEL LIEDTKE | Associated Press
MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) — Silicon Valley, it turns out, doesn't revolve around the stock prices of Facebook and its playful sidekick, Zynga.
By most indications, tech companies in this hub of innovation are humming along, even as two of its rising stars endure steep declines in their stock prices that have wiped out more than $60 billion in wealth in the past six months.
Companies catering to mobile devices, business software and data management products are thriving, while longtime Silicon Valley stalwarts such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc. remain among the most revered brands in the world.
"Nothing has fundamentally changed about the opportunities that are possible," says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, an online data-storage company based in Los Altos, Calif.
The optimism in Silicon Valley can be seen in a variety of ways in this area that covers roughly 40 miles from San Jose to San Francisco:
— Entrepreneurs are still pursuing big ideas and raising millions of dollars.
Silicon Valley startups raised $3.2 billion from venture capitalists during the April-June quarter, far more than in any other part of the U.S as tracked by the National Venture Capital Association. Venture capital flowing into Silicon Valley increased by 4 percent from the same time last year, while it dropped 12 percent nationwide.
— Apartment rents in San Francisco have soared beyond the lofty levels of the original Internet boom more than a decade ago. This time, it's being driven by well-paid software engineers and Web designers who are flocking to Silicon Valley.
San Francisco apartments rented for an average of $2,734 in June, up 13 percent from a year ago. Renting in San Jose — the region's largest city — was less expensive, but even there the average lease cost $1,811 a month, a 10 percent increase from last year.
— Computer coding programmers still command top dollar for their services because there aren't enough of them to meet demand.
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of the 8-year-old online reviews service Yelp Inc., said his company is always behind on its hiring goals for software engineers.
"There is no one who is like 'Oh, we have all the engineers we need and we don't need more,'" he says. Competition is fierce from all sides — massive companies such as Google and Facebook, tiny startup incubators and everything in between.
"And there is attrition," Stoppelman says. "From what I gather from engineers, two, three times a week they get calls from recruiters."
Software engineers working in the San Francisco area are now paid an average of about $115,000, up from $106,000 in 2008, according to Glassdoor.com, which analyzed compensation figures collected from users. The average salary for software engineers in the Bay Area is about 17 percent higher than the national average for the same occupation, according to Glassdoor.
Google now pays its engineers an average of $142,000, up from just under $104,000 in 2008, Glassdoor calculated. During that time, Google's workforce has swelled by 70 percent to about 34,000 employees, including thousands of engineers working at or near its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Even Facebook and Zynga remain on hiring sprees.
Facebook still plans to transform its Menlo Park headquarters into the equivalent of a small town that is supposed to eventually house 6,000 workers. The social networking leader has hired famed architect Frank Gehry to design a 420,000-square-foot warehouse that will feature a garden growing across its roof. Plans also call for a town square featuring restaurants, a bike shop and health clinic.
Levie moved Box from Seattle several years ago because he believed his company had to be in Silicon Valley to succeed. Box now employs about 500 workers and raised $125 million this summer. Levie is just 27, a few months younger than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who turned 28 the week his company went public in May.
Echoing an oft-repeated Silicon Valley ethos, Levie says startups are much more focused on their long-term prospects than their performance from one quarter to the next.
Wall Street, though, isn't known for its patience. Investors' fixation on short-term results has left Facebook's stock trading at about half of its initial public offering price, while Zynga's stock has lost more than two-thirds of its value.
Driven by the hype leading up to its IPO, Facebook Inc. opened with a stock price of $38 and a market value of $104 billion. Less than four months later, share prices have lost half their value.
Investors have been unhappy that Facebook's revenue growth is slowing, seen as a sign the company won't be able to make as much money as more people use Facebook on mobile devices, where there is less room to show ads. The worries have hammered Facebook's stock, even though many analysts still see the company as a solid long-term investment.
"The challenge of the public markets is that it has the ability to create a lot of these near-term distractions if you start paying attention to the day-to-day stock price changes," Levie says. "A lot of those day-to-day changes have no bearing or relevance on the ultimate opportunity for your business."
Facebook has consistently declined to talk about its stock price. But CFO David Ebersman told analysts in July that "obviously we're disappointed about how the stock has traded."
"But I think the important thing for us is to stay focused on the fact that we're the same company now as we were before," he added.
Zuckerberg will get a chance to muse about Facebook's fall on Tuesday when he is scheduled to speak at a technology conference in San Francisco.
Zynga Inc., the maker of "FarmVille," ''Mafia Wars" and other games that first became popular on Facebook, appears to face more uncertainty.
The San Francisco company is losing money and players while facing stiff competition as more games are played on mobile devices instead of personal computers. CEO Mark Pincus insists the company will rebound, though many analysts consider Zynga hopelessly adrift. Zynga's shares are now hovering around $3, down from a peak of nearly $16 in early March.
Nonetheless, there are nothing but good vibes emanating from many other technology companies in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
Even as Zynga employees watch the value of their stock options deflate, the 65 or so workers at Pinterest are settling in to the online scrapbooking service's new San Francisco headquarters just a block away. Around the same time Facebook went public, Pinterest raised $100 million from investors who valued the company at $1.5 billion, according to several media reports.
Meanwhile, iPhone maker Apple has established itself as the world's most valuable public company — ever. It hit another all-time high Monday as anticipation builds for Wednesday's expected unveiling of the latest iPhone.
"We have completely forgotten the bad days at Apple," says Alfred Chuang, former CEO of software maker BEA Systems and founder of software startup Magnet Systems.
Bankruptcy loomed at Apple in the mid-1990s until exiled co-founder Steve Jobs returned.
Today, Apple boasts a market value of about $630 billion and is riding a wave of culture-shaping innovation that Jobs unleashed with the development of the iPod, iPhone and iPad before he died last year.
Apple's ups and downs are emblematic of Silicon Valley's often-turbulent climate, Chuang says.
"But when we see something heading down fast, the next wave can be heading up very quickly," he says.
Professional networking service LinkedIn, whose IPO preceded Facebook's by a year, has become the best-performing Internet stock to go public since the start of 2011, according to Dealogic, a research firm. LinkedIn is doing so well that it recently signed a lease to expand into Sunnyvale, Calif., offices spanning 560,000 square feet beginning in 2014. The additional space will enable LinkedIn to add about 3,000 more workers in Silicon Valley.
Meanwhile, a slew of unsexy, business-focused tech startups are raising big money from prominent venture capitalists drawn to the companies' stability and predictable business models.
"Facebook is yesterday's story. People are looking at the next thing," says Terry Connelly, dean emeritus at Golden Gate University's Ageno School of Business in San Francisco.
Some of the best examples include Silicon Valley-based software companies Palo Alto Networks Inc.,
ServiceNow Inc. and Splunk Inc.
All have seen their value grow by more than half since their IPOs this year, even as IPOs of better-known companies such as Facebook proved to be a disappointment.
The difference? Rather than focusing on consumers whose tastes can be finicky and rise and fall with trends, these three court corporations and government agencies as customers. Palo Alto makes firewall technology that protects computer networks, ServiceNow's software automates technology operations and Splunk's analyzes massive amounts of data.
"You can make a lot of money selling stuff that nobody understands," jokes Ben Horowitz, who went through the first Internet boom as an executive at Web browser pioneer Netscape Communications during the late 1990s. He's now a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
On average, the 60 technology companies that have gone public since the start of 2011 had seen their stock price increase by 11 percent through August, according to Dealogic. That was slightly better than the 9 percent gain posted by the Standard & Poor's 500.
Even companies that have seen their market values grow know they can't afford to slow down.
Splunk's stock price has more than doubled to about $37 since its April IPO, which Chief Marketing Officer Steve Sommer says "makes everyone feel good."
But he says signs posted around the company's San Francisco office remind employees that they are at "mile 3 of the marathon."
"It does feel good to have a successful stock price (to) look at, but everybody is focused on what we can do to get to mile four, five," he says.
___
Michael Liedtke reported from San Francisco.
Jay-Z knocks Occupy Wall Street
Jay-Z says Occupy Wall Street had a fatal flaw: Its 99 messages.
The legendary rapper, in a new interview, says he never threw his support behind the protest movement because he didn’t understand what it stood for.
“What’s the thing on the wall, what are you fighting for?” Jay-Z told The New York Times in a wide-ranging interview.
The Brooklyn-born hip-hop king said he made his feelings clear to Russell Simmons, who was a full-throated supporter of the Zuccotti Park demonstrators.
“I’m not going to a park and picnic — I have no idea what to do,” Jay-Z said, recalling a conversation with Simmons about joining the movement.
“I don’t know what the fight is about. What do we want? Do you know?”
Jay-Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, transformed himself from a poverty-stricken crack dealer to a multimillionaire music mogul and co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets.
He said Occupy Wall Street’s blanket demonization of the rich is un-American.
“I think all those things need to really declare themselves a bit more clearly because when you just say that ‘the 1 percent is that,’ that’s not true,” he said.
“Yeah, the 1 percent that’s robbing people, and deceiving people, these fixed mortgages and all these things, and then taking their home away from them, that’s criminal, that’s bad.
“Not being an entrepreneur. This is free enterprise. This is what America is built on.”
Sir Paul McCartney receives France's Legion of Honour
Sir Paul McCartney has been given France's highest award, the Legion of Honour, for services to music.
The former Beatle was decorated by President Francois Hollande during a ceremony at the Elysee Palace in Paris.
As an officer of the Legion of Honour, Sir Paul joins such cultural icons as actor Clint Eastwood and singers Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli.
In his native Britain, he was knighted by the Queen in 1997 - earning the title Sir.
Sir Paul said afterwards: "It is such an honour to be awarded this."
He recently performed to a global audience at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The Legion of Honour was created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, and comes in five grades - Knight, Officer, Commander, Grand Officer and Grand Cross.
Sir Paul, 70, has enjoyed a long and successful music career after rising to fame with The Beatles.
He and bandmate John Lennon penned such hits as Yesterday, Hey Jude and A Hard Day's Night, before the Beatles split up in 1970. McCartney went on to forge a solo career.
The Deb and Tam Show: Guests include Debra Burlingame and Tara Stackpole
Dear Friends,
As we approach the anniversary of 9/11, we invite you to join us tomorrow for a very special show with two incredible guests. First we will be speaking with Debra Burlingame, the sister of American Airlines pilot Charles "Chic" Burlingame whose hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon. Debra is an amazing woman who transformed tragedy into purpose and co-founded both Keep America Safe and 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America.
You also won't want to miss our conversation with Tara Stackpole, the widow of the legendary New York Firefighter, Captain Timmy Stackpole who gave his life to save others in the twin towers. Tara, a mother of five, has inspired countless people with her moving tale of hope and healing.
We invite you to join the conversation! We want to hear from you so call in at: 877-243-7776. The show is called "Your Voice" because it is all about you!
Let's come together to remember and honor the heroes we have lost, and the heroes in our midst!
You can catch the show every Saturday from 8 am to 10 am MT (that's 7 am to 9 am PT) on KRKS 94.7 FM in Denver or streaming live on
AmericanWomenMedia.com and KRKS.com.
Blessings,
Deborah Flora and Tamara Colbert
As we approach the anniversary of 9/11, we invite you to join us tomorrow for a very special show with two incredible guests. First we will be speaking with Debra Burlingame, the sister of American Airlines pilot Charles "Chic" Burlingame whose hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon. Debra is an amazing woman who transformed tragedy into purpose and co-founded both Keep America Safe and 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America.You also won't want to miss our conversation with Tara Stackpole, the widow of the legendary New York Firefighter, Captain Timmy Stackpole who gave his life to save others in the twin towers. Tara, a mother of five, has inspired countless people with her moving tale of hope and healing.We invite you to join the conversation! We want to hear from you so call in at: 877-243-7776. The show is called "Your Voice" because it is all about you!
Let's come together to remember and honor the heroes we have lost, and the heroes in our midst!
You can catch the show every Saturday from 8 am to 10 am MT (that's 7 am to 9 am PT) on KRKS 94.7 FM in Denver or streaming live on
AmericanWomenMedia.com and KRKS.com.
Blessings,
Deborah Flora and Tamara Colbert
Dolly Parton Book, 'Dream More,' Set for November Release
Dolly Parton certainly knows how to dream big, and has made most of her dreams reality throughout her amazing career. Now, she's getting ready to share some of the inspirational wisdom she's learned about dreams and many other important aspects of creating a richer, fuller life in a book titled "Dream More," due in November 2012 from publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons. The book is based on a commencement speech Dolly delivered at the University of Tennessee in 2009.
"I know that I've learned some things in my life that are important to me," Dolly says in a statement about the new boo. "And I think maybe they might be good ideas to pass along to you. Not as advice, but as information that I have found has helped me over the years. Enough to share, and a little to spare. If you're lucky, your dreams will never die, you may not always achieve them, but if you always have dreams and reach for them, you'll never be a failure. I still have dreams of what I want to do next."
Over the years, Dolly has shared her words of wisdom (and even a few hilarious jokes) with The Boot, including how she continues to inspire people with her attitude and her ability to stay adaptable.
"I've just been around so long that I think people just feel like they know me," she told us earlier this year. "I'm like a comfort zone for a lot of people, and I'm from a big family. I'm kind of that rags-to-riches story, everybody knows it is possible to have that American dream. I'm very friendly and down home because I love people. I see my family in everybody that I meet, I see somebody I love that reminds me -- you remind me of a niece -- and I just feel like I know people and they feel like they know me. People know that I will just blurt out what's on my mind, and that seems to be OK. It seems better to be who you are then to try to fake it and be something else."
"Dream More" will be on bookstore shelves just in time for the holidays. Dolly is currently playing on the big screen at film festivals worldwide in the award-winning documentary film "Hollywood to Dollywood," which is also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The film details the dream of twin brothers Gary and Larry Lane, as they journey cross-country to attempt to get a screenplay they've written -- with a part for the superstar -- into Dolly's hands.
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