Sunday reads.

In a private office in the Thompson Center with no press allowed, Squeezy signs the #pension theft. Why are they smiling?

Another battle by parents with CPS to keep a public school open.

Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint.

Imagine. It was 33 years ago.

When did “reform” become a bad word. We must reclaim it.

Credit Sun-Times reporter Dan Mihalopoulos. A rare Chicago journalist who saw the crooked Juan Rangel and stuck to the story like a dog on a bone.

Logan Square activist Will Guzzardi gets another endorsement, adding to his list of progressive politicians. Will Berrios’ phony no vote on #pension theft save her? That was Madigan’s plan.

The story of Illinois pensions should be at least as infuriating. Unlike Detroit, the economy in Illinois is reasonably healthy. News reports often tout its unfunded liability of $100 billion without pointing out that this is an obligation that needs to be met over the next 30 years. During this period, Illinois’ economy will exceed $18 trillion in output, putting the liability at roughly 0.6 percent of the state’s future income. That is hardly trivial, but neither is it an unbearable burden.

The disturbing aspect about the Illinois situation is that the underfunding of the pension was a deliberate choice. For years the governor and Legislature approved budgets that did not make the required contribution to the pensions. (The city of Chicago, under Mayor Richard M. Daley, did the same thing.) This was a deliberate shafting of workers in which most of the state’s leading political figures acquiesced.

Among those who deserve special vilification in this story are the bond-rating agencies (yes, the folks who rated all those subprime mortgage-backed securities as Aaa). During the years of the stock bubble in the 1990s, they analyzed pension funds using the assumption that the bubble would persist indefinitely. This meant that state and local governments had to make little or no contribution to their pensions.

Unfortunately, it was a habit that stuck. Even after the bubble burst, they continued to contribute little or nothing to their pensions.

So now Illinois, Chicago and several other state and local governments have badly under-funded pensions. It would seem that they would have an obligation to raise the revenue needed to pay workers, after all this money they are owed.

But in 21st-century America, contracts and the rule of law apparently don’t mean anything, at least not if the people at the other end are ordinary workers. So, rather than inconvenience all those rich folks at the Chicago Board of Trade or other highly successful businesses with a larger tax bill, the plan is to stiff the firefighters, the schoolteachers, and the people who collected garbage for 30 years.

It may turn out to be the case that the rich and powerful can just rewrite the rules as they go along. But at least the people should know that theft is now in style when it’s their property at stake. Dean Baker