Illustration by David Hine. It all began with a napkin. The international food-processing company Archer Daniels Midland was paying $250 per shipping container to transfer its goods between two railroads in Decatur, and they were looking for a way to cut that cost. Scott Fredericksen, ADM’s president of transportation, and Mark Schweitzer, then the company’s […]
ADM
Posted inOpinion
Big business and Madigan business
House Speaker Michael Madigan’s spokesman said last week that his boss’ statement opposing further corporate “handouts” basically “speaks for itself.” But does it? Madigan invoked the populist gods last week as he called for an end to the “case-by-case system of introducing and debating legislation whenever a corporation is looking for free money from Illinois […]
Posted inOpinion
Quinn vows to veto ADM, cites pension reform ‘issue of a lifetime’
Gov. Pat Quinn refused to say for several days whether he’d support a $1.2 million a year tax break for Archer Daniels Midland to move 100 jobs out of Decatur and open up a world headquarters and new tech center in Chicago. But last week he made it clear that without pension reform, the ADM […]
Posted inOpinion
Pennies and nickels
For a lot of people in Springfield, Decatur is just a place to stop when you get hungry on the way back from a U of I game. But people live there too – at least some still do; the city has lost nearly 20 percent of its population since 1980. And it’s going to […]
