By Steve Rhodes

“Sears Holdings Corp. suffered its worst stock decline in six weeks after acknowledging ‘substantial doubt’ about its future, raising fresh concerns about whether a company that was once the world’s largest retailer can survive,” Bloomberg reports.
“Sears added so-called going-concern language to its latest annual report filing, suggesting that weak earnings have cast a pall on its ability to keep operating. The 131-year-old department-store chain, which has lost more than $10 billion in recent years, was cited last year by Fitch Ratings as a company at high risk of defaulting.”
Not to make light of a disaster long in the making, but back in January, amidst discouraging Sears news, Beachwood Labs got to work on a recovery plan for a post that got lost in the shuffle. Here’s that post now:

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Posted on March 22, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

“You might have heard this one before,” Lee Provost writes for the Ottawa, Illinois Times.
“Believe it or not, the South Suburban Airport may be closer to becoming a reality that anyone thought.
“At least according to U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly, who’s congressional district includes the proposed site as well as the Kankakee area.”
I wish I could believe. I have been a longtime supporter of the South Suburban Airport, more typically known as Peotone.
Just to kind of bookend my reasoning, in 2002 I wrote in a Chicago magazine article about Richard M. Daley that if he “were less concerned with hoarding political power and more concerned about the broader needs of the region, the airport mess would have been solved already. In 1986, a state study determined that Chicago would need a third airport by 2000. How right that study turned out to be.”
In 2014, I wrote for Crain’s how building Peotone could actually save lives. I still believe that.

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Posted on March 20, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

I need work, projects, assignments, collaborations. Here is my extended resume/clips/bio/career interests. Now, in this SlideShare version, the links don’t work, though you can click through and download it and then you’re good to go. Also, I’ll just place a linky Word for Mac version below this one as another option.

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Here’s the linky Mac for Word doc:
RhodesResume2017.doc
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Now, perhaps the biggest problem I had was picking out specific Papers columns to show, as well as other Beachwood work. I’m going to work on that; if you have any favorites or suggestions, let me know.
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I’ll place a more proper version, or at least the downloadable linky version, on the site soon as a permanent addition.

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Posted on March 17, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

“For years, Chicago has patched up budget deficits with long-term borrowing – an expensive habit that Mayor Rahm Emanuel inherited, perpetuated and has vowed to break,” the Tribune reports.
“But a Tribune analysis of the city’s latest bond sale, a $1.2 billion offering earlier this year, shows that the mayor will continue to run the city with borrowed money, at great long-term expense, through the rest of his term in 2019.”
I can’t wait for the next mayor, who undoubtedly will be one of the current mayor’s biggest cheerleaders, to assume office and immediately blame Rahm for the mess he or she has inherited, declaring that the old way of doing business is over.

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Posted on March 16, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

In the last few days, having read articles about Rachel Maddow’s booming popularity in the Trump era, I once again became disheartened. Why? Because as I wrote in a note to myself about a possible post, Rachel Maddow is a master propagandist masquerading as a journalist.
I won’t rehash the Maddow disaster that unfolded last night; you can catch up with that in plenty of other places, though I found this summary from Columbia Journalism Review’s morning newsletter to be a good start:

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Posted on March 15, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

Editor’s Note: The Papers will continue in the abbreviated form you’ve seen a lot of recently for the foreseeable future, though I intend to still include an item of the day or multiple items on some days when circumstances warrant and I have the time and energy. I will also still write the occasional long column. But on a lot of days, it will be like what it’s been lately. I have to pull back. I hope to write about what’s happening with me and the site, which will continue, though not as robustly, in the coming weeks. (I’m not dying or anything, it’s not that dramatic.) I hope you’ll still keep reading, even if the column/site isn’t what it used to be. A further explanation is forthcoming. Thanks.

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Posted on March 13, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

I still have some personal and business issues to take care of, so I’m just going to take the week off instead of doing a half-assed job just to get a column up every day. I’ll still be posting the work of our other contributors, and some social media recaps. Otherwise, I’ll plan to re-start the Papers on March 13.

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Posted on March 10, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

I still have some personal and business issues to take care of, so I’m just going to take the week off instead of doing a half-assed job just to get a column up every day. I’ll still be posting the work of our other contributors, and some social media recaps. Otherwise, I’ll plan to re-start the Papers on March 13.

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Posted on March 9, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

I still have some personal and business issues to take care of, so I’m just going to take the week off instead of doing a half-assed job just to get a column up every day. I’ll still be posting the work of our other contributors, and some social media recaps. Otherwise, I’ll plan to re-start the Papers on March 13.

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Posted on March 8, 2017

By Steve Rhodes

I still have some personal and business issues to take care of, so I’m just going to take the week off instead of doing a half-assed job just to get a column up every day. I’ll still be posting the work of our other contributors, and some social media recaps. Otherwise, I’ll plan to re-start the Papers on March 13.

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Posted on March 7, 2017