John Deere, one of the Fortune 500 companies that still calls Illinois home, has been making capital expenditure decisions that Wirepoints founder Mark Glennon and Dan Proft described Monday morning as a slow-motion divestiture the state’s political class and business press have either missed or chosen to ignore. A new excavator factory is being built in Kernersville, North Carolina, and a one-point-two-million-square-foot distribution center with one hundred and fifty permanent jobs and four hundred to five hundred union construction positions is going up outside Hebron, Indiana. Proft said he was told by a reliable source in the industrial property sector that John Deere had been ready to green-light a Chicago location for that distribution center before taking a hard look at the lawlessness in and around the city and choosing Indiana instead. Glennon confirmed the pattern, noting that companies that pass up Illinois rarely say so publicly to avoid burning bridges, but the capital investment decisions tell the story clearly enough without any comment. A text from a Chicago crane operator during the segment put a fine point on it: there are currently six standing permitted tower cranes in the city with only three more on the books for all of 2026.
Glennon said the visual evidence of capital flight from Illinois is stark enough that Wirepoints has posted a graphic from Visual Capitalist showing wealth and population movement out of California and Illinois and into other states in terms that are impossible to misread. He said anyone who drives through South Carolina, North Carolina, or the broader Sunbelt and looks at the scale of manufacturing investment, from auto plants to John Deere facilities, gets a clear picture of where American industrial capital is going and where it emphatically is not. Proft drew the comparison to Caterpillar’s departure for Texas, which Illinois’s political class initially greeted with a dismissive good riddance before the economic consequences became undeniable, and predicted Pritzker will be making a similar statement about John Deere within a couple of years while pretending to be surprised.
The Illinois-specific policy news that dominated the rest of the conversation was a Springfield bill sponsored by House Speaker Chris Welch that would effectively mandate that park districts, forest preserves, and other local green spaces across the state allow homeless encampments. Glennon said the bill is moving, not some marginal piece of legislation, and a hearing was scheduled for the following day in the housing committee. Hundreds of witness slips have been filed in support, mostly from homeless advocacy organizations, while a long list of institutional opponents has formed including the Illinois Municipal League, the Illinois Association of Counties, the Forest Preserves of Cook County, multiple suburban police departments, and municipalities including Lombard, Western Springs, and Elmhurst. Despite the breadth of opposition from the people who would actually have to manage the consequences, the bill has received almost no press coverage and most of the public is unaware it is moving.
Glennon said Austin, Texas, offers a direct cautionary example. The city allowed homeless encampments in its parks in 2019, including along the lakefront at Town Lake, and the parks were rapidly trashed with needles, fire hazards, and open drug use. Even liberal Austin reversed the policy within two years by public vote, after which the state of Texas passed its own ban on encampments. All of that evidence is available and being ignored in Springfield. He said the deeper problem is that allowing people to live in parks treats the symptom of homelessness while doing nothing about its causes, whether drug addiction, mental illness, or economic failure, and constitutes disgraceful public policy regardless of the compassionate framing it receives.
Proft also noted a Tribune report that sixteen thousand immigrants, including refugees and asylum seekers, may lose access to SNAP food assistance in Illinois following federal eligibility changes that took effect April first as part of the budget reconciliation bill, and a separate bill advancing through the Illinois House that would allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public universities. Glennon said the Springfield Democratic majority is, in his characterization, undeterred on open borders and continuing to push as far as they can get away with regardless of what polling says the public actually wants on immigration enforcement.
On a more encouraging note, both Proft and Glennon said they had heard that citizen investigator Nick Shirley, whose low-cost method of knocking on doors of registered benefits program providers in Minnesota exposed hundreds of millions in Feeding Our Future fraud, is considering Illinois as his next destination. Glennon said the scale of the potential problem in Illinois is significant, with hundreds of nonprofit organizations receiving billions in state funding with minimal legislative oversight, and that the combination of Shirley’s investigative approach and the JD Vance-led federal task force now looking specifically at Illinois represents the first serious scrutiny the state’s benefits spending ecosystem has faced.