Progress Illinois

The private health insurance industry has gone to great lengths -- and spent big bucks -- to put a stranglehold on the health care reform debate. By the nonprofit watchdog Public Campaign Action Fund's count, insurance companies and HMOs have spent nearly $700,000 per day lobbying against reforms this year. And no reform has received more scrutiny than the public option, which seeks to cover the uninsured and bring the cost of private premiums back down to earth.

Today, local members of the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition staged a rally at the doors of Blue Cross/Blue Shield's Chicago headquarters to push back against the industry's anti-reform efforts and voice their support for the public plan.

"Last year two Blue Cross/Blue Shield executives got a combined bonus of $26 million," the Campaign for Better Health Care's Jonathan VanderBrug said. "They have been partying with our money. All the while denying us care ... The party for them stops now." Watch an excerpt from his remarks:

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During the next week, Chicago will play host to two political rallies: the "A New Way Forward" (ANWF) demonstration taking place tomorrow and the "Tax Day Tea Party" on April 15.  The two events share some similarities: Both are part of nationally coordinated efforts.  Both are also premised on frustrations with the economic plans being pursued in Washington.  But there is a crucial difference between them: One is advancing a specific policy alternative, while the other seeks to ... well, we're not sure exactly.

Today, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan took the time to dig through the literature put out by the tea party organizers and found himself "befuddled" by what exactly these protests are trying to achieve:

As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.

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The latest episode of PBS' Bill Moyers Journal includes a 25-minute profile of Chicago community organizer James Thindwa, who works with the group Jobs with Justice. The report traverses many of the great organizing efforts that we've covered here at Progress Illinois over the past year: from the Republic Windows sit-in to the fight with Wal-Mart for a living wage to the mobilization behind the Employee Free Choice Act. Moyers' synopsis of the 2006 big box fight is particularly useful.  Watch it:

You can find the entire report here and more on Thindwa here.

The "New Way Forward" (ANWF) anti-bailout protests scheduled for April 11 are brilliant in their lack of institutional organization.  One of the main drags on widespread involvement in public demonstrations is that they're often sponsored by groups that engender suspicion or who push an agenda that is broader than the motivating concern -- an agenda that deters potential participants who don't share the organizers' views.

The ANWF protests, by contrast, aren't based around any organization, ideology, or individual.  They stem from the widespread frustration with Washington's handling of the financial crisis and seek to advance an idea for a better approach.  As Show Me Progress recounts, ANWF's genesis came as a bunch of friends with organizing experience watched a Bill Moyers Journal episode on the banking crisis:

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For the past few years, Cristina Garcia (pictured right) has hounded officials in Springfield and brought the campaign for humane immigration reform to the streets of Chicago. Last week, she took her advocacy to a whole new level. Through a national program hatched by the Center for Community Change (nicely profiled by NPR), Garcia and a team of organizers from Illinois headed to D.C. to lobby from the perspective of “what’s really happening on the streets of Chicago.”

Knowing that a former South Side community organizer lives in the White House gave the 30-year-old Erie Neighborhood House staffer more confidence about the prospect of change in the halls of Congress. Also slated to take part in the program are staffers from Organization of the NorthEast, Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, as well as veteran organizer Ed Shurna of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. We caught up with Garcia on Friday to hear about the experience. Here are some excerpts from our interview:

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It’s sundown on the fifth day of a historic sit-in at Republic Windows and Doors, but workers at the Chicago factory aren’t going anywhere.

We’re hearing that representatives from United Electrical Workers (UE) have yet to strike a deal with Republic management, despite an apparent commitment from the company’s lender, Bank of America (BOA), “to provide a limited amount of additional loans” to cover the pay and benefits still owed to workers.  While this development appears to be a sign of progress, the dispute isn't resolved until the union leaders say it is.  From the AP:

Leah Fried, a spokeswoman for the union representing the workers, said Tuesday that it was too soon to know whether the sit-in will be called off. She said that workers would have to vote to end the action but that negotiations among the bank, the company and union representatives continued.

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During the past five days, employees at Republic Windows and Doors have shown the nation that when united, workers can take on big business and advocate for their rights on the job. Judging by the public’s response, people are sympathetic to their fight.

On that front, Illinois labor leaders are organizing a rally tomorrow in support of a people’s bailout. Led by the Chicago chapter of Jobs With Justice (JWJ) and several other unions, demonstrators will meet at the doors of Chicago’s Bank of America (BOA) office at noon to demand the bank use the billions it’s received through the federal bailout program for its intended purpose—serving the public.

BOA’s unwillingness to extend enough credit to cover overdue wages and benefits owed to the Republic employees symbolizes the sort of corporate greed that has driven the growing wealth gap that we’ve reported on before. Labor leaders see the corporate disregard for the Chicago workers as an opportunity to galvanize support for their cause.

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Late last week, the Obama campaign announced a plan to launch a massive voter registration drive, dubbed "Vote for Change." The campaign plans to mobilize its army of grassroots supporters to register thousands of new voters for the general election. The plan is an ambitious one: not only does the campaign hope to bring voter participation in the general up above 50 percent, it also targets all 50 states, even places where Obama is thought to have zero chance of winning.

Since the announcement, Vote for Change has been widely reported on as an example of the campaign looking beyond the primary to an eventual general election battle against John McCain. But according to deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, the massive registration effort is also a way for the Obama campaign to have a far-reaching impact on down-ticket Democratic races across the country:

Hildebrand cited Wyoming as an example. The March 8 caucus state got little attention from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and it's a long shot as a Democratic pickup in the presidential election. But Obama, who beat Clinton in Wyoming easily, built a volunteer team there that can now be dispatched to aid Gary Trauner, who lost a 2006 race for the state's at-large House seat by 1,000 votes. Trauner has a better shot this year: The GOP incumbent who beat him, Rep. Barbara Cubin, is retiring. "We're looking for opportunities beyond the presidential campaign," Hildebrand said.

While Vote for Change doesn't officially kick off until after next week's elections in Indiana and North Carolina, the primary itself continues to motivate record numbers of people to sign up. The Washington Post reports that one million new Democratic voters have registered in the last seven primaries, and people registering to vote have flooded the election boards in the run up to the May 6th elections. In North Carolina, 165,000 new voters registered before deadline and 150,000 have signed up in Indiana.

Over at his blog, Hiram Wurf has a post up about House Bill 1826 and the grassroots movement that has risen up to support it.

The story begins with a Facebook page, “Students for the Illinois Marriage Equality Bill”, which attracted over 8,000 online members and ultimately the attention of one state legislator:

State Representative Greg Harris, an advocate of Civil Unions recognized that these self-organized, grassroots voices represented an important part of an activist movement to support his House Bill 1826, historic legislation to extend basic legal protections to committed opposite-sex, same-sex and senior couples in Illinois by creating civil unions. Now there is a website.

That website, CivilUnionsIllinois.org, is a helpful clearinghouse for information about the fight for equal domestic partnership rights, and it offers suggestions on how to get involved. For instance, the site provides a ready-made letter that you can send to your representatives in the statehouse, urging them to support HB 1826.

Wurf has also collected some compelling stories about real Illinoisans who would benefit from the passage of this common sense legislation.