If you want to get a sense of one possible consequences of the financial chaos caused by the high-stakes gamblers who led the U.S. economy to the brink of ruin, look in a child’s eyes.

Between rising foreclosures, prices and unemployment, and falling property values and inflation-adjusted wages, American schools face a serious challenge to the treasured notion of a free public education.

Add unknowns such as state and federal funding, and 21st century schools are being squeezed like a grape in a nutcracker. This vital public issue is being addressed by the Presidential candidates, but too often overlooked in the media attention to general economic woes. Read the rest of this entry »

Candidates to replace retiring U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood (R- Peoria) from the 18th Congressional District are, in alphabetical order, Colleen Callahan (Democrat), Sheldon Schafer (Green), and Aaron Schock (Republican). Below are responses to questions sent to all three campaigns, questions derived from the nonpartisan Project Vote Smart – supported by the late U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and former President Gerald Ford, a Republican, as well as retired U.S. Sen. George McGovern (D-South Dakota) and ex-President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat.

In mid-July, Schock explained to me that he refused to reply to Project Vote Smart’s questionnaire, but “if anyone wants to know my positions, they can come to where I’m talking and ask me.” Then he promised me that he’d respond to my written questions. However, multiple calls to his office, chats with helpful staffers and emails all resulted in no response.

Still, here are 15 issues, presented in alphabetical order, and candidate responses (Colleen Callahan =CC, Sheldon Schafer = SS, Aaron Schock= AS).) Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who’s seen TV’s Law & Order has seen a dramatization of the prickly relationship between police and prosecutors, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when any incumbent State’s Attorney is not endorsed by police groups.

However, there are real risks in raising crime as the main issue in the campaign between Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons, a Democrat, and Republican challenger Darin LaHood.

First, no one besides criminals favors crime – there’s no “Go crime!” lobby to oppose real law and order – so the debate can escalate into who’s tougher – and tough means different things to different people.

For instance, is it “tougher” to torture suspects or to adhere to international law? Read the rest of this entry »

The Chamber of Commerce presents itself as a civic group promoting business, but in aggressive campaigning against Democrats, lobbying against equal pay for women and consumer protection, and pushing for restrictions on victims’ right to a day in court, the Chamber shows another side.

Of course, there often are conflicts between individuals and bureaucratic organizations that purport to represent them: churches and positions on civil unions for gays, for instance, or the Farm Bureau and its seeming preference for Big Ag at the expense of family farmers, or political parties who say they’re Green but favor nuclear energy, or talk fiscal conservatism and increase the national debt from $6 trillion to $9 trillion in eight years. Whether you’re a member of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) annoyed that they backed the Medicare Part D drug plan or a member of the Painters union that endorsed Mike Huckabee and Hillary Clinton even though you preferred Ron Paul and John Edwards, it happens. Read the rest of this entry »

June should be Computer Month, and it’s a fine time to starting recycling common materials most folks may not even see as waste.

Or as toxic.

Computer scientists Howard Engstrom and Maurice V. Wilkes were born in June (on June 21, 1902, and June 23, 1913, respectively).

The first commercial electronic computer, UNIVAC 1, was dedicated at the U.S. Census Bureau on June 14, 1951. Three years earlier, on June 21, a computer used a stored program for the first time at the University of Manchester in England.

More recently, the personal computer was given a boost on June 10, 1977, when Apple shipped its first Apple II models. And on June 8, 1979, the first computer information service, The Source, went online.

Finally, the woman recognized as the first computer programmer, Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, on June 5, 1833, met British mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage, who’d invent the first mechanical computer.

June is more than a time for brides, then.

This June is a good time to realize that computers eventually make up a huge part of the stream of electronic waste – “e-waste” – that threatens people and communities’ landfills.

“Electronic waste is something that a lot of people don’t really know much about,” says Karen Raithel, recycling director for Peoria County. “There are computer components and parts of TVs and other devices we just don’t associate with batteries and oil and so on.” Read the rest of this entry »

To many, May means Mayday and May flowers – violets in baskets left at doorsteps where bells are rung and visitors flee, laughing. May means Mother’s Day, too, of course, but more, too.

Personally, May is when my son was born – 21 years ago this month. And it’s when my own youthful innocence died – at Kent State 38 years ago.

Then, I thought that government would listen to its people; that it would care what demonstrators thought – about the Vietnam War, women’s rights, poverty and a whole host of issues.

But the government didn’t hear, and a detachment of National Guardsmen accidentally fired on peaceful protestors, Americans were told, killing four and wounding nine.

It turns out, however, that the government did hear, and that the shooting of unarmed protestors was no accident. Read the rest of this entry »

March had too few days when kites remind kids that wind is a power that rivals the rainfall expected in April showers.

And central Illinois has too many of the silent, skeletal remains of windmills from decades past.

But things change; progress occurs.

Sometimes in spite of political impediments to reform. Read the rest of this entry »

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, but one of its key provisions is increasingly ignored, hurting working Americans and U.S. society.

The last major piece of New Deal legislation, that law guaranteed a minimum wage, banned child labor, set the maximum work week at 40 hours, and made the 8-hour day standard. But that standard has virtually vanished in an economy that values corporate profit over individual well-being, and that requires households that want to keep up with rising prices to work multiple jobs or as many hours as possible – or as ordered.

Neither organized labor nor the political parties are helping enough, although there’s a little promise in the Presidential campaign. U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) supported 24 of 26 proposals advocated by Take Care Net, a nonprofit group that surveyed all Presidential candidates. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) backed 21 of 26.

No Republican responded to the survey, which asked about initiatives such as limiting mandatory overtime and indexing the minimum wage to productivity or inflation.

The 8-hour movement has deep roots in Illinois, where it first was a demand during the Civil War. The state legislature in 1867 passed an 8-hour day law, but it had a huge loophole letting employers “contract” with workers to work longer days — foreshadowing future laws with other loopholes.

By the late 19th century, the 8-hour day was a key issue of America’s growing labor movement, centered somewhat in Chicago. Almost six decades of organizing, agitating and lobbying culminated in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It finally legalized the notion expressed in labor’s rally cry, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

The FLSA was supposed to work through an indirect financial penalty on employers who made people work overtime: “time-and-a-half” pay. That was not meant to enrich those who worked a lot of hours as much as encourage employers to hire more people to meet their needs.

Today, of course, one of modern civilization’s greatest achievements – earned leisure – is almost gone. In fact, U.S. workers spend more time on the job than workers in any developed country because they’re exempted or compelled to worker longer days and weeks and months and years.

The FLSA didn’t cover farm workers, domestic workers, employees and management. So many companies now call some workers assistant managers and escape their legal obligations, pay time-and-a-half because it’s cheaper than hiring full-time employees, improperly demand overtime as a condition of employment, require overtime for sometimes-elusive “compensatory” time off, create high-falutin’ schemes like “flex time” or “alternative schedules” that compress weeks into days of 10 or 12 hours, or just play to the increasing dependence workers have for any extra income they can earn to pay rising costs for utilities, gasoline, housing and consumer goods.

Take Back Your Time Day — an initiative of the Simplicity Forum, part of the Simplicity Movement promoting “simple, just and sustainable ways of life” — is a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. TBYTD studied the American workplace and found that:

* Millions of Americans are overworked, over-scheduled and stressed out.

* We put in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s — despite promises of a coming Age of Leisure by the year 2000.

* Mandatory overtime is at near record levels, in spite of an economic downturn.

* Americans work an average of almost nine full weeks (350 hours) longer a year than Europeans do.

There are obvious and well-documented increase in likelihood of accidents or injuries that can result from longer hours and worker fatigue, which is why there are regulations limiting work days for jobs like pilots, train crews, air-traffic controllers, and truckers. (That said, the American Trucking Association last year got the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the courts to relax rules for long-haul truckers, so companies can make truckers spend 11 hours a day driving 35-Ton rigs instead of the previous cap of 10-hour days.)

Time stress hurts all of us in other, different ways, the TBYTD says.

* Time stress threatens health, cutting time for exercise and encouraging consumption of calorie-laden fast foods. Job stress and burnout costs the U.S. economy more than $300 billion a year.

* Time stress threatens marriages, families and relationships as there’s less time for others, to care for children and elders, or to just relax.

* It weakens communities. There’s less time to know neighbors, supervise youngsters and volunteer.

* It reduces employment since fewer people are hired.

* It even contributes to the destruction of our environment. Studies show that lack of time encourages use of convenience and throwaway items and reduces recycling.

If Big Business can’t control itself, citizens must pressure employers to abide by the 8-hour day or lobby elected officials to curb mandatory overtime.

Employers can “rent” workers for 8 hours; we need 8 hours to rest; and we need 8 hours for our families, communities, world and future.

(For more information or TBYTD’s most recent newsletter, go online to www.timeday.org/)

(Take Care Net’s Presidential Work Family survey is posted at http://www.takecarenet.org/)

Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.

It was 40 years ago when progressive Americans started to believe that they could change politics, but the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the ostracism of Gene McCarthy and the “coronation” of centrist Hubert H. Humphrey showed that progressives shouldn’t expect to start at the top and work their way back to the grassroots.

That was clearer four years later when progressive George McGovern was successfully nominated but defeated by Richard Nixon in a landslide that showed a consequence of building political organizations from street level.

In Peoria, Central Illinois and the whole state, that wisdom is bearing fruit, as more progressives are organizing grassroots efforts, running for office, and serving.

Successes range from State Sen. Dave Koehler of Peoria (D-46th) to U.S. Rep. Phil Hare of Rock Island (D-17th Congressional Dist.), but action echoes throughout Illinois, from the Greens to the campaign for the 92nd House seat in the General Assembly.

Partly as a result of Rich Whitney’s campaign for Governor as the Greens’ candidate (he got more than 10% of the vote in 2006), the Green Party is a legally established, “viable” state political party in Illinois. Plus, membership has grown, with chapters in communities and campuses and dozens of Green Party candidates filing petitions to run for office — for Congress, the state legislature and county and local offices.

“This truly is a monumental moment for the Green Party,” says Walter Pituc, the Greens’ congressional campaign coordinator. “Previously, we’d only had one congressional candidate ever in Illinois Green Party history. This year, we had candidates file in nine districts. That’s pretty remarkable growth, and we’re only going to continue to grow beyond this election.”

The Green Party is having its national convention in Chicago in July.

Elsewhere, Illinois activists affiliated with Democracy for Illinois – a spinoff of Democracy for America, started by Howard Dean – total more than 600.

Meanwhile, Republicans’ ex-Majority Leader Dennis Hastert’s 14th District around Aurora has a strong progressive candidate in union carpenter and former Navy intelligence analyst John Laesch; the Cook County State’s Attorney’s race has progressive Cook County Commissioner Larry Suffredin running; the 26th House District on Chicago’s South Side has former Barack Obama aide Will Burns running; and in DuPage – too often dismissed as a GOP stronghold – “Turn DuPage Blue” is a new progressive group trying to revive that county’s Democratic Party.

Peoria’s Democratic Party has some slight discordance with Jehan Gordon and Allen Mayer competing to be Democrats’ candidate for the 92nd House seat, but both are decent public servants with progressive impulses. That’s a bright spot. Gordon is on the board at the Pleasant Hill School District and has the backing of some unions, including the UAW and the Laborers, plus Koehler, former State Sen. George Shadid and five members of the Peoria County Board. Mayer is on the Peoria County Board, where he led the fight to stop the landfill expansion, and is supported by the Sierra Club and other unions, including the Operating Engineers.

Regardless of the outcome of the Feb. 5 primary, their points of views are mostly progressive – as are most Americans’, no matter how they identify themselves.

Americans have moderate to progressive opinions on 10 key issues, according to a comprehensive report from Campaign for America’s Future, The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth. Most people support progressive positions on organized labor, taxes, gays, foreign policy, guns, crime, the environment, energy, immigration and health care, the study shows.

Illinois is typical, too

“There’s a lot of progressive action going on in Illinois,” writes Irregular News, an organization that maintains online information on progressivism in all 50 states. “Illinois elected the great progressive hope for America, Barack Obama. There’s a reason Obama got elected – Illinois knows true vision when it sees it.”

Statewide, Illinois’ Congressional delegation has strong progressives, including Jan Schakowsky, Danny Davis, Bobby Rush, Luis Gutierrez, Rahm Emanuel, Jerry Costello and Hare. But Democrats don’t yet have a candidate running for retiring U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood’s open seat after ex-Bradley basketball coach Dick Versace dropped out in December.

“We reach out to possible candidates all the time,” said Peoria County Democratic chairman Billy Halstead, who’s expected help pick a candidate after the primary. “We get people involved at the grassroots, knocking on doors, putting up signs – finding out what campaigning is all about. Some respond, like Jehan Gordon, and some don’t.

“It’s like when my son said he’d like to run a restaurant some day,” Halstead continued. “I said, ‘Great! Let’s see if you can get a job as a busboy and see the whole operation from the ground up’.” There’s a lot of potential for more success in Central Illinois, he added.

“Steve Waterworth ran against LaHood and – with almost no resources – got 33% of the vote,” Halstead said. “In 2000, Joyce Harant challenged him and got 33% of the vote. So there’s a core that’ll support us. We have to win those independent-minded swing voters.”

Peoria-area Democrats get help from the state and national party for get-out-the-vote efforts and for Congressional races, Halstead said. To reform government will take finding and developing candidates and relying on old-fashioned organizing.

“We’re not like a lot of Republicans, who have a lot of money and own their own businesses and grow up with silver spoons in their mouths,” he said. “We’re regular people and have to work hard at the street level.”

Throughout Illinois, progressives have hope.

“With all this grassroots activity this election season, the progressive tide is rising once again, much as it did in the 1960s and ‘70s,” said Dick Simpson, chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois/Chicago.

See the Democracy for Illinois web site at www.dfalink.com/illinois

See the Illinois Green Party web site at http://ilgp.org/

For progressive news and analysis, see http://www.irregularnews.com/

For the report: Progressive majority: Why a Conservative America is a Myth, go to http://mediamatters.org/progmaj/

Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.

A medical test was recommended. Insurance cards and forms were completed, and competent health professionals conducted the procedure. A follow-up exam was urged and completed. Good news. Time passed. (More than six months.)

The first notice that hundreds of dollars was past due came as an initial statement from the medical center 26 weeks later. A kind woman answered a phone call, looked up the account, and noted that a Preferred Provider plan applied the first charge to a deductible, then denied the second charge. The secondary insurer, an HMO, never responded to the medical provider.

Contacted, the HMO said they’d not received an Explanation of Benefits from the PPO. Called again, the PPO - which sent no previous notice about anything - said they’ll send one.

The balance remains unpaid.

Health insurers that drag their feet like turtles on sedatives are familiar - for people fortunate enough to even have health insurance.

In fact, according to the state Office of Legislative Research in Connecticut (where several insurance corporations are based), such practices aren’t uncommon, with some actions “arbitrary, reckless, intentional, malicious [and] fraudulent.” States supposedly regulate insurers through laws like the Unfair Claims Settlement Practices Acts, which mandate that insurers process claims promptly and prohibit requiring unnecessary or repetitive reports or forms. Still, some health insurers don’t handle claims promptly, delay settling claims, deny claims without reasonable justification, require duplicate information, cancel policies or increase premiums - all to avoid paying and to boost profits.

The problem with health care is less about health providers than insurance providers.

Nevertheless, timid reformers in Springfield and Washington are confusing proposals to provide health insurance with providing health care. Only Democrats John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich advocate plans addressing the need to efficiently provide health care to all Americans: a single-payer system.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has pushed an expansion of health-care coverage despite misgivings by public advocates, his own party, and an increasingly divided labor movement. The California Nurses Association strongly supports single payer, as do more than 350 union locals, as well as 80-some members of the House of Representatives on record as backing such as bill (HR 676), plus millions of regular Americans.

“Single-payer” describes a way to run a program in which one entity administers it - a government, in the case of Canada’s health-care system. The single payer collects all fees for the goal, like health care, and disburses all payments. Incidentally, “universal health care” isn’t the same thing. It may be single-payer, but it needn’t be. Universal health care refers to programs intended to guarantee that everyone in a certain place - state or nation - has access to most types of health care, and in theory that could be arranged through existing health insurers.

But they are part of the problem - financially more wasteful than skyrocketing hospital costs, redundant (and expensive) medical equipment, malpractice insurance and the lawsuits (and malpractice itself) that cause it, and exorbitant salaries for a few medical professionals.

Amazingly, AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney and leaders of the breakaway Change to Win labor coalition in November spoke out in favor of Blagojevich’s employer-based state health insurance reform plan, similar to one introduced by Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.), Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) and Ed Rendell (D-Pa.).

Such employer-based “reforms” are criticized by the California Nurses Association (CNA), Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) and other progressive groups as undermining a better solution - a single-payer system.

“Blagojevich [first] proposed to raise taxes, which Illinoisans would then pay to insurance companies - but private insurers are the problem, not the solution,” said Dr. Quentin Young, an Illinoisan who co-founded and leads PNHP. “The only effective solution is a single-payer public insurance program.

“We pay the world’s highest health-care taxes already,” he continued. “While Canadians live longer and healthier, they spend just over $3,000 per capita, compared to our $7,000. Because we rely on private insurers, we pay more for less.”

Blagojevich says his plan is the best that can be done - echoing Hillary Clinton when she spearheaded the doomed “managed care” reform in the early 1990s.

“So much of what you do in government is done through political realities,” said Blagojevich, quoted in the publication Corporate Crime Reporter. “The art of politics in government is the recognition of what is possible. The choice is between whether you take an existing structure - an employer-based health care system - and build on that, shore that up, or whether you scrap the whole thing and create a whole new system that historically has not taken root in the United States.

“In a perfect world and in theory, the single-payer system is one that I could certainly support,” he added. “As a practical matter, I don’t think it is something we are going to achieve in the near future.”

Sweeney recognized single-payer’s popularity, but he seemed to surrender, too.

“I recognize that there is tremendous support for single payer,” he said. “But as the Governor has said, it is important that we move on health care coverage now with what we have the political will to achieve. That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to continue to strive for a single-payer health care system.”

However, other interests threaten to derail single-payer before it ever gets on track.

Behind the retreat-as-reform press conference with Sweeney were two (labored-backed) insurance companies, Union Labor Life Insurance Co. and American Income Life, plus PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America lobby), a Blue Cross Blue Shield consultant, and former Democratic Congressman Richard Gephardt, now with the world’s largest law firm, DLA Piper (which represents more than half of the top 250 companies in the Fortune 500). The appearance was put on by “America’s Agenda: Health Care for All,” whose board includes a few union leaders, attorney Joseph Bock (a campaign contributor to Republican and Democratic candidates alike) and PhRMA vice president Jan Faiks.

Young, the PNHP doctor, said other proposals for reform are inferior, “patch-quilt failed systems that won’t work.”

Only Edwards’ proposal even comes close, he continued, and Clinton in particular “is ultimately duplicitous. People are being ripped off and these liberal Democrats are doing nothing to ease their pain.”

Independent-minded progressives and conservatives see the problem with relying on insurers.

Daniel Gallington in the conservative Washington Times newspaper last month wrote, “Private insurance companies are licking their chops over national insurance ideas that would have billions of dollars paid to them - no matter who pays.”

Young summarizes the real choice - one ignored by all Republican and most Democratic Presidential candidates and a troubling number of labor leaders.

“Replacing private insurers with a single public coverage program - a kind of Medicare for all - would recover enough funds currently lost to administration to cover all Illinoisans without additional cost to the state, businesses or consumers,” Young said.

For details on single-payer health-care, go online to -http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what_is_single_payer.php.

Also, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) has a valuable Frequently Asked Questions page - http://www.pnhp.org/facts/singlepayer_faq.php

Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University.Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.