Illinois’ Clean Energy bill sets path for future

 Bill Knight column for 9-16, 17 or 18, 2021

 Maybe Illinoisans can breathe easier, as a comprehensive energy bill ensuring the state achieves 100% carbon-free energy by 2050 passed the Senate 37-17 on Monday after the House approved it last week 83-33, with 11 Republican Yes votes.

The action occurred weeks after a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that addressing climate change was almost “beyond reach”; days after a cloud of coal ash caused by an equipment failure at Springfield’s City Water, Light and Power (CWLP) plant hovered above the city; and hours after an urgent call for worldwide action by more than 220 medical and public-health journals.

Passage followed state Rep. Ann Williams (D-Chicago) brokering a deal changing a Senate bill that passed Sept. 3. The House kept most of the Senate’s language but mandated that coal plants cut emissions. The final draft requires 40% of Illinois’ power coming from renewable sources by 2030, and 50% by 2040.

 “This is a climate bill not a utility bill,” Williams said. “We need to address climate, but we also have to ensure that we keep our nuclear fleet operating to that we have a bridge to a renewable-energy future.”

Gov. Pritzer said the bill “puts consumers and climate first.”

The publicly owned CWLP and the Prairie State Generating Station in downstate Marissa – one of the largest polluters in the nation – could remain open until 2045 (longer if they eliminate emissions). But if they don’t cut emissions 45% by 2035, they could be closed.

Illinois’ privately owned coal- and oil-fired power plants would have to shut down by 2030. Natural gas plants have until 2045, and until then their carbon emissions in a year cannot exceed their average releases over the past three years.

Provisions include:

* zero carbon emissions by 2045,

* saving three nuclear plants and their jobs,

* $500 million/year to support wind and solar projects

* job-training programs for the renewable-energy sector,

* increasing electric vehicles to 1 million by 2030, with a $4,000 rebate/buyer, and

* mandating union-scale pay for large-scale renewable-energy projects.

 

Pritzker backed the compromise, as did the Clean Jobs Coalition environmental group and the labor-backed Climate Jobs Illinois group.

“All the pieces of legislation are critical for reliability, solar development, clean energy,” said state Rep. Marcus Evans (D-Chicago), “and of course, all the jobs.”

CWLP and Prairie State – backed by several communities’ $5 billion investment, with bonds due in 2035 – were one obstacle. Another was different priorities by key Democrat constituencies, environmentalists and labor. A third was Exelon, ComEd’s parent company, threatening to close its Byron and Dresden nuclear plants.

Exelon/ComEd got a generous bailout for its Quad Cities and Clinton nukes in 2016, when a $235 million annual rate-hike law was arranged by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and former Democratic Speaker Mike Madigan. That deal contributed to indictments of ComEd executives, lobbyists and others, and the utility giant agreeing to pay a $200 million fine.

Environmentalists objected to giving money to the profitable Exelon without climate-friendly provisions and attention to solar, which has been hurt by inaction. Last year, Illinois’ solar industry had almost 6,000 jobs, according to Clean Energy Trust and Environmental Entrepreneurs, but it’s lost hundreds of positions since because of uncertain government support.

For its part, labor fought to protect about 1,000 jobs at the nukes and maintain fossil-fuel work, including at CWLP and Prairie State.

Common ground was reached, perhaps because of a couple of realizations.

Despite having more financial clout than environmentalists, labor leaders might have wondered where any jobs will be if Illinois is less habitable. And environmentalists maybe accepted that people will have difficulty appreciating Nature and clean air and water without decent jobs.

Joe Duffy of Climate Jobs Illinois praised negotiators overcoming “considerable differences to pass an ambitious bill.”

Giving more money to Exelon was difficult for many to stomach, but cuts in coal-plant emissions and reduced funding made it passable. Pritzker approved subsidizing Exelon’s Byron, Dresden and also Braidwood nukes $694 million over five years, much lower than the corporation’s $6 billion request. The measure also prohibits Exelon/ComEd from making customers pay for any penalties tied to the criminal probe.

Besides planning for a sustainable state, residential consumers may pay $3 to $4.50 more a month, according to Evans, who said, “We’re serious about climate change; we’re serious about just transition; we’re serious about solar development, and we not only want to be a participant nationally. We want to be a leader.”

All in all, chipping in the price of a Frappuccino, a craft beer or two Happy Meals seems literally to be a small price to pay for a decent future.

LaHood: ambitious ‘bipartisan’ advocate or extremist?

 Bill Knight column for 9-13, 14 or 15, 2021

 

 Even as a democratic socialist, I find it difficult to dislike Darin LaHood, akin to scolding a gifted musician’s child for being tone-deaf.

But Illinois’ 18th District Republican Congressman seems to exalt bipartisanship and express concerns for social issues that liberals value (health care, child-care) while steadfastly backing President Trump and embracing extreme positions.

If he’s trying to please everyone, it may backfire.

The 53-year-old attorney son of Ray LaHood, a seven-term Congressman who also served in Democratic President Obama’s cabinet, Darin was appointed in 2011 to the State Senate, where he won the seat the next year against no opponent. He served there until he replaced Republican Aaron Schock, who resigned. Darin won races in 2016, 2018 and 2020 by around 100,000 votes, perhaps helped by a Democratic Party that didn’t really compete.

In recent months, Darin’s pushed two bills dealing with health care and a third addressing family leave and child-care, all seemingly attempts to play both sides of the aisle, or insubstantial distractions from actions that may not play well with many voters.

After Darin in June received an Award for Conservative Achievement from the American Conservative Union (which also recognizes Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley), he said, “I am proud of my record advocating for our conservative values in central and west-central Illinois.”

Darin was 1 of 106 Congressional Republicans who supported December’s lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results; the day before the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection he reportedly told a newspaper he was unsure about backing the certification of votes; and on Jan. 8 “spoke out of both sides of his mouth,” according to professor emeritus Steve Hochstadt of Illinois College in Jacksonville.

Darin commented to local TV “we need to come together,” Hockstadt wrote, adding, “He still asserted that there are ‘election fraud’ issues in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan.”

Recent legislation: LaHood is the only Republican of four lawmakers who re-introduced the “Value in Health Care Act of 2020,” which would reform Medicare payments to boost involvement in Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), provider networks coordinating care and sharing financial responsibilities to increase efficiency.

“The Value in Healthcare Act is a commonsense proposal that includes substantive reforms to encourage and support greater participation by health-care providers in ACOs, particularly in our rural communities,” Darin said.

Rural health care needs help. Rural residents tend to be older, sicker and poorer than the general population. More than 40% of rural hospitals operate in the red, according to health-care consultants Navigant, which said 17.3% of Illinois’ rural hospitals are at high risk.

But that bill and a second, the “Rural and Underserved Small Hospital (RUSH) Protection Act” Darin said he introduced, may be insufficient. (Democrat Ron Kind of Wisconsin was actually its primary sponsor; Darin joined two other Democrats and two Republicans as co-sponsors.)

The president of a rural hospital network based in Canton, Ill., said neither piece of legislation will help the 81-bed Graham Hospital or its five rural clinics.

“Both could have positive impact on our peers,” said Robert Senneff, whose nonprofit hospital had net income of some $800,000 on 2020 revenues of $232 million, said the American Hospital Directory.

“What we would really like to see is to have the ability to open additional clinics in rural communities and be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid based on our costs,” Senneff said. “That was the model in the past; it was replaced by a fixed reimbursement model – significantly below our anticipated costs, making it financially impractical to expand. Residents living in those markets are then forced to seek care elsewhere or defer care.”

Darin’s third recent bill is the “Promoting Equitable Access to Paid Family Leave Act,” which seeks to amend Title IV of the Social Security Act “to provide for parental leave payments to parents after the birth or adoption of a child in lieu of child-care assistance,” Darin said.

Since Title IV sends block grants to states, one wonders whether it would use Social Security funds to substitute for direct government aid.

Darin did introduce that measure, but it stemmed from discussions by GOP colleagues Kevin Brady of Texas and others on the Ways and Means Committee, where Darin serves.

Whether fence-mending or posturing for 2022 (Darin’s claimed he’s undecided about another term based on redistricting possibilities, and Politico reported he’s considering running for governor after a remap of state judicial districts showed no open seat in his area for the Illinois Supreme Court, in which he’d expressed interest), such actions may be politically savvy, or risky. Or maybe they’re awkward nods to an increasingly diverse District since the area’s biggest city elected a liberal-leaning Black woman as mayor. Taking for granted that the 18^th is uniformly conservative seems silly.

Sometimes, you just can’t please everyone.

Worker-owned businesses becoming viable options

 Bill Knight column for 9-9, 10 or 11, 2021

 Despite living in a nation that reveres democracy, most Americans have few rights on the job, as if a big chunk of each week is lived in a dictatorship.

However, a commercial structure that can balance workers’ well-being and the bottom line exists – worker co-ops. There, ideally, worker-members share equally in profits and have influence on decisions.

“Employees who own the businesses where they work have a share in the wealth they help create, and that connection makes companies stronger, more stable, and more rooted in their communities,” said Mary Boettcher, Board Chair for the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO).

Employee-owned enterprises vary widely, though, from informal community food co-ops to the 265-location Hy-Vee supermarket chain, from Soviet-era “collective farms” to Chicago’s successful ChiFresh Kitchen, where formerly incarcerated women in a worker co-op prepare 1,000 healthy meals each week.

An inspiring example is the Rural Electric Administration cooperatives. Since the 1930s, REA co-ops have brought electricity to rural America and maintained its systems, with a slogan “owned by those we serve.”

A disappointing version was the Peoria Journal Star. For much of the 1980s and ’90s, the daily newspaper had an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, but it was set up so employees could not “vote their shares,” and a requirement for the corporation to re-purchase its stock from departing employees ultimately forced it to sell to a chain.

As Boston College professor David Ellerman wrote in 1985, there’s a difference between Employee Stock Ownership Plans and cooperatives – “ESOPs & Co-ops” – “worker capitalism” vs. “worker democracy.”

In Cleveland, the Great Lakes Brewing Company technically is employee-owned, but feelings by workers that they had no “place at the table” caused staff to unionize.

Founded in 1986, the company now has the Great Lakes Organizing Committee seeking recognition or a National Labor Relations Board election.

“This is about giving us a voice,” a GLOC activist told the Cleveland Scene alternative weekly, “but we also feel that a union would be good for business.”

Business in this country usually means a lot of people are constantly on the edge of financial ruin. Regardless of circumstances, you better show up to work or you’ll lose pay or the job. Then you won’t have health insurance or could face eviction. That’s reality.

A worker cooperative is an alternative, said Janine Jackson, program director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) – “the way they treat workers, and productivity and the balance of worker health and company success, in a pandemic and every day.

“COVID laid bare a number of conflicts, hypocrisies and frank inequities that ‘normal times’ kept hidden,” she continued. “Some faceless thing called ‘the economy’ could demand that people return to work but would not be responsible for protecting their lives and their health when they did.”

During the 20-months of the COVID pandemic, worker-owned co-ops have become more popular.

Worker-owned cooperatives make up only a tiny slice of U.S. businesses, but COVID has helped make them seem viable options.

“Given new extremes of income inequality, corporate consolidation, and union-busting – and with what work is available being increasingly unstable and episodic – it’s no wonder that people are drawn to a model that returns them power,” wrote Alissa Quart in Mother Jones magazine.

That interest has spurred a boom; a 2019 survey the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives helped conduct found 465 such enterprises – a 36% jump in five years.

“It’s typical of what people do when their government is unable to meet the moment,” said USFWC policy director Mo Manklang.

In Washington, a bipartisan proposal to encourage employee-owned businesses was introduced this summer: the Promotion and Expansion of Private Employee Ownership Act (HR 4141), targeting S Corporation Employee Stock Ownership Plans (S-ESOPs).

“Kickstarting our economy and creating jobs is a top priority as we work to build back stronger from this pandemic,” said sponsor Congressman Ron Kind (D-Wis.), “and the evidence is clear that S-ESOPs help companies grow faster while ensuring a more financially secure future for workers.”    

HR 4141 would provide incentives to qualifying companies to sell stock of their companies to their employees, creating an S-ESOP.

Congressman Jason Smith, one of the bill’s three Republican co-sponsors, along with two other Democrats, added, “This legislation builds on the success of ESOPs in giving employees a stake in the businesses where they work.”

Meanwhile, Jaisal Noor, a Real News Network reporter, has said that co-op business operations give “a sense of ownership to the workers” when decisions are made democratically, which ultimately improves the quality of their products,” and he produced a 25-minute special report, “Worker Co-ops vs. COVID,” documenting eight co-ops in four states and how these workplaces have kept workers safe during the pandemic.

It can be viewed at: https://therealnews.com/worker-cooperatives-prove-your-job-doesnt-have-to-be-hell?fbclid=IwAR1IVk1Pfe7kwePN8J8M-zOiaX_K-k0tZJoPTmPP1a_U_XE4zINH_X9ddm0