Not to be rushed into a decision

UPDATE:

Ilya was given the opportunity to respond to this post and he declined. On other sites and in other venues, he has taken full credit for MoveOn's work on fake health care reform. So, as far as I'm concerned, he's taking credit for his local MoveOn's work against our local single payer advocates.

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Recently, Illinois Tenth Congressional District Candidate, Ilya Sheyman made a You Tube statement about the Occupy movement. He said he supports Occupy Wall Street and pretty much took credit for parts of it through his work with MoveOn.

The video was immediately lauded by progressives. Sheyman Gets It! they proclaimed. My first thought was that I'm not so sure. You see, Ilya's credentials, in fact his only significant credentials are through his work with MoveOn. According to his resume, he was the "Mobilization Director" for MoveOn.org from June 2009 through February 2011. I had an experience with MoveOn during that time and I wrote about it at the time.

Fall 2009 Health Care Debate

You may recall that the fall of 2009 was the height of the health care reform debate in Washington. I felt, and still feel, that single payer, Medicare for All, is the best health care solution for the country. It saves on administrative costs and puts all of the money into care while our current system, as slightly revised by the Affordable Health Care Act, supported by President Obama and many Democrats, puts a lot of money into insurance, marketing, advertising and paying for people to spend their time denying health care. A lot of very good people worked for single payer before the major health care debate of Fall 2009, during that time, and still work for the tested and true cost reduction plan now. However, during this critical time, around early November 2009, when public opinion was brought to bear on Congress through town hall meetings and in the media, single payer was silenced.

It was frustrating for single payer advocates like me to see single payer taken off the agenda in Congress and mostly because it wasn't the Republicans or the Tea Parties that took it off the agenda. It was Democrats and their supporting organizations, including OFA, HCAN and MoveOn.

I was incredibly disappointed to find that our very own community organizer organization, Citizen Action/Illinois, was taken over by HCAN, an organization dedicated to preserving private health insurance, but softening the blow through something that they called the "public option". HCAN, and OFA,  the morphed version of the President's own candidate committee, were very aggressive in promoting the public option, not so much as against Republicans in Congress, but against those advocating for single payer. Of course, none of this was such a big surprise. OFA was in fact a group made up of Obama campaign workers. HCAN was created solely to sell the public option as the only arguable solution. What surprised me was when MoveOn joined in on the push for the public option, the push that only pushed single payer off the table and out of the discussion.

The Enforcers at Work

A lot of my writing in the Summer and Fall of 2009 centered on the efforts of groups like HCAN and OFA to silence single payer advocates. The HCANNERS specialized in telling people they were for reform to gain support, and then backing off when it came time to fight and then berating those holding out for real reform. OFA threatened to kick me out for holding a house party event where single payer would be discussed in addition to the public option.

Things spiraled a bit out of control, at least to me, when several people speaking for HCAN and MoveOn joined a single payer advocate Internet group claiming agreement on the issue. The Internet group had been set up by single payer advocates for discussions among single payer advocates. It was not a general health care reform discussion group, but specifically for single payer advocates. At one point in early November 2009, a MoveOn worker, not  a run-of-the-mill volunteer, but someone with a title and in a position of leadership, advertised a MoveOn health care event on the Internet group. The response from the group was basically thanks for the invite; we'll be there with our signs and banners. The reply was if you think you're going to mention single payer at our event, you are uninvited. So, the single payer folks were invited to make their crowd look bigger, but not to advocate for single payer. Objections from both sides went back and forth and the conversation got tense. For a week or so the entire group was blasted with emails from the MoveOn person who basically told the single payer advocates, on their own Internet group, to stand down, and a few of the exchanges were rather harsh. I have the emails if anyone is interested in looking at them.

The Point

This brings us back to the present and Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Chicago and similar movements around the country. I think that one of the most important aspects of the Occupy movement is that the participants and supporters are sick of the empty promises and sick of business as usual in Washington. To me it's the anti-HCAN, or anti-Tea Party for that matter, group of people who do not want their work on issues to be sucked into a candidate campaign or astroturf organization that ultimately abandons the issues to benefit a candidate campaign. They want what they want on the issues and will not support the lesser of evils as those of us who work in campaigns are often told we have to do.

President Obama talked about single payer in his original Senate and then Presidential campaigns. He led people to believe that the topic would at least be discussed. Then, as his star rose, he changed his tune, and a good chunk of the progressive grassroots movement went along with him and enforced for him. Not only was the promise to work for a single payer or a similar system unfulfilled, they actively and loudly worked against any discussion of it. The term was "Off theTable!"  We were left with business as usual and these great "progressive" groups, including MoveOn, became enforcers of the status quo.

So, I guess I have a hard time getting all warm and fuzzy from Ilya Sheyman, Mobilization Director for MoveOn, telling me that he and only he gets the Occupy movement. I'm also having a hard time with PDA, the "Healthcare not Warfare" folks endorsing Sheyman, in fact gushing over his progressive credentials, without asking a question about this episode in his MoveOn past.

Mitigating Factors

In his defense, I have to say that it was not Ilya himself who sat on the single payer group and yelled at the single payer advocates. I don't know where he stood in the pecking order, and I do not know that he ordered the actions, accepted the actions as incontrovertible necessity, merely tolerated them, or if perhaps he did not even know about them. But, the facts are that he was in this organization, touts a central and supervisory role in it, probably had contact with enough information that he'd know at least as much as I did from outside the organization, and failed to take any sort of public stand against it. Had he read my blog at the time, he'd have known all about it. So, I still have a few questions for Ilya.

Questions

When you were at MoveOn, did you supervise or come into contact with council coordinators? Did you know that they were aggressively working against single payer groups? Did you ever ask the powers that be at MoveOn why they abandoned single payer? Did you fight them on that change or express any opinion that they should stand firm and not just stand with politicians? Did you take a public stand on health care reform in the fall of 2009? Did you feel that single payer needed to be taken out of the discussion? Why or why not? And finally, do you get that the Occupy movement is not about giving up on an issue, ordering its advocates to stand down, in order to support a politician?

Conclusion (for now)

Ilya Sheyman is running as the great progressive hero. I'm just wondering where he was and what he did when we needed a progressive hero and couldn't find one at MoveOn. I'm wondering if his supporters rushed into their decision to support him without studying the facts of this matter. I'm also wondering if there is some connection between progressives standing down on health care reform and our current conversation on the importance of child labor laws. We stand down and stand down, and then wonder why this country keeps moving further to the right.