Following is the statement of SEIU Healthcare Illinois Vice President Greg Kelley in response to news that Gov. Bruce Rauner intends to seek re-election:

“Last week, Bruce Rauner went before 400 or so executives of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce to assure them he was ‘all in’ for them. Yesterday, when he canceled a Juneteenth Day event at the DuSable Museum after outcry from the African American community, he blamed ‘special interests.’

“In Bruce Rauner’s Illinois, a person of color, a person with disabilities seeking choice over who provides them with intimate services, a low-wage worker seeking health insurance, a senior trying to live in their home, a person seeking help to break the chains of addiction, an Alzheimer’s patient seeking home healthcare, a working mother wanting help to care for her child so she can get to her job-THESE are special interests.

“But the REAL special interests, the corporations who ship jobs overseas and dodge their tax responsibilities at home, the investment houses that use outrageous instruments to avoid paying their fair share while encouraging massive layoffs, the employers who put profits over the safety of their workers, the companies who resist paying their workers a living wage- these special interests have a special place at Rauner’s table, in his wine clubs and at his side.

“Bruce Rauner has been a failure as a governor in his brief time in office, has made the long-term structural problems facing Illinois even worse, has sought to instigate an end to labor peace and has deliberately used the human suffering of others as a bargaining chip to enact a divisive political program. What’s more, he has been unwilling to fulfill his obligation to pass a budget and continues to tour the state in a perpetual political blame game.

“It is the height of hubris for Bruce Rauner to suggest he deserves another term when we can scarcely begin to describe the damage he is doing in his first. The people he is harming can’t stand one more day of the suffering caused by Rauner, to say nothing of the nightmare prospect of four more years.”