Republican U.S. House speaker Paul Ryan is coming to Chicago Thursday for a big-ass fund-raiser! If you have $1,000 to spare, you can join him for dinner at the Chicago Club and offer him your thoughts on the Trump administration and the new GOP health-care plan (known to some as “Ryancare”). Or you can stand outside and protest for free. Or, if standing around and yelling is getting old, you can drink beer on Wednesday night instead.
Or, as Taylor puts it, “Most Chicagoans would not be happy to know that their beer money is eventually ending up in the hands of Paul Ryan.”
So Taylor and company went to the website Beer Menus and discovered that the Big Onion Tavern Group, which owns nine bars in the city including Fatpour and Derby Bar & Grill, stocked the beer, and figured that, as a larger organization, it had the ability to handle many phone calls from concerned citizens at once. They then teamed up with Indivisible Chicago, a group that organizes daily and weekly community actions and has about 3,000 members, and Indivisible made calling Big Onion and asking it to stop carrying Ballast Point one of its actions for last Thursday.
“It’s a win-win,” says Rieger. “They heard our voices, they understood, they agreed, and we came up with a nice way to resolve the issue. It’s a nice little lead-in to the protest on Thursday.”
