The pandemic has exposed the moral bankruptcy of basing critical public services such as health care and education on profit. Two recent examples:

South Carolina remains one of the few states to refuse using our federal taxes to provide health care to the quarter-million poor people living here who are now the most likely vector for spreading Covid-19. The Network led the fight to expand Medicaid, but our governors continue to choose free enterprise over public welfare.

South Carolina is the only state whose taxpayers own the entire educational broadcast system. The state’s control of all 63 broadcast licenses and 700 towers began in 1958, when the legislature started ETV and was considering closing public schools to keep them all-white. There were no black legislators then in SC, or in Mississippi, where their Jim Crow legislature owns 75% of the licenses. In other states, communities and universities own the majority of licenses.

In 2009, when the nation’s broadcast spectrum went digital, the Network was the only voice at the table fighting to use the “excess spectrum” of our educational broadband system to provide a statewide system of free internet, at least for the 600,000 school children who qualified for free lunch.

Now, more than a decade later, the schools are finally closed, and students are told to watch their lessons on television. They could be taking interactive classes at home on their phones or laptops, but the legislature continued to worship free enterprise by leasing out ETV’s excess broadband to telcom corporations for a fraction of its value. Sen. Harvey Peeler argued that giving citizens something for free would be “socialism.” Free enterprise won again.

President Trump’s slavish obeisance to profit over people is killing those he was sworn to protect. Let us not let them die in vain. For the past 25 years, the SC Progressive Network has been in laying the groundwork for a movement to reconstruct democracy. Our Missing Voter Project has been reaching out to the 75% of young South Carolinians who don’t believe that voting will do any good. We agree with them, and tell them we can’t rely on the system that cheapens life to reorder its priorities and we need a movement outside the system to change it.

Our nonpartisan voter education and registration efforts focus on policies rather than candidates or parties. Our 2020 MVP is using high-tech tools to identify and mobilize the fewer than 10 percent of South Carolinians under 28 years old who have never voted in a general election.