Days after the Charleston murders, Democracy Now‘s Amy Goodman interviewed Brett Bursey outside the Hope Emanuel Church.

“In Charleston, South Carolina, we speak with Brett Bursey, director of the South Carolina Progressive Network, who calls himself the oldest living Confederate prisoner of war. He says he is still out on bond after he burned the Confederate flag in 1969. Bursey knew Rev. Clementa Pinckney and says, “I feel a responsibility to Clementa to take advantage of the sacrifice he made to challenge the hypocrisy and bigotry” of Governor Nikki Haley and Republican lawmakers who backed voter ID legislation and blocked the expansion of Medicaid eligibility in the state.”

See video and full transcript here.

In the wake of the tragedy at Emanuel Church in Charleston, nearly 2,000 South Carolina citizens gathered at the SC State House to demand that lawmakers remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds.

The loss of nine people – murdered in their house of worship – has broken our hearts but strengthened our resolve to do what is right and decent.

It is way past time to retire the flag to its rightful place in a museum. If not now, when?

See more images from the June 20th rally in our photo album.

Whether canvassing neighborhoods, lobbying at the State House, or applying heat on the streets, grassroots activists must understand their history as well as the political and social landscape of the Palmetto State in order to be effective. To that end, the SC Progressive Network will offer its members in the Midlands a chance to enroll in the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights‘ 2015 summer session.

One of the school’s prime missions is to teach grassroots activists the best practices for understanding, organizing and leading a movement for social justice in South Carolina. The 2015 summer session consists of six classes, held the first and third Mondays between June and August. Students will meet for 90-minute classes (45 minutes of instruction; 45 minutes of guided discussion) running 7pm-8:30pm at Conundrum Music Hall, 626 Meeting St. in West Columbia.

While initial classes will be limited to members who live in the Midlands and those willing to drive to Columbia, we plan to have the courses online this fall. Once the curriculum is refined and course guides posted, classes will be made available to students across the state.

Participation is limited to individual members of the SC Progressive Network. To enroll, prospective students must submit an application, indicate a commitment to attend all six classes and complete required homework. A $120 fee covers expenses, class materials, personal copies of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History and the book A Place at the Table.

Class fees can be paid monthly and scholarships are available. We encourage sponsorships by organizations and individuals.

Click here to download the Summer School application. Fill it out and email to network@scpronet.com. Got questions? Call 803-808-3384.

Summer School classes will be moderated by SC Progressive Network Director Brett Bursey, with the assistance of faculty advisers, each lending their own expertise and teaching skills. Class sizes will be limited to facilitate interaction.

In the fall, a new semester will repeat the core introductory courses, and add advanced classes to focus on specific issues and skills.

• • •   Class Schedule  • • •

June 1, People’s History of South Carolina, Part 1: Exploring the historic dynamics that shape the state’s politics and culture, from native people through the Civil War.

June 15, People’s History, Part 2: From Reconstruction to today.

July 6, Palmetto Politics: How our history influences our current democracy and civic engagement. This reality-based civics course is critical to enable activists to be effective political organizers.

July 20, SC Progressive Network History: The SC Progressive Network was founded in 1995 by activists with decades of experience working in this state’s mean vineyards. Much can be learned and gained from studying the work that has gone into one of the nation’s best models of state-based movement building.

Aug. 3, Strategy and Tactics: Crafting the sharpest tools for building and sustaining a popular movement for a revolution of social values. We will examine tactics ranging from armed insurrection to prayer; review strategists from Lao Tzu and Jesus, to Che, Malcolm X and MLK.

Aug. 17, Enough Theory; Let’s Practice! To graduate, our students will work on an actual organizing project. Over the years, the Network has started sound projects that didn’t gain the traction they deserve simply because we lack enough trained and dedicated organizers to carry them to completion. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we need to grease it.

The political theater being staged on the backs of our state’s working poor has gone from tragi-comedy to farce.

The Network anticipated that Gov. Nikki Haley, like other governors who refused to expand Medicaid, would promote a plan to privatize the federal funding. That way she could claim victory over Obama and keep the federal government from getting between a quarter of a million poor South Carolinians and the doctor they don’t have. Gov. Haley could direct the billions of returning tax dollars to health care-related corporations that, according to FollowTheMoney.org, have contributed more than $1.6 million to her political campaigns.

When the privatization scheme was promoted in April by moderate state senators who claimed it was the only way to get the much-needed health care funding, Gov. Haley confounded political prognosticators by promising to veto privatization.

Jonathan Gruber, a health economist at MIT, noted that the holdout states are “willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people.” Gruber, a free-market economist who helped design the ACA, has called Haley’s position “awesome in its evilness” and “political malpractice.”

Network director Brett Bursey recently met with one of the Republican Senate sponsors of a privatization waiver. The senator acknowledged that while the US must ultimately move towards the type of universal health care found in all other industrialized democracies, the only politically practical step to get health care for poor South Carolininans was privatization. He noted that Haley’s pursuit of higher office, combined with 2016 legislative elections that will inhibit a veto-overide, means our state’s most vulnerable people will continue to suffer. And our tax dollars will go elsewhere until a new governor takes office.

The Network will continue to oppose privatization of Medicaid while we do the long, hard work of building a movement with the power to punish politicians who treat our citizens as pawns in their selfish game.

Today, the Close the Gap coalition announced a legislative plan to accept Medicaid expansion. The group had asked members of the SC Progressive Network to turn out for its press conference, but wouldn’t reveal who the sponsors are or details of the bill. (A notice with the senators’ names and an acknowledgement that the group was calling for privatizing Medicaid expansion went out April 13, the day before the press conference.)

Unfortunately, the original solicitation didn’t mention support for privatizing Medicaid money, pointing to Arkansas as a model to emulate. The coalition didn’t mention that Arkansas is one of a few states that received a waiver to buy private insurance for the extremely poor, rather than simply provide them with Medicaid. The stated goals of the Arkansas Health Care Independence Act are to “reduce state and federal obligations to entitlement spending” and address the “need to achieve personal responsibility” for health care – rhetoric straight from Haley’s opposition to “Obamacare.”

Network activists lobby SC lawmakers to expand Medicaid.

At our Network’s fall conference, we predicted that Gov. Nikki Haley would favor privatization, but we didn’t expect “progressive” allies asking us to support such a plan. Our position then – as now – is that privatization of poverty isn’t about helping the poor but rather about subsidizing the free market.

Our erstwhile allies think that we can’t win on principle, so they offer to settle by dealing with the opposition on their terms. Sadly, the struggle they avoid is the only way we can build the ability to win.

Our position is that privatizing health care for the extremely poor is immoral. Our position is that health care should be a right and supported by tax dollars, as is done in all industrialized democracies.

We don’t want to doom a good thing by demanding a perfect thing, but we are far from that point. If we are going to surrender, we need to talk about it first. To that end, please read this story by Michael Hilzik that ran last year in the LA Times. The piece quotes an MIT economist, who says “holdout states are “willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people.” Gruber helped design the health insurance reform in Massachusetts on which the ACA was modeled. He added: “It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.”

Brett Bursey is executive director of the SC Progressive Network. Reach him at network@scpronet.com.

Modjeska Booklet Gets Legs

In  case you missed the story in Sunday’s The State newspaper about the SC Progressive Network’s Modjeska booklet, you can read it here. The booklet has been so well-received that we ordered a second printing. Copies are free, available at the Modjeska Simkins House, 2025 Marion St. in Columbia. This week, we are leaving copies with each of the state legislators, and the booklet is to be recognized on the floors of the House and Senate.

We have submitted a proposal to the Richland County Conservation Commission for funding a series of similar booklets about lesser-known activists. Suggestions welcome. Email becci@scpronet.com or call 803-808-3384.

Medicaid Expansion – the Struggle Continues

On March 4, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments that the Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies don’t apply in states like SC who refused to go along with the federal law. Gov. Nikki Haley is a party to the King v. Burwell suit, and is spending tax money to insure that the half a billion dollars in subsidies for health insurance that went to SC citizens this past year is stopped. We will be working the press to provide them with real people who will be hurt if the governor wins. Read The State’s recent story quoting Tim Liszewski, who worked as one of the Network’s Navigators.

City Water War

The Network has been a player in the citizens’ effort to stop the city of Columbia from privatizing its water system. It has been interesting to be invited to the table with the mainstream liberals who were our arm-length allies in the Richland County penny sales tax campaign – which they now acknowledge we played a significant role in getting passed by organizing bus riders. They recognize that we have a rapport with working people that they lack. The opponents of privatization had two days notice of a city council meeting that would be considering a resolution against selling the water. The Network was asked to turn out people and we did. 10 of the 12 people who spoke in opposition to privatization were our members. The issue appears dead for now.

Voting Rights Project Update

Our project to gather the affidavits necessary to file a lawsuit against the state for equal protection of students and ex-offenders is slowly moving forward. We have one ex-offender ready to sign on, and another considering. We are meeting with the state Probation, Parole and Pardon Office on March 4. We submitted questions to them last month regarding their practices and procedures for training their officers about their clients’ voting rights. They have promised answers on the 4th.