The SC Progressive Network is helping bring the internationally acclaimed documentary Shadows of Liberty to Columbia and Charleston, with interactive “talk-back” sessions after each screening.

On Wednesday, Feb. 18, the public is invited to Tapp’s Arts Center, 1644 Main St., downtown Columbia for the 7:30pm showing.

The documentary reveals the extraordinary truth behind the news media: censorship, cover-ups and corporate control. In highly revealing stories, renowned journalists, activists and academics give insider accounts of a broken media system. They include Amy Goodman, Danny Glover, Julian Assange, Dan Rather, David Simon Normon Solomon Bob Bear, Roberta Baskin, John Macarthur, Jeff Cohen and John Nichols. They recount how controversial news reports are suppressed, people are censored for speaking out, and lives are shattered as the arena for public expression is turned into a private profit zone.

Shadows Of Liberty is dedicated to the journalists and information freedom fighters, the heroes of our time, who dedicate their lives to our right to freedom of information – the central pillar of a free society. The film  provides a platform for voices that have been silenced and in doing so, attempts to inspire change and accountability. This film champions the idea of an independent media where truth and integrity are the norm, not the exception.

This screening kicks off the 7th Leg of the Shadows of Liberty Coast to Coast Screening & Media Reform Action Tour.

After the screening, Network Director Brett Bursey will moderate a discussion about the film and critical issues facing the media today. The panel includes:

Tickets are $7 and benefit Tapp’s, the SC Progressive Network, and the Shadows of Liberty Coast to Coast Screening & Media Reform Action Tour.

Film Website: www.shadowsofliberty.org
Film Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SAUborWbPw
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1188412

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The Charleston screening will be held on Thursday, Feb. 19, at 7pm at the College of Charleston Tate Center. The event is being held in collaboration with the College of Charleston Department of Communication and Urban Studies Program, Media Reform South Carolina, the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Church in Charleston, and the SC Progressive Network. The screening is free.

Health Care

We intend to keep educating and agitating for South Carolina to accept the Affordable Care Act. A couple of fights are looming this year, not withstanding our state’s refusal to participate in the ACA.

Medicaid Expansion

We see South Carolina applying for a “waiver” to take the federal funding but not use the Medicaid system to administer the billions of dollars to fund health care for 300,00 low-income adults. States have proposed a number of waivers, but the main similarity is block granting the Medicaid expansion money to the state. Anticipate an SC waiver application that would contract with private insurance companies, or health maintenance organizations, to make a profit off of administering Medicaid program.

While Medicaid has an average administrative cost of around 7%, for profit insurance providers increase the cost as much as 25% (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. This 18% difference amounts to a reduction of service to patients of $252 million a year out our state’s estimated $1.4 billion annual Medicaid expansion funding. That’s more than enough to cover the revenue lost by the state’s ten largest hospitals by treating people with no insurance, or money. We have no reason to believe that the state of SC has the best interest of working people and minorities at heart. So, we will be organizing to turn out the masses at any federally mandated hearings on proposed waivers.

Marketplace insurance (Obamacare)

SC is one of 27 states that chose not to set up a state insurance marketplace that could have helped citizens get the ACA subsidized health insurance. Nine states partnered with the feds and 14 set up their own Marketplace. Over ten million citizens, 200,000 in SC, have taken advantage of the discounted health insurance. The average wage earner in SC, making around $23,000, could get a $4,300 “silver” policy for around $50 a month, or $600 a year. Not content with obstructing access to the ACA, SC is one of six states suing the federal government to stop subsidies for the nearly 200,000 South Carolinians signed up for health insurance.

Gov. Haley has taken the position that the original language in the ACA said that consumers would get subsidies through the Insurance Marketplaces set up by the states. Since SC refused to establish our own Marketplace, the feds stepped in and provided the service. In a bizarre move that has separated the true loons from the merely cold hearted, a shrinking number of Republican governors (6) signed on to a federal law suit (King v. Burwell) that argues that the working people who got discounted health insurance through the “federal” Marketplace should pay full price, because they didn’t get it through a “state” Marketplace, which our state refused to set up. South Carolinians, who got an average of an 80+% discount for their policy, could be billed for the several thousand dollars and most will lose their insurance.

The Network is filing an amicus brief supporting the governments position that the intent of the Affordable Care Act was affordable care, and not whether the federal subsidy reached the consumer via a state of federal marketplace. The case is scheduled to be heard by the US Supreme Court March 4.

Voting Rights

Ex-offenders

We are developing a lawsuit to address the unequal protection of the voting rights of ex-offenders and college students. The national ACLU has said they will take the case. The Director of the State Election Commission asked us sue them, because she can’t get the counties to enforce the laws in a uniform fashion.

Voting Machines

We have been working for the past 10 years with the nation’s lead organizations regarding verified voting systems. We will come up with parameters to guide the type of new voting system we expect the state to buy within the next year. The state election commission is putting together a “vendor fair” in the next few months to let companies showcase their wares. While there are some good systems being developed that will meet our parameters (open source, publicly owned, cheap to buy and use, voter verifiable paper trail) we will need to focus on seeing that whatever they buy, meets our specs. They will then form an evaluation committee to determine what RFP meets their needs. The Network as been invited to participate in the vendor fair later this year. It would not be a good idea for any legislator to introduce a bill regarding the type of voting system the state purchase without talking to us. We actually want to work up a plan that works. Not just file a bill to say we did. We want to help shape the Election Commission and County Directors position. They are the ones that can get a bill passed.

Ethics Reform

The Network is working with Common Cause to promote an independent investigation of legislative ethics violations, full disclosure of income and regulate campaign expenditures. We will continue to raise publicly financed elections as the best fix for the corrupting influenced of money on politics.

Racial Injustice

At our founding conference in 1995, the Network acknowledged that racism was our state’s most profound problem. In 2000, we released a study the showed the racial disparities in our criminal justice system were the worst in the nation. We then hosted town hall meetings to solicit citizen testimony on racial profiling, followed by the introduction of a bill to require “all cops to report all stops.” After 9/11, the bill languished until Gov. Sanford vetoed a mandatory seat belt bill that was required to get federal highway funding.

The Republican majority offered to support the racial profiling bill to get the Black Caucus to vote to over-ride the veto. It was a year after the bill passed that we discovered the five white legislators on the conference committee added the work “non-custodial” to the bill, changing the requirement for all stops to be reported, to all warning tickets be reported. In 2010, we did a ten year review of racial disparities and an audit of the pubic data base the Dept. of Public Safety has on their web site. Though the racial profiling law requires all 299 police agencies to report the race of those questioned in “non-custodial” stops each month, nearly half the agencies are not in compliance.

The 2010 study and a link to the DPS racial profiling site is on the Network web site under Projects. Our racial profiling study provides a tool kit for anyone in the state to engage their local police in a constructive dialogue regarding racial profiling. Rep. Joe Neal, the racial profiling bill’s original sponsor is planning to reintroducing legislation to add “all stops” to the data base. Our job is to lobby the heads of our local police agencies to endorse legislation that shows their communities that they do not practice, or condone, racial profiling.

Bills We’re Backing

S-172: Earned Sick Leave, Sen. Marlon Kimpson. We organized the witnesses for the bill at sub committee level last session and will do so again. Expect an ALEC sponsored ANTI-Sick Leave Bill to be filed again this session. Rep. William Sandifer, Chair of the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee is an ALEC member and passed out an anti-worker-benefits bill last session without any public hearings or committee debate.

H-3031: Minimum wage of $10.10. Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter. SC is one of five states with no minimum wage.

S-207 & H-3202: Whistleblower Act. Would protect and award public employees who report illegal or unethical acts.

S-148: Early voting, Sen. John Scott. While the Network has promoted an early voting bill for the past 12 years, nearly 20% of the voters are taking advantage of our “Early-in-person-absentee-with-excuse-voting” law that allows those with one of 15 excuses to vote in person, 30 days prior to the election. For the past few sessions, Alan Clemmons, the Republican chair of the House Election Law Subcommittee, has filed legislation to do away with early absentee. Clemmons argues that we should all vote in the same 12 hours “as a show of patriotism”. Clemmons, the primary sponsor of the photo-ID bill, seems to be committed to keeping fraud down by making it harder to vote.

S-48: Study Committee on Racial Profiling, Senators Gerald Malloy and Marlon Kimpson. “Study Committee on Racial Profiling” to review State and local law enforcement policies, practices, and procedures regarding racial profiling, and to make recommendations to the General Assembly regarding proposed changes to the laws regarding such policies, practices, and procedures.

Repeal Right to Work: Rep. Cobb-Hunter has offered to introduce a bill to repeal the Right to Work Act. This will be high drama and public education. We envision getting people from the unions to participate in a press conference in front of Nikki’s office. “I’m Velma Huggins I’m a union member and I deliver the governor’s mail. I’m Kenny Riley, I’m a union dockworker that has made the port of Charleston something the governor brags about. I’m Powell Caldwell, I’m a union member and I make sure that the governor gets her UPS packages. etc.”

Mis-classification bill: Rep. Neal introduced this for us last session and will do it again. He is waiting for us to find a Republican sponsor. This is a business friendly bill that Republicans have sponsored in other states to tighten up on contract employees.

Stand Your Ground Repeal: Rep. Harold Mitchell will be reintroducing a bill we worked up for him to take the clause out of the old Castle Doctrine that the NRA inserted in 2006. This is the clause that says you can use deadly force anywhere you are lawfully present – not just inside your castle.

See photos from the annual gathering here.

Presentation to the SC Progressive Network at its annual fall retreat Nov. 15 in Columbia.

Daniel Deweese, New Legacy Project

A Faceless Master.

A specter is haunting South Carolina — take it from someone who has been to ten of its cities in ten days — the specter of Modjeska Simkins, the ghosts of a progressive and effective left.

Nearly a century ago, on the precipice of the emergence of the twin monsters of the 20th century, namely Stalinism and Fascism, Freud, in his prescient insight identified the forthcoming antagonism; “Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this—hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two heavenly forces, eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside of his equally immortal adversary.” (1920, p.147)

We are on the verge of a new totalitarianism, one with a faceless master; that of  global capital.  This is attested to by the winner of our last election; money. Millions of so called “dark dollars”-uncountable, utterly  inundated this election. It is appropriate here to recall Boiseguillebert’s insight of finance as the alembic of commodities that extracts that unholy essence and  “…money declares war on the whole of humanity.” ( Marx, 1992, p.239).

A Princeton study has indicated something we Leftists have known for a long time, namely, that the United States is transforming into an oligarchy. It is economic elites who possess the most influence over public policy (TPM, 2014).

The first step in any critique of ideology that has the potential to foster revolutionary upheaval is to identify the position of the master (the ruling class) as being what it is, namely, an empty position. There exists an irreducible gap between the totalitarian master and his title. The master seizes this mantle and yet it is not congruent to his being. The title is something that is assumed rather than a “quality” that is inherent to the master.

For example, the divinity of kings or the so called “hard work” of Wall Street executives are just some of the reasons manifested to justify the position of mastery which in turn is utilized to justify the accumulation of the surplus social product at the expense of the working class. The revolutionary must not only expose the master as being empty but she must also expose and attack that in herself which chains her to the ruling ideology. Here we return to the predicament of postmodernity, namely, that of unlimited consumption. If the consumption of frivolous commodities is the equivalent to or at least the path to social fulfillment, then why is postmodernity so fraught with discontent? This is true in even the wealthiest of the industrialized nations (I developed this idea further in my article Truth as Contradiction).

The duty to consume and its failure to cultivate a meaningful social bond should be taken as a sign of the   impotence of the dominant discourse. The gaps in this discourse also manifest themselves in the forms of poverty, war, starvation and so on.  For instance; “The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase.” (worldhunger.org). And yet millions starve. It is true that 300,000 South Carolinians would have had health insurance if the Governor would have accepted the Medicaid expansion. And yet thousands will go with out, some even to their deaths.

The Ghosts that Speak Truth

The revolutionary must pronounce to the ruling class and all those who rest underneath their heel; “ I am your truth! (poverty, oppression, exploitation!), you the master are not complete!” It is crucial for a dialectical analysis to realize that this undeniable excess, these foreclosed subjects, are not separate from the dominant discourse but are apart of the the effects of the totality of global capital. After traveling through our fair state it became clear to me; there are those of us willing to protest, that is, publicly enunciate this truth of the foreclosed excess. However, these scattered voices wander like ghosts searching for an apparatus that would materialize their very substance into something more.

In Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? he emphasizes that the working-class will not spontaneously formulate into an emancipatory collective due to oppressive conditions. He believed it would take a vanguard party to educate and organize the people. This I claim was the victory won in the Healthy Democracy Road Show, namely, laying the ground work for this emancipatory collective in South Carolina, the ground work for a new legacy. Therefore, something of an education is required. Namely, a school that is right, the Modjeska School of Human Rights!

The way for the Left to undermine the dominant discourse is to facilitate the birth of a new discourse by utilizing the emancipatory legacy left for us by the revolutionaries of the past. To conclude, we return to the spectral realm and echo a thought from Walter Benjamin; ?“ Every Revolution is not only directed towards the future but it redeems also the past failed Revolutions, all the ghosts-as if the living dead of the past Revolutions, which are roaming around unsatisfied will finally find their home in the new freedom.” (Zizek, 2014).

***************
Freud, S. (1920). Civilization and its discontents. (p. 135). New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lenin, V. I. (1969) What is to be done?: burning questions of our movement. Intl Publishing
Marx, K. (1992) Capital Volume 1 (p.239). London: Penguin Classics.
www.worldhunger.org
Zizek, S. (2014) The pervert’s guide to ideology

While there is much hand-wringing in the wake of Tuesday’s elections, the SC Progressive Network is not mourning; we are celebrating a job well done. After a year dedicated to educating and mobilizing voters on health care, we capped the campaign with a 10-day 10-city blitz. We started at the Governor’s Mansion with a press conference, and ended with a rally at the County Square in Greenville.

It was a long haul. But that’s what the Network is about. We are working year-round to promote progressive values, not cranking a cold motor every two years when elections roll around. If we have a chance to pull this state out of the ideological ditch that’s drowning our most vulnerable citizens, more of us need to move beyond outrage to action. It can be gratifying.

On the road we got to see parts of South Carolina too often neglected, we met dedicated community and political activists at every stop, we made friends and allies across the state, we nurtured a growing solidarity among our staff and volunteers, we generated some great press and, best of all, we changed the conversation on Medicaid expansion. It was an issue the pundits and pooh-bahs had declared dead. We insisted that the only thing dead about this issue are the people paying the price for petty, partisan foolishness.

In related news, because our staff has been busier than expected with the Road Show, the Network’s fall retreat Nov. 15 at Penn Center has been moved to Columbia. We’ll be meeting at the Lake House at Sandhill Research Education Center, 900 Clemson Rd. It is a nifty facility, built in 1932 by WPA workers. Details to come.

Thanks again to our Road Show crew for a campaign to remember. Warning: watch this video, and the song may loop in your brain for days.

On Oct. 8, two Network groups and their allies from across South Carolina celebrated marriage equality at the SC State House after the historic court decisions paving the way for marriage equality in several states, including South Carolina. After a rally, LGBT activists and allies delivered a box of 5,000 petitions to SC Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office. Ignoring the writing on the legal wall, the governor and the AG vowed they will continue using taxpayer money to fight the issue.

Indeed, the next day the SC Supreme Court blocked the marriage license applications gay couples filed the day before in Charleston and Richland County court houses.

In spite of the stubborn response on the part of state leaders, marriage equality is inevitable, even in South Carolina. Congratulations to our member groups SC Equality and the Harriet Hancock Center for their dogged pursuit of fairness for all South Carolina’s citizens.

More photos on Flickr.

Becci Robbins
SC Progressive Network Communications Director

If you are sent to prison in South Carolina, you lose the right to vote. By state law, that right is to be restored upon completion of your sentence. But a new survey of the state’s voter registration offices reveals that how the process for re-enfranchisement works — and doesn’t work — depends on where you live.

The SC Progressive Network has just completed a survey of the state’s 46 county voter registration offices, finding that 33 of them require people to provide documentation that they’ve completed their sentence in order to re-register.

“Talking with staff in each of the 46 offices, we found a selective application of the law that we believe violates the equal protection clause,” said Network Director Brett Bursey. “People who have served their time are being made to jump through bureaucratic hoops to regain the full citizenship granted by law. It is unfair, further depresses the state’s dismal voter participation rate, and affects twice as many black citizens as whites.”

While 13 offices do not require documentation from ex-offenders, Susie Edwards, Director of the Dillon County voter registration office, said her staff will ask for proof if someone “is acting sketchy.”

Saluda County voter registration office Director Dana Burdern said, “A letter from Pardons and Parole is not required by law but it’s asked for.”

Deputy Director Patrick Lee of Charleston said, “We go on their word. We don’t require more than that.”

The word Lee is relying on is the “voter oath” a person signs when registering swearing that he or she is a US citizen, is 18 years or older, and a South Carolina resident. Registrants also swear that they haven’t been found “mentally incompetent,” are not serving time in jail, and have completed their sentence.

“The only part of the oath citizens are being asked to provide additional proof for is the completion of a prison sentence,” Bursey said. “No law requires the counties to ask for further proof, and there is no established system for proving someone has served their time.”

The survey also revealed that 20 counties wrongly claim differences in the waiting periods between felonies and misdemeanors for voter registration, with felonies requiring additional waiting time.

SC Progressive Network Director Brett Bursey and volunteer Bishop Shirley Raiford work a voting registration table at the bus transfer station in downtown Columbia.

“South Carolina’s voting system is a vestige of the Jim Crow era,” Bursey said. “The Senate was able to retain white power in 1895 by granting control of the election process to the counties, whose boards Senate members appointed. To this day, legislators appoint the boards, and each county is in charge of its own elections. This is why we have 46 counties interpreting the laws differently.”

The Network has introduced legislation that would require the state to inform people exiting the prison system of their voting rights. The bill has not advanced, but will be introduced again next legislative session.

“We think it is an important part of the reintegration of people back into our communities to ensure they regain their voting rights,” said Network Co-chair Virginia Sanders. “The state removes you from the rolls if you are incarcerated, and it should make sure that you can be reinstated once you’ve served your time.”

Sanders, who has spent years doing registration drives through the Network’s Missing Voter Project, said a common misconception, especially in rural areas, is that when people are sent to prison they forever lose their right to vote. “It’s sad that so many people don’t understand the law, especially those who are charged with enforcing it.”

The Network will use the survey as evidence in a case that is being prepared for federal court. Ex-offenders with relevant testimony about difficulties registering to vote are asked to contact the Network at 803-808-3384 or by sending email to network@scpronet.com. For more about the Network or its Missing Voter Project, visit scpronet.com.