The SC Progressive Network has supported Pride since our founding, back when doing so meant we would likely lose foundation money and certain community allies in the process. We’ve always tried to stay on the side of right, even when it hurts.
We applaud the gay community in South Carolina for its successes over the years, in spite of tough odds. Here’s a look back at Pride over the years.
More photos in our Flickr photo album.
Our political leaders must think so. How else can you explain their refusal to expand Medicaid?
Please watch and share this video about the SC Progressive Network’s grassroots campaign to educate and mobilize voters on health care before the Nov. 4 elections. Then join our Healthy Democracy Road Show. Details here.
The SC Progressive Network is in the process of training crews of volunteers to launch its latest project, the Healthy Democracy Road Show, designed to educate and mobilize voters on the state of democracy and healthcare in South Carolina. Road crews will do door-to-door canvassing in targeted neighborhoods, and a show is being developed to liven up events in selected towns across South Carolina.
We spent the last legislative session targeting lawmakers on Medicaid expansion. Now, over the summer and early fall, we will focus on targeted communities across the state, taking our message to the people most affected by state lawmakers’ refusal to accept federal funding — our own tax money.
In July and early August, trainings for organizers are being held. For information, or to schedule a training in your area, call 803-808-3384 or email network@scpronet.com. The next training is on July 21 at the ILA Hall in Charleston.
This clip is from a training in Columbia, presented by Network Director Brett Bursey.
By Herb Hartsook
University Libraries South Carolina Political Collections
(posted June 30 on A Capital Blog and re-posted with permission)
Modjeska Simkins was a remarkable human rights activist and a uniquely powerful speaker. Becci Robbins captures her essence in a new booklet, Modjeska Monteith Simkins: A South Carolina Revolutionary, just published by the South Carolina Progressive Network. The 38-page booklet is clearly a labor of love by Robbins, the Network’s Communications Director.
Mrs. Simkins’ voice is present throughout the booklet which features lavish quotations. Robbins places Mrs. Simkins both in time and place with a detailed biographical sketch. The booklet also includes rich illustrations and statements by people such as SC Political Collections donors Matthew Perry and Candy Waites who knew and were influenced by Mrs. Simkins.
Until a full-length biography is produced, this forms the best treatment on the life and important role played by this forceful human rights activist.
A June 26 reception at Mrs. Simkins’ Marion Street home, which houses the Network’s offices, celebrated the new publication. Brett Bursey, founder and director of the Progressive Network and devoted Simkins mentee, served as master of ceremonies and gave a stirring talk describing plans for the Modjeska Simkins School for Human Rights, a new endeavor by the Network which will train and encourage individuals to follow in the footsteps of Mrs. Simkins and “take on issues of economic and social injustice.”
3,000 copies of the booklet, which was made possible by a grant from the Richland County Conservation Commission, will be distributed to libraries around the state and interested individuals. An electronic copy is available on the Network’s website.
Mrs. Simkins once noted, “Start each sunrise as a new day. Start out believing there’s good to be done and people to do it for.” That spirit still lives.
Brett Bursey
Executive Director, SC Progressive Network
Contrary to news reports, registered voters do not have to have a photo ID to vote in South Carolina.
There is widespread misinformation regarding the new state law. Numerous television reports leading up to the June 10 primary told voters they must have one of the five approved photo IDs to vote. Truth is, voters with none of the approved IDs can present their old (non-photo) voter registration card and cast a paper ballot.
Unlike the traditional provisional paper ballot that could be rejected by the county board of elections, the federal court ruled that the legitimacy of the paper ballots cast by voters without photo IDs is determined by the voter. The paper ballots will be counted unless evidence is presented that the voter lied about why they do not have a photo ID.
The two most salient points of the appeals court ruling were:
The SC Progressive Network spent three years fighting this regressive law, and was a party to the appeal. We will not let state Attorney Gen. Alan Wilson, Gov. Nikki Haley and others go unchallenged in their claim that they beat the Section 5 ruling and that our new law requires voters to present a photo ID.
As we have said before, the photo ID campaign was a shameless ploy to suppress the vote — expensive political theater that only served to confuse voters. Unfortunately, they are still confused. Our work to educate South Carolina voters continues.
By J. David Cox Sr.
national president of the American Federation of Government Employees
The public’s outrage over excessive wait times and rigged record keeping at Veterans Affairs hospitals is more than justified. As a former VA nurse, I understand all too well that depriving veterans of timely access to care is a disservice to them and their sacrifice to this nation.
But cleaning house in the VA’s executive ranks will only treat the symptom. The disease plaguing the VA healthcare system is chronic under-staffing of physicians and other frontline providers.
Until we fill thousands of vacant positions, open closed hospital beds and provide more dollars for building and maintaining medical facilities, we will never heal what ails the VA.
Physicians are dealing with excessive caseloads and insufficient support staff. Since 2009, 2 million veterans entered the VA health care system for a net increase of 1.4 million new patients. Each physician should be responsible for no more than 1,200 patients at a given time, according to the VA’s own guidelines, yet many VA doctors are treating upwards of 2,000 patients each.
Simply put, there isn’t enough time in the day for the available doctors to treat every veteran who is seeking care in a timely fashion.
Compounding matters is a performance system that sets unrealistic goals and incentivizes managers to increase the number of patients served, instead of improving the quality of care. Rather than face the under-staffing issue head-on and risk poor ratings, many managers have taken the easy way out and have cooked the books to mask the wait times.
But blaming those managers for a performance system that was doomed from the start won’t help our veterans get the care they seek any faster.
Truth be told, there is nothing wrong with the VA that can’t be healed by what is right with the VA: the frontline providers who care for our veterans every day.
No one is complaining about the quality of care our veterans receive. That’s because the federal employees who look after our nation’s heroes work hard each and every day to provide them with world-class service.
Unfortunately, those same employees have lived in fear of speaking out about the problems they witness due to an established history of retaliation, including loss of duties and unfounded disciplinary actions. Our members have paid a heavy price for voicing concerns, submitting letters to agency leaders, raising issues in labor management meetings, and testifying before Congress on wait time issues and veterans’ access to care. When they have sounded the alarm, our members have faced retaliation and intimidation time and time again.
Employees shouldn’t feel afraid to speak up when they see managers more concerned with securing bonuses than providing patients with timely access to care for critical medical conditions. In fact, they should be encouraged to bring up these issues so they can be rectified before more veterans go without the treatment they so desperately need.
The waitlist and understaffing issues are one and the same. Until Congress gives the VA the resources to hire enough frontline clinicians to meet demand, our veterans will continue to face long waits. And to be clear, sending veterans to expensive health care providers outside the VA system on a massive scale will not fix the underlying resource deficiencies plaguing our veterans medical centers.
According to the Independent Budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs, developed each year by leading veterans groups, the Veterans Health Administration is facing a $2 billion funding shortfall for the upcoming fiscal year and another $500 million shortfall for fiscal 2016.
It’s time for the VA to get back to basics and focus on improving access to care for our nation’s veterans. The agency must cut excess management layers and use those resources to boost frontline staffing of doctors, nurses and others directly involved in patient care. The growth of middle management positions within the agency has ballooned to unprecedented levels, from fewer than 300 in 1995 to more than 1,700 by a recent count, costing taxpayers $203 million annually.
The VA long has been held up as a model healthcare delivery system that all other hospitals should emulate. The care our veterans receive is second to none, but that only counts when our veterans actually are treated.
J. David Cox Sr. is national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 670,000 federal and D.C. government employees nationwide and Chair of the AFL-CIO’s Union Veterans Council.
Protesters demonstrate outside McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook. (Chuck Berman, Chicago Tribune / May 21, 2014)
Seven Charleston-area fast food workers, including six McDonald’s employees, were arrested Wednesday during a protest at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Oak Brook, Illinois. A delegation of ten workers from Charleston joined more than 2,000 fast-food workers, community supporters, clergy and elected officials at the corporate headquarters near Chicago to escalate their call for $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation. Wednesday’s protest took place less than a week after strikes and protests rocked 230 cities around the world in what MSNBC called the “biggest fast-food strike ever.”
Among the local McDonald’s workers arrested was Cherri Delisline, a mother of four. “I’ve been working for McDonalds for 10 years and my hourly paycheck is the same now as it was my first day on the job: $7.35,” she said. “It’s not okay for McDonald’s to rake in huge profits but pay us so little we can’t support our families. I went on strike and now I got arrested, and I will continue to protest until McDonald’s listens.” Delisline was among more than 100 McDonald’s workers to be arrested Wednesday.
The SC AFL-CIO, the Charleston Central Labor Council, the SC Progressive Network (Charleston chapter), the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment, the Coalition (People United to Take Back our Community), and the International Longshoremen’s Association (Local 1422) stand in solidarity with the Charleston fast food workers and their efforts to form a union and raise the minimum wage. Last Thursday (May 15), more than three dozen workers went on strike at area fast food restaurants. They were joined on picket lines in front of Burger King (4709 Dorchester Rd., North Charleston) and McDonald’s (2988 W. Montague Ave., North Charleston) by dozens of community supporters.
“If you do the math it doesn’t add up to surviving,” said Erin McKee, president of the SC AFL-CIO. “You cannot live on $7.25 an hour.” McKee noted that many of the fast food workers are also parents. “I know what it’s like to wonder if you have enough to pay the bills or to worry about losing your job if you miss work because your child gets sick,” said McKee who has been a single parent for all of her adult life.
McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting, scheduled for Thursday, approaches as investors and company officials are increasingly realizing they need to respond to workers’ call for higher pay. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company admitted that the growing and focus on inequality might force them to raise wages. And in response to class-action lawsuits against McDonald’s that allege widespread and systematic wage theft, the company announced it was launching a comprehensive investigation.
Scrutiny on the company has intensified since the release of a report earlier this month by Demos showing that the fast-food industry has the largest disparity between worker and CEO pay. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said that excessive pay disparities “pose a risk to share owner value,” and that conversations around inequality should move into the boardrooms of profitable fast-food companies.
USA Today noted that the growing worker movement would be front-and-center at McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting, naming it “the issue that just won’t go away.” And Business Insider wrote that the company was barring reporters from the annual meeting because of “the pressure the company is feeling from shareholders, franchisees, and especially workers — who are planning to protest at the meeting in Oakbrook, Illinois.”
“The problems of pay disparity in fast food extend beyond the industry to affect the rest of our economy,” said Catherine Ruetschlin, Demos Policy Analyst and author of the report Fast Food Failure. “Even the industry leader, McDonald’s, has acknowledged that rising inequality is a risk to their bottom line, as companies see the negative consequences of pay disparity appear as operational issues, legal challenges, and diminishing worker and customer satisfaction. Those consequences pose a real risk to shareholders, who have a material interest in addressing the practices that drive income inequality, undermine the long-term performance of the firm, and inhibit stability and growth in the economy overall.”
As McDonald’s U.S. sales are slumping, the company is facing growing criticism from both customers and franchisees. A recent Harris poll found that McDonald’s reputation among customers fell sharply, and surveys show that a majority of franchise owners are upset with the company, describing their relationship as “poor” and giving McDonald’s the lowest ratings it’s seen in 12 years.
In the past year, McDonald’s was widely ridiculed for its sample budget for workers, which required them to get a second job to make ends meet; its employee advice site that told workers to sing away stress, take small bites of food to avoid hunger and not eat fast food; an employee hotline that encouraged workers to apply for public assistance; and findings that the company costs U.S. taxpayers $1.2 billion annually in public assistance for its workers.
McDonald’s workers who will protest at the annual meeting, and who have now struck six times in the past 18 months, are challenging the company’s outdated notion that their workers are teenagers looking for pocket change. Research shows that a majority of fast-food workers are adults, many of whom are struggling to raise children on a median wage of $8.94.
A campaign that started in New York City in November 2012, with 200 fast-food workers walking off their jobs demanding $15 and the right to form a union without retaliation, has since spread to more than 150 cities in every region of the country, including the South—and now around the world. The growing fight for $15 has been credited with elevating the debate around inequality in the U.S. When Seattle’s mayor proposed a $15 minimum wage earlier this month, Businessweek said he was “adopting the rallying cry of fast-food workers.”
The spread of the worker movement overseas should cause further alarm. International fast-food restaurants are expected to expand at four times the rate of U.S. businesses, according to a recent Merrill Lynch report. And while US sales slump, companies like McDonald’s are relying on growth overseas to boost their bottom lines more than ever.
For more on last week’s strike and protests, visit fastfoodglobal.org.
Over the three weeks that the South Carolina Senate debated a bill to “nullify Obamacare,” 28 people were arrested for blocking the legislators’ entrance to the State House garage. Twenty seven of those arrested requested a jury trial, and the City of Columbia’s response is expected to be announced in Columbia Magistrate’s Court on Tuesday, May 6, at approximately 9am. A 10am press conference will follow the hearing.
“We were arrested to bring attention to our state’s immoral refusal to accept Medicaid funding for our states poorest citizens,” said the group’s spokesperson, Rev. Tom Summers.
Then-interim Columbia police chief Ruben Santiago, who oversaw the first round of arrests, said recently, “Prior to the protests, I didn’t know that we had turned down a free Medicaid card for all the homeless people in Columbia. You can’t imagine what a difference that would have made, not only in the lives of our homeless citizens, but to the police who have to deal with them daily.”
Santiago said that a lack of medical care and prescriptions for the homeless have turned the cops into “social workers with guns.”
The SC Progressive Network and its Truthful Tuesday allies will continue working to get SC to implement the Affordable Care Act by launching a statewide “Healthy Democracy” campaign to educate the 123,279 registered SC voters living below the poverty level who were denied a free Medicaid card.
To put this number in perspective, the anti-ACA candidate Nikki Haley won the governor’s race in 2010 by 59,971 votes. If the people denied free health care turn out and vote, the next governor will support the ACA.
By Daniel Deweese
Columbia, SC
When we were first formulating the New Legacy Project, Becci shrewdly pointed out that “New Legacy” is a contradiction. How can something be new and at the same time be a legacy? If there is a lesson from Marxist (Hegelian) dialectics, it is that truth emerges from such paradoxes and contradictions. Starting from close to a zero point, a one emerges and the repetition continues, followed by two and three. Every emergence is constituted by a legacy, every legacy thereby produces some thing new. The New Legacy Project has emerged as the result of the work of Modjeska Simkins and now the SC Progressive Network.
This New Legacy Project, this contingent is not contingent. It is necessary. One simply has to observe the growth of right wing fascist-nationalist movements, the ever increasing influence or should I say ownership of democracy by big capital and the looming ecological crises to see that the New Legacy Project is a necessity.
There is in absence in our movement. What is missing? Students and young people. Gone are the student and youth movements of the ’60s, perhaps only briefly rekindled during the Occupation. A movement that was quickly crushed. What has happened to a once dynamic emancipatory force?
We must look for answers in the inescapable phenomena of ideology. Youth are interpelated, that is addressed as subjects, by the ‘power structures’ as Modjeska correctly identified them, as subjects of pure hedonism. Consume, don’t think too much, watch TV, be your ‘true self” ,which is another way of putting the narcissistic (superego) imperative (Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide, 2013).
As a student this is not only my own anecdotal experience, it is also supported by clinical and academic data. However, this is is not a case study. This is a call to action.
The New Legacy Project possesses the potential to undermine this ideology, connecting with student organizations and thereby reaching other youth who persist in a state of apathy. We can only rekindle the dream of an emancipatory collective pursuing freedom by a creating a new legacy.
Email newlegacy@scpronet.com for details.
About 80 activists from across the state spent part of last Saturday debating and refining organizing strategies for the rest of the year. Continuing the SC Progressive Network‘s strategic focus on the state’s refusal to accept Medicaid funding, and the general sad state of democracy in South Carolina, we are preparing tools you can use to organize in your town or county. We can map the location of registered, inactive and unregistered voters by neighborhood who have been denied Medicaid coverage. The Network is calling for voter education and mobilization around a healthy democracy.
Health care is being denied and our democracy is being held hostage in a rigged game. 75% of South Carolinians will see their House representative elected without major party opposition on Nov. 4, most with 99% of the vote. Practically speaking, our best opportunity to affect state policy is in the governor’s race.
Our nonpartisan campaign will provide side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ health care positions, and let informed voters decide.
We believe that our plans to “change the dialogue” on accepting Medicaid funding in South Carolina worked. Our Truthful Tuesday educational and act-up efforts helped more people understand the issue, and widened the gap between rational conservatives and anti-government radical fundamentalists.
A “Health Democracy Road Show” committee has been formed to carry our message beyond Columbia and Charleston. Anyone interested in helping organize events around the state between June and November should email network@scpronet.com.
The individual members of the Network’s political action committee, SC Progressive Voter Coalition, met and are refining plans to focus on a few political campaigns where we may make a difference. ProVote made two primary endorsements of long-time Network supporters, Sen. Brad Hutto for US Senate and Shelia Gallagher for Superintendent of Education.
See photo album on Flickr.
Affordable Health Care Update
Network Navigators are still on duty to help people with a “life changing event” sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Life changing events include moving to a new state, certain changes in your income or family size, getting out of prison. See if you can get coverage (substantial discounts based on income) at healthcare.gov. Call the Columbia Network office at 803-445-1921 for help.
New Legacy Project
Our youngest Network members announced at the conference that they are launching a campaign to educate and mobilize new blood. With the Network’s core activists graying, it is great news to see a new generation take the initiative to grow their own grass roots. Stay tuned for more. Meanwhile, any younger people wishing to get involved can contact Wayne Borders at waynerbord@gmail.com.