Mike Miller of The Cedar Creek Boys
Michael Moore flick to launch Network’s free monthly movie night
The SC Progressive Network has occasionally shown movies in the backyard of our office in Columbia. This month, we’re making it a regular attraction (every 4th Tuesday), beginning with Michael Moore’s Capitalism, A Love Story on July 26.
And because of the beastly weather, we’re moving indoors. The movie will be shown at Conundrum Music Hall, 626 Meeting St. in West Columbia at 6pm. (Big thanks to proprietor Tom Law for offering his new venue to us!) Free and open to the public. Popcorn on the house.
On Aug. 23, we will show the documentary Salud!, about Cuba’s health care system.
For more information, call the Network at 803-808-3384 or email network@scpronet.com.
Latest news from Network’s photo ID campaign
On July 8, the SC Progressive Network held a second press conference on the photo ID law to clear up misconceptions repeated by the governor and lawmakers, and to invite the public to submit comments to the US Dept. of Justice, which is reviewing the new law to consider whether it abridges the minority vote.
See more photos from the media event here.
Below is a sample of the media coverage the press conference generated.
Group seeks those impacted by new SC voter ID law
JIM DAVENPORT, Associated Press
July 8, 2011
South Carolina voting rights advocates said Friday they are looking for voters who might not be able to have their votes counted next year under one of the nation’s toughest voter identification laws. The South Carolina Progressive Network is trying to identify some of the nearly 180,000 people who are now registered to vote but who lack the state- or federal-issued photographic identification called for under the new law. Those people would be able to cast provisional ballots, but would have to show the required identification within three days to have their votes counted. Read more:
Critics challenge ‘Voter ID’ plan
By GINA SMITH
The State
When Delores Freelon was born in 1952, her mother could not decide on a name for her. So the space on the birth certificate for a first name was left blank. In the decades since, the incomplete birth certificate did not prevent Freelon from getting her driver’s license and voter registration card in the various states she has lived, including Texas and Louisiana.
But a measure — already passed by the General Assembly and signed by Gov. Nikki Haley — will create new hurdles for Freelon and others to vote. Read more:
Group aims to block voter ID law
Opponents push for rejection by U.S. Justice Dept.
BY YVONNE WENGER
The Post and Courier
COLUMBIA — The S.C. Progressive Network issued a warning Friday to the nearly 25,000 registered voters in the tri-county area without a state-issued photo ID: You could run into trouble the next time you go to the polls. The advocacy organization is urging the U.S. Department of Justice to reject a new South Carolina law that will require all voters to carry a picture ID to cast a ballot in future elections. The state’s Republican leadership pushed for the new law, citing a need to guard against voter fraud even though there has been no substantive proof of widespread voter fraud for years in the state. Read more:
Progressives Push to Stop Implementation of Voter ID Law
BY COREY HUTCHINS
Free Times
Five TV cameras, two reporters from The State, one from The Associated Press, a reporter from the Charleston Post & Courier and another from the South Carolina Radio Network, among others, swarmed around a podium in the lobby of the State House July 8, as South Carolina Progressive Network director Brett Bursey warned voters here that they might have trouble casting a ballot under a new state law. It comes during a time of a national pushback against such regulations.
Governor, lawmakers mislead public on SC’s photo ID law, now under review at Justice Dept.
SC Progressive Network to hold press conference to clear up misunderstanding and to invite public comment
The US Dept. of Justice is now receiving comments on South Carolina’s new photo ID law as it considers whether it abridges the minority vote. The SC Progressive Network will host a press conference at 11:45am on Friday, July 8, in the downstairs lobby of the State House to clear up public misunderstanding stemming from misinformation being repeated by the governor and GOP legislators.
The Network will share with reporters the only attachment supporting the state’s filing: a one-page letter from bill sponsor Rep. Alan Clemmons, who writes that he filed the bill because “It is an unspoken truth in South Carolina that election fraud exists.”
The Network, which for 15 years has been advocating voting rights, is making its case to the Dept. of Justice that our state’s ID law, the nation’s most restrictive, will suppress the vote, especially among seniors and the poor. In South Carolina, a birth certificate is required to get the state-issued card, and the law provides no exceptions, as do similar laws in other states.
It is clear that at least some of the estimated 200,000 registered SC voters who don’t have a photo ID will not be able to vote in the next election because they won’t have their papers in order.
The press conference will include the showing of a brief video clip of Gov. Nikki Haley signing the bill into law, where she defends the law by stating that a photo ID is necessary to buy Sudafed or to get on an airplane. To a reporters’ question about what sorts of ID are acceptable, Rep. Bobby Harrell says, “If you can fly with it (photo ID), you can vote with it.” That simply isn’t true.
At Friday’s press conference, two South Carolina voters will testify that, contrary to Gov. Haley and Rep. Harrell’s assertions, they can buy Sudafed and fly with the IDs they have; what they can’t do is vote in South Carolina.
The Progressive Network is collecting statements from people around the state who are having trouble meeting the state’s new ID requirements and will forward them to the Justice Department. Also, the public may make comments by email to: vot1973c@usdoj.gov. In the subject line put: “2011-2495: Comment”. Or comments may be faxed to: 202-616-9514.
For more information contact the SC Progressive Network at 803-808-3384 or network@scpronet.com. See background on the photo ID law and video clips of voters disenfranchised by the new law at SC Progressive Network.
Real patriots pay taxes
By Scott Klinger and Holly Sklar
Some of our nation’s biggest corporations are planning a tax holiday and they want you to pick up the tab. Actually, you already pay for their routine tax avoidance through the use of tax havens in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and elsewhere. These accounting acrobatics cost the U.S. Treasury $100 billion a year. Now they want Congress to pass a special tax holiday for money they “repatriate” back to the United States.
There’s nothing patriotic about this repatriation being pushed by Google, Cisco, Pfizer and other companies in the Win America campaign. To sell the tax holiday, they claim it will produce a burst of jobs and investment.
In fact, Congress passed a “one-time-only” tax holiday in 2004 with similar promises. Instead, it produced a burst of shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, which goosed the pay of CEOs. Corporations laid off workers and shifted even more income and investment to offshore tax havens in the wake of the 2004 tax holiday.
“Why should we reward firms for successfully gaming the tax system when we in turn are called on to make up the missing tax revenues?” Edward Kleinbard, former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, told Bloomberg. “Much of these earnings overseas are reaped from an enormous shell game: Firms move their taxable income from the U.S. and other major economies – where their customers and key employees are in reality located – to tax havens.”
A favorite accounting trick is transferring a patent from the U.S. parent company to a subsidiary – often a shell company – in a tax haven. Profits from the patent go largely untaxed offshore while the costs of development, marketing and management remain in the U.S. where they are taken as tax deductions. Pfizer was the largest beneficiary of the last tax holiday, bringing $37 billion back to the United States and paying just $1.7 billion in federal corporate income taxes. It laid off 10,000 American workers in the following months.
The U.S. is the world’s most profitable drug market and yet over the last three years, Pfizer – maker of Lipitor, Viagra and much more – has reported $7.9 billion in U.S. losses while claiming $37.8 billion in profits in the rest of the world. Pfizer, like the rest of Big Pharma, is heavily subsidized by taxpayer-funded research at the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere. It should not be rewarded with another tax holiday.
Bloomberg reported that Win America member “Google reduced its income taxes by $3.1 billion over three years by shifting income to Ireland, then the Netherlands, and ultimately to Bermuda.” What a corporate ingrate. Google would not exist without the Internet, and the Internet grew out of U.S. government research beginning in the 1960s. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, now billionaires, developed into Google. Brin was also supported by an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.
Increasingly, U.S. multinational corporations want to benefit from government spending on education, infrastructure, research, health care and so on without paying for it. Today, large corporations pay, on average, 18 percent of their profits in federal income taxes and as a group contribute just 9 percent toward federal government bills – down from 32 percent in 1952.
The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation says a new tax holiday would cost $79 billion. A dozen national and state business organizations led by Business for Shared Prosperity recently wrote members of Congress urging them to oppose the tax holiday. The letter said, “When powerful large U.S. corporations avoid their fair share of taxes, they undermine U.S. competitiveness, contribute to the national debt and shift more of the tax burden to domestic businesses, especially small businesses that create most of the new jobs.”
There is no excuse for repeating a policy that’s a proven failure. It would be even worse this time around, as corporations would redouble their efforts to shift profits overseas in anticipation of the next tax holiday. Congress should close the tax loopholes that reward companies for transferring U.S. profits, jobs and investment abroad – not encourage them.
Real patriots pay their fair share of taxes. They don’t run out on the bill.
Scott Klinger is Director of Tax Policy and Holly Sklar is Executive Director of Business for Shared Prosperity. Mr. Klinger is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder.
New photo ID law makes it harder to vote in South Carolina than anywhere in the country
By Becci Robbins
SC Progressive Network
You could forgive voters for being confused about South Carolina’s photo ID law. Debate on the bill went on so long their eyes glazed over years ago. It’s hard to be as charitable to Gov. Nikki Haley, who twists the truth every time she defends the law she helped push through.
The governor argues that if we need a photo ID to buy Sudafed or to board a plane, we should need one to vote. Sounds reasonable, but neither pharmacies nor airlines require a state-specific ID, as this law does. And to get a SC photo ID you need to produce a birth certificate. For some people, that’s a problem.
Finally, we are number one! Sadly, it’s in voter suppression.
These documents aren’t enough for Delores Freelon to vote.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has identified seven states as having the most restrictive photo ID requirements for voting: Georgia, Kansas, Texas, Indiana, Wisconsin, Tennessee and South Carolina. All require voters to show a photo ID, but states vary in what kind and how hard it is to get.
- In Georgia, if voters are already registered, they automatically get a new photo ID voter registration card.
- In Kansas, voters can use a driver’s license from out of state, any accredited college ID, or government-issued public assistance cards. Voters over 65 may show expired ID.
- In Texas, you can get ID to vote with your concealed weapons permit, your boating license, insurance policy or beautician’s license. Or you can vote a provisional ballot if you will incur fees in order to vote. Voters over 70 are exempt.
- In Indiana, those without a photo ID get their provisional vote counted by claiming the fees to get the required documents were a burden.
- In Wisconsin, voters can use any state driver’s license, Social Security card or student ID.
- In Tennessee, a driver’s license from any state allows you to vote.
- In South Carolina, voters must produce a birth certificate to get the state-issued photo ID required to vote. No exceptions. (If you vote a provisional ballot, that won’t count unless you present your state-issued photo ID within three days.)
Numbers are hard to project, but it is clear that some of the nearly 200,000 registered South Carolina voters who don’t have their papers in order will not be able to vote in the next election.
Even though there are no cases of the kind of fraud this law is purported to prevent, our cash-strapped state will spend at least the $700,000 supporters say it will cost to implement. Opponents say it will cost two to three times that much to educate poll workers and the public about the new law. The governor has said you can’t put a price on the sanctity of the vote.
She should tell that to Delores Freelon, a Columbia resident and registered voter who won’t be able to vote in the next election because she has a Louisiana driver’s license and can’t get her birth certificate from California in time. What about the sanctity of her vote? What about Ms. Kennedy in Sumter, whose birth certificate lists her first name as Baby Girl, meaning she’ll have to go to court to get her papers straight in order to get a photo ID? Or Larrie Butler, who was born at home in Calhoun County in 1926 and is being told he needs records from an elementary school that no longer exists in order to establish a birth certificate?
Stories like these are coming in from around the state. The SC Progressive Network, which for 15 years has been advocating for voting rights, is fielding calls from people with questions about the new law or having problems meeting the ID requirements.
The lucky ones will still get to vote, but only after jumping through hoops and paying fees at various state agencies. Some will have to amend their birth certificates by going to court, at considerable cost. People without a car, a computer or short on money are simply out of luck. The disenfranchised will be primarily seniors and the poor. Many of them will be people of color who have voted all their lives.
The Network is working to educate the public about the new law.
This quiet whittling away of the vote is no accident. It is, in fact, the point. It’s the pattern being repeated in GOP-controlled legislatures across the country.
In South Carolina, we have a brief chance to challenge this law. Because of our state’s history of disenfranchising people of color, ours is one of seven states that must get pre-clearance from the US Dept. of Justice (DOJ) before new voting laws can go into effect. Once the state attorney general files the case, DOJ has up to 60 days to consider whether the law suppresses the minority vote.
The SC Progressive Network is gathering statements to forward to DOJ documenting voters’ experiences. We need volunteers around the state to help find citizens who will have a hard time meeting the new voting requirements. If you want to help, call the Network at 803-808-3384 or see scpronet.com for details.
See video clips of Delores Freelon and Larrie Butler telling their stories.
Another casualty of the SC voter photo ID law
Delores Freelon will not be able to vote in the next election because she can’t meet the requirements of the new photo ID law in time. She is one of nearly 200,000 South Carolina voters who don’t have a current, state-issued photo ID at risk of being disenfranchised. Please help us get this law thrown out. Call 803-808-3384 or see scpronet.com for details.
Southern states seek end run around Justice Department over redistricting
By Chris Kromm
Facing South, Institute for Southern Studies
If you’re a Republican legislator eager to redraw your state’s political lines to your party’s favor in time for the 2012 elections, but fear opposition from a state Democratic attorney general and the Obama Justice Department, what to do?
Sneak little-noticed language into the bottom of a budget bill that allows you to bypass your redistricting foes, of course — even if it could end up costing your state time and money in the process.
At least that’s the approach favored by GOP lawmakers in the battleground state of North Carolina, and based on a similar strategy used in Texas and other Southern states this spring.
N.C. House Republicans hoped their plan would largely fly under the radar of Democrats and the media. But it was unintentionally made public last week, when a microphone was left on during a closed-door GOP caucus strategy session, causing the proceedings to be directly broadcast to the state press corps.
The plan revealed by mic-gate: Instead of submitting North Carolina’s redistricting plan to the Department of Justice — where it needs pre-clearance because 40 of the state’s counties are covered by the Voting Rights Act — the GOP law would allow the state’s Legislative Services Commission to directly present the plan to a district court in D.C.
That would allow the Republican-drawn lines to bypass being approved by the Department of Justice, which would merely be an opposing party in the case if it has objections.
The leaked audio has House Speaker Thom Tillis describing the plan, which he also warned was “extremely sensitive” and shouldn’t be publicly discussed:
The plan all along has been to submit this to the courts, rather than the Department of Justice, since this will be the first redistricting plan under the Voting Rights Act submitted to a DOJ controlled by Democrats, let alone Obama.
Just as important, the Republican measure would allow lawmakers to remove the state attorney general — in this case Democrat Roy Cooper — from representing the state.
As Jason Kay, a lawyer for Tillis and former staffer of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law — one of several conservative groups largely backed by Raleigh retail millionaire Art Pope — was caught openly mocking Cooper in the session:
[The Republican bill] allows the client [the state legislature] to have control over the attorney in the litigation … We could fire [Roy Cooper] or we could ask him if he’s just so confused and conflicted that he’s not able to represent his client effectively anymore.
Kay’s candid comments are especially interesting given the role his previous benefactor, Republican donor Art Pope, has played in the redistricting battle. As Facing South revealed last fall, an outside group in part coordinated by Pope funneled $1.25 million from the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 with the express purpose of helping N.C. GOP candidates take over the legislature in time for redistricting. Art Pope’s family foundation supplied nearly all of the money for Kay’s salary when he worked at the right-wing N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law.
A Costly Strategy
The idea isn’t original: Texas Republicans filed a similar bill in April allowing the state to take their redistricting plan directly to court and bypass the DOJ — although the Texas version allows their attorney general, a Republican, to represent the state in court.
It’s also all clearly within the law. But one reason most states haven’t used the option is because, aside from drawing criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups, going directly to court has two major drawbacks: It’s expensive and usually very slow.
“[Going to the Justice Department] is more informal,” election law expert Rick Hasen told Facing South. “You don’t need to hire a lawyer.”
If North Carolina does go straight to court, it will face all of those court expenses, including hiring a lawyer — most likely Thomas Farr, a Republican attorney who has handled redistricting cases before and is considered the likely choice for the GOP’s scheme.
Indeed, state GOP house leader Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam joked in the secret meeting that “Y’all [Republicans] need to be raising money for our outside counsel for after session adjourns.”
But if Farr or another Republican-friendly attorney is hired through the Legislative Services Commission, North Carolina taxpayers — not just GOP lawmakers — could end up picking up the tab.
Ironically, the straight-to-court strategy has another possible drawback: It takes more time. “The DOJ process is much (much) faster,” according to Justin Levitt, who runs the very useful All About Redistricting website from his perch at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
That’s why Louisiana and Virginia, in addition to taking their redistricting cases to court, are simultaneously seeking approval from the DOJ for their plans, in hopes of getting them approved more quickly.
What’s more, the proposed North Carolina law wouldn’t stop Attorney General Roy Cooper from filing suit against the redistricting plan if he felt it violated the state constitution.
In other words, the N.C. GOP’s once-secret redistricting scheme will likely be expensive, time-consuming and won’t stop Democrats from presenting legal obstacles to their plan.
“It’s more political theater than substance,” reasons Justin Levitt. Especially now that everyone in North Carolina knows about it.
SC Equality shares victory
New photo ID law poses big obstacles for countless SC voters
Stories like this are coming in from all over South Carolina. Fortunately for Mr. Butler, he has a computer, a car, a son to help him gather documents, and the money to pay for court costs. But what about voters without those resources?