Dossier on the South Carolina Workers Party Candidates for SC General Assembly
In this Special Election Issue: Dossier on the South Carolina Workers Party Candidates for SC General Assembly
• Greetings from the South Carolina Workers Party (SCWP)
• Expand Medicaid: Press Release from South Carolina Workers Party
• Message from GARY VOTOUR, the SC Workers Party Treasurer, former gubernatorial candidate, and current candidate for the SC House seat in District 76
• Platform of the South Carolina Workers Party: “The Bosses Have Two Parties, Now the Workers Have Their Own!”
• CALL FOR LCIP NATIONAL CONFERENCE – MARCH 2024 – “Breaking the Grip of the Two-Party System” – (co-sponsored by the South Carolina Workers Party) – excerpts
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• Greetings from the South Carolina Workers Party (SCWP)
Dear Sisters and Brothers,
We are writing to ask you to support and donate to the South Carolina Workers Party (SCWP) candidates for legislative seats in our State House and State Senate. As the election rapidly approaches, we are in need of funds to purchase basic campaign materials. This includes signs for election week and issue cards for candidates to leave with potential voters when we visit them as we knock on doors.
The SCWP party platform includes a living wage of at least $20/hr, the right to form Unions, and the expansion of Medicaid to cover the working poor. You can read more about our platform below and at www.scworkersparty.org.
You can also make your donation at:
Donate here:
We’d like to thank Labor and Community for an Independent Party (LCIP) for its support and willingness to forward this message widely on our behalf.
In solidarity,
The SCWP Candidates for the SC General Assembly
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• Expand Medicaid: Press Release from South Carolina Workers Party
Recent rankings by the Commonwealth Fund show that South Carolina is among the worst states to live in if you need health care. At the national level, our state ranks 46th for racial and ethnic health equity, and 42nd for reproductive and women’s health. Even among its fellow southern rates, SC ranks 8th out of 12 in both categories.
SC is one of the remaining handful of states that have refused to expand Medicaid to cover lower-income workers. In the states that accepted the additional federal funding, Medicaid changed from an insurance program mainly for the poor and people with disabilities to one that also covered low-income workers earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.
Expanding Medicaid reduced uninsured rates significantly in the most vulnerable parts of the Black and Latino communities. In the states that agreed to cover more of their low-income workers, the census tracts with the most mortgage redlining historically have also seen the biggest drops in their uninsured populations.
Medicaid has also reduced mortality in working-age adults and in infants, provided crucial funding to rural hospitals in crisis and in danger of closing, and improved the quality of care.
The working class of SC pays its fair share of the federal taxes that would fund Medicaid expansion, yet are denied the benefits of longer, healthier lives with less medical debt by the State’s refusal to expand. All the SCWP candidates (Mace, Geddings, and Votour) for state legislative seats will fight to expand Medicaid to cover the working poor.
Unlike our Republican and Democratic opponents, we will not sit idly by and watch as thousands of workers have needlessly shorter lives, dying from illnesses that could be detected and treated earlier. We will fight to eliminate the racial and ethnic bias in a system designed to reward only the highest of wage earners with the best care and least debt.
We need your help to get there if we are going to succeed.
We have signs designed and ready to print to get the word out to voters they have a choice. If you’d like to help our party cover expenses, you can donate to our party’s election fund. Unlike other parties (and their candidates), we won’t spend your money on consultants, lunches, or personal mileage. Every dollar you give to the party account below is used to supply our candidates for the SC General Assembly with the handouts and signs they need to reach out to voters.
Donate here:
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November 5, 2024
Message from Gary Votour, Candidate SCWP House 76
I have been pondering the seemingly futile attempts to protest unjust laws that many of us have participated in over the last few years, wondering if it really makes a distance to show up and be heard for issues like the death penalty, or for peace in Middle East, or for a living wage, or for the right to unionize, or for the expansion of Medicaid to cover the working poor.
The answer I return to again and again is a resounding YES.
We need to be heard by those in power, those who make the laws in our state that so profoundly impact the working class. We also need to replace them if they refuse to listen. That means running candidates like the three of us for the positions that make those laws.
Our campaigns are a part of a multi-year plan to take back the power of the working-class people of South Carolina. Win or lose this November, our candidate will likely run again in two years. In fact, our plan is to have a dozen or more SCWP candidates running for everything from the Governor to the State House.
Without a viable third party willing to run candidates against both Republicans and Democrats, we will never see the change we so desperately long to see. Right now, it is your chance to help. Every donation, no matter how large or how small, to our party campaign fund inches us forward to achieving our goals in South Carolina.
So, I’m asking, once again, for you to help by donating $10, $20, $50 or more so we can purchase signs and other materials we need for the November election! Thank you to everyone who has donated so far, and thank you in advance for your help as we move forward in solidarity with the working class of our state.
Donate here:
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Message to the Founding Convention of the South Carolina Workers Party (SCWP)
Dear Sisters and Brothers of the South Carolina Workers Party (SCWP),
On behalf of the Labor Fightback Network (LFN) and Labor and Committee for an Independent Party (LCIP), we send our solidarity greetings to your SCWP convention this coming weekend.
The LFN and LCIP have followed closely — and supported — the formation of your new organization and your principled fight to build a working-class party that is truly independent of the Democrats. We were at the side of Brother Gary Votour and Sister Donna Dewitt in their valiant struggles. They are both members of the LCIP Continuations Committee
We write this greeting with a request that your organization join the Continuations Committees of LCIP and LFN — as Brother Votour and Sister Dewitt have done.
Most important, we invite you to send a delegation from your convention to the LCIP National Conference for Independent Working-Class Politics, to be held over zoom on March 24, 2024, just one weekend from now. This will give you a better idea of who we are and what we stand for.
We are sending you below the LCIP Conference Call and information on how to register.
We end this greeting with an excerpt from our Conference Call:
“The will to fight back is strong. Let us harness this fightback for a winning strategy for political power. We must seize the moment.
Hoping to hear back from you soon and wishing you a successful convention,
In solidarity
Alan Benjamin (and all others) on behalf of the LFN and LCIP steering committees
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CALL FOR LCIP NATIONAL CONFERENCE 2024
“Breaking the Grip of the Two-Party System”
March 24, 2024
(co-sponsored by the South Carolina Workers Party)
The Crisis Before Us
Every day, every hour, every minute that passes, hundreds of tons of bombs are dropped on the Palestinian people in Gaza – children, women, and men are murdered, buried, and mutilated by weapons ”MADE IN THE USA.” Sixty thousand people have been killed or seriously injured; tens of thousands more are threatened with imminent starvation and disease; 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced, their homes and the infrastructure in Gaza destroyed.
Gaza is not the only U.S.-funded war. For the past two years, a war has raged in Ukraine. It’s a war that both sides acknowledge could last many years, if not decades — a war that has already taken 500,000 military and civilian lives (315,000 in Russia alone), a war funded and supplied by the U.S. and European governments.
Another arena of direct U.S. military intervention and war funding is Africa, where the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has built 46 various forms of U.S. bases that station thousands of U.S. troops with the aim of promoting U.S. strategic interests throughout the continent.
There is more to be said about the U.S. war build-up against Iran and, in the longer term, against China. In all these cases, U.S. arms manufacturers – especially Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), and Northrop Grumman – are raking in billions in profits while the Democratic and Republican governments slash domestic spending for health care, public housing, education, social services, public transportation … and more.
Working people, and youth in particular, are facing an escalating war at home linked to the wars abroad. Black liberation activist Erica Caines explained this inter-connection: “AFRICOM is the flip side of the domestic war being waged by the same repressive structure against Black people in the U.S., notably through the construction of multiple ‘cop cities’ across the country.”
Growing Resistance
Segments of the U.S. working class and oppressed communities are beginning to implement a class-struggle fightback against the employers and the U.S. government. To cite a few examples:
· Since early October 2023 – in unprecedented mass actions – more than one million people have taken a stand in support of Palestinian self-determination, flooding the campuses, streets, city council chambers, and numerous union halls. On January 13, 2024, an estimated 400,000 people assembled in the streets of Washington, D.C., to demand a ceasefire, an immediate, permanent and unconditional halt to the bombing, an end to U.S. aid to Apartheid Israel, a lifting of the siege on Gaza, and an end to the occupation.
· Many unions, large and small, have come out for a ceasefire in Gaza, contradicting the political line of the Democratic Party and the trade union officialdom. (This stance in support of the ceasefire opens the possibility for further organizing and collective action by these and other unions.)
· Strike action is back in the public and private sectors.
· A rank-and-file labor upsurge to democratize the unions and transform them into instruments of class struggle has brought fear into the boardrooms of the corporate giants.
· More than 25 million people took to the streets nationwide in 2020 to protest the police killing of George Floyd.
The will to fight back is burgeoning. Now we need to harness this fightback into a winning strategy in the political arena, one with an independent perspective that can achieve the goals of the working-class and oppressed. This will require that the U.S. labor movement break with the Democratic Party – its subordination to the Democratic Party is a major obstacle to defending our rights and winning our demands.
Union, community, and political activists and their organizations came together six years ago and formed Labor and Community for an Independent Party (LCIP) around two Points of Unity, both of which are premised on our understanding that the bosses have two political parties and working people and the oppressed need a party of our own.
· Point 1: The need to advocate for and promote a working-class party – a labor party – rooted in the labor movement and communities of the oppressed, as well as an independent Black working-class party linked to the struggle for a labor party.
· Point 2: The need to promote the fight for a labor party within the unions by organizing labor party rank-and-file caucuses that are based on the resolution in support of a labor party that was adopted by the October 2017 National Convention of the AFL-CIO. It is time to go beyond words of support to independent political action and to begin implementing this resolution, starting with running independent working-class candidates for local elections, such as for city councils and school boards.
LCIP also developed a strategy – we call it a building blocks strategy – to get the ball rolling through the formation of local grassroots assemblies that develop a fighting, united-front platform and nominate candidates mandated to advocate and promote the fightback platforms. The candidates would also champion the fight for a labor party on a national level.
We Must Seize the Moment!
Rarely in recent U.S. history has there been such an opening to build the foundations of an independent working-class party.
“Genocide Joe” is less and less popular, as he implements an increasingly right-wing agenda of increased funding for wars and interventions on every continent – an agenda that could become a World War III conflagration if this reactionary course is not stopped. Rail workers also remember when Biden invoked the anti-union Railway Labor Act to prevent a nationwide railway labor strike.
Growing numbers of youth, Arab Americans, Black people and union members are disenchanted with the choice of Biden or Trump in November 2024. At a UAW convention rally in late January 2024, in the presence of Biden, 10 UAW activists denounced from the convention floor the UAW President Shawn Fain’s endorsement of Biden. One of the UAW activists, Johannah King-Slutzky, declared loudly: “A president who supports genocide and sends millions of dollars in funds and weapons to Israel to kill children and families does not deserve our support!”
These growing numbers are looking for an independent, pro-working-class alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties.
Providing that alternative, growing LCIP, and mapping out a few areas where LCIP-endorsed candidates could run for office at the local level with our proposed strategy of labor-community assemblies is the aim of LCIP’s National Convention 2024. This will be a zoom conference open to all who share this vision and wish to promote it across the country.
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- [This dossier was prepared for the South Carolina Workers Party (SCWP) by Labor and Community for an Independent Party (www.LCIPcommittee.org) and The Organizer Newspaper, www.socialistorganizer.org.]
Socialist Organizer 