Losing a voice

 

The labor movement and the people of West Virginia lost a powerful voice (literally) yesterday with the death of Elaine Purkey from COVID. Among other things, she was a singer/songwriter whose music has reached many around the US and beyond. And she was my dear friend. 

We met during the Pittston coal strike of 1989-90, my first big fight after joining AFSC. Her husband Bethel was a grassroots union leader and Elaine was just finding her voice writing labor songs. It was wild and uncut class struggle: there were shootings, at least one fatal, burning buildings, vehicles smashed by nonunion coal trucks, evictions from company property, private gun thugs, state police and federal marshals, arrests, and a bit of the wooden shoe and black cat. Also music, laughter, humor, mischief and love. 

(I’m not necessarily proud of this, but some of us were having the time of our lives.)

We did a lot together over the years, not just labor stuff, but also things like fighting racist police brutality and even doing mountain stories and songs with kids. It never took much to get her to whip out her guitar. She was very intuitive, like someone who could solve complex math problems without showing her work. 

Sometimes I’d pitch her a bare song idea, which she’d weave into gold in short order. Her best song is One Day More (here’s the Smithsonian version), which was written in 1992 when 1,700 Steelworkers were locked out of the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation for nearly two years. 

A lot of people thought the fight was hopeless. I asked her to write something to boost morale and she came up with one for the ages in less than 24 hours. The first time I heard it, I knew people would be singing it after we were gone.

The Oscar winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple filmed the first performance at the union hall while doing a documentary for PBS on the lockout (I think you can see the neck of my 12 string on it too). I knew music was powerful in the struggle but never saw anything like that, with people crying, clapping, and singing along the first time they heard it. The song became their anthem and the good guys actually wound up winning. 

The idea behind the song was just to hang on one day longer than the company. It had legs, even showing up in a songbook of the 2011 Wisconsin protests against union busting. If you decide to listen but aren’t used to Appalachian twang, you may want to stand back and play it low. 

I think her message to us in these evil days would come straight from the song: hold out one day more.

Another one to watch

I've kind of been obsessed with health care policy for pretty much my whole career with the American Friends Service Committee, which began in 1989.

The first big fight I ever had, the Pittston coal strike (1989-90), was largely about health benefits for coal miners and their families, especially for retirees. Health care was a major issue in other good labor struggles from the Ravenswood Aluminum lockout (1990-92) to the recent WV work stoppages by teachers and school service workers.

In terms of public policy, lots of fights in the era of welfare reform (1996-early 2000s) had to do with health care. These included enacting the Children's Health Insurance Program at the federal level, followed by several pushes here to get the state to implement and expand the program. That culminated in 2011, when then Governor Tomblin expanded eligibility to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

There were also efforts in that period to make sure people got "transitional Medicaid" when they left public assistance, along with supportive services related to minimal dental and vision care.

Then came the epic struggle to enact the Affordable Care Act. Misnamed Obamacare, it's really more like the Senate version of a reform bill. The House version was better, but with the death of Senator Edward Kennedy in August 2009, the senate version was the only game in town. It passed in March 2010.

I remember all hell breaking loose at town meetings in WV and around the country in 2009. At one in Huntington, a conspiracy theorist argued that reform meant something like a military takeover by the World Health Organization. You know, black helicopters and microchips in the butt. Apparently, they haven't made it out my holler yet.

At another event in southern WV, a  Catholic priest got heckled by someone during the opening prayer, with a shout of "How much are you getting paid?"

Efforts to repeal it began as soon as efforts to defeat it in Congress failed. In 2012, the US Supreme Court weighed, affirming the constitutionality of the law but making a key piece of it, Medicaid expansion, a state option.

People here worked hard to persuade Tomblin in 2013 to make the expansion, which he did with characteristic caution, seeking an actuarial opinion that fortunately underestimated the benefits of the expansion to WV. The effects were and are huge.

While quite a few states jumped on right away, others, particularly in the south and west, held out. A series of state by state fights ensued. I think each time a state decides to expand it, the harder it will be to undo the whole thing.

(I'm going  to skip over the epic fights since the 2016 election to block Trump, WV attorney general Patrick Morrisey and others of that ilk to take it all away from millions of Americans, not to mention the next US Supreme Court ruling, which is expected to come early next year. I get tired just thinking about it.)

The last time a state expanded Medicaid was in Oklahoma in June, where voters narrowly approved the expansion despite a flood of dark money..

Which brings us to tomorrow, when voters will take up the measure in Missouri. The following alert went out from Joshua Saleem, director of AFSC's St. Louis program to Friends and contacts in that state:

On August 4, Missouri voters will have the chance to make history and save lives by voting “Yes!” on Amendment 2, which would expand Medicaid to cover around 200,000 currently uninsured state residents. The expansion would particularly benefit adults in working families earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level.

This step makes sense in “ordinary” times by extending health care, opening the path to recovery from addiction, easing the path to reentry for formerly incarcerated people, supporting hospitals and health care providers, creating jobs and generating economic activity—but these aren’t ordinary times. In these times of a global pandemic that has yet to slow down, a yes vote is absolutely imperative.

Medicaid expansion is a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. It was intended by Congress to apply across the nation, but a U.S. Supreme Court decision made it a state option.  As of now, 38 states, including the District of Columbia, have expanded Medicaid. Missouri should join their ranks.

The vote could be close. In Oklahoma, voters approved the expansion in June—but by a bare margin of one percent. Millions of dollars in dark money will be spent to defeat the measure.

This is why we’re asking you do three things: vote yes, share this email with friends, and do all you can to get out the vote.

Since its founding over 100 years ago, the American Friends Service Committee, following the Quaker belief in the value of all persons, has worked to promote economic rights as human rights. It has supported access to health care internationally as well as at the national and state level in the United States.

It doesn’t often happen that ordinary people have the opportunity to make such a huge difference with such simple steps, but this is one of those times. Please help us make the most of it.

It will be the latest round in a series of struggles that probably began in the USA in 1912 when former president and presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt first proposed something like universal health care as the candidate of the Progressive Republican Party.

I plan on staying up as long as it takes for the vote to be counted.