By Bob Hennelly

The Stuck Nation Radio Labor Hour for the week of 12/26

Part I: What’s the lost opportunity cost of a $1.7 Trillion Omnibus federal spending bill that spends $858 billion on the military? Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director of the Kairos Center and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, director of the Kairos Center, as well as co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, reflect on the moral failure of the Congress in not renewing the expanded child tax credit but giving the Pentagon billions more than the President Biden asked for.  

Part II: For the first time in its 87-year-history, the rank-and-file members of the United Auto Workers had the opportunity to cast a ballot for their union’s leadership yet fewer than 10 percent of its one million members did so. Now, the incumbent union president Ray Curry and Shawn Fain, are headed off for a run-off election having gotten less than 50 percent of the votes cast. Will Lehman, one of the three other candidates, has filed a challenge maintaining that the union bureaucracy deliberately suppressed the vote and as a result both front runners got less than four percent on the votes of the one million plus members. Lehman, who ran as a socialist, also recounts the sprawling criminal corruption cases that caught up two former national union presidents and several union officials who were paid off by executives with Fiat Chrysler to sell out the union.

Part III: Village Voice writer Sarah Ferguson updates her reporting on the long saga of former P.S. 94, reinvented by the residents of the lower Eastside neighborhood as CHARAS/El Bohio, a multi-cultural center. While it was sold by Mayor Rudy Giuliani to a private developer decades ago, that developer has failed to actualize his vision of turning the 150,000 square complex into a for-profit dormitory for local universities.

“But he’s been stymied by the dogged opposition of CHARAS supporters—including local politicians and a wealthy hedge funder who lives in a penthouse next door—who want the building restored as a community center,” Ferguson recounts. “Meanwhile, the property is in foreclosure. Somehow Singer, who purchased the school for a scant $3.15 million, is now in the hole for more than $90 million—enough that his creditor, Madison Realty Capital, appears poised to seize control of the decaying property.”   

Listen to the whole show below: