LISTEN: The ‘Wall Street-ization’ of US Healthcare and More!
“We Earned Medicare”: Hundreds of municipal retirees and their supporters rallied outside City Hall last month, against the ongoing campaign to strip them of their traditional Medicare benefits. Photo by Joe Maniscalco
By Bob Hennelly
Raising Hell and Money For Labor Radio — it’s the May Pledge Drive Edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour. On this special episode, Marianne Pizzitola, president of the FDNY EMS Retirees Association and NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees joins nationally syndicated progressive radio host Arnie Arnesen who explore how the resistance against Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign to strip municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare benefits and push them into a profit-driven Aetna Medicare Advantage program is actually part of national fight back against the Wall Street-ization of healthcare.
Later in the show, Chris Silvera, secretary-treasurer of Teamster Local 808 offers his insights on how a more militant American labor movement can flip the US wealth pyramid so that the country works for workers and their families.
John Samuelsen, International President of the TWU, which includes TWU Local 100, also describes what's at stake in ongoing talks with the MTA. Samuelsen tells Stuck Nation Labor Radio that calls by pro-business groups like the Partnership for NYC to eliminate conductors from New York City Transit's subway system put the riding public and the workforce at risk.
He suggests that rather than cutting the essential transit workforce, the State of New York stops rebating back to Wall Street the Stock Transfer Tax (a nickel per $100) which has cost the state $138 billion over the last ten years.
Listen to the entire show below: