Listen: NYC Council Member Barron Vs. ‘Mayor Cop Adams’ and More

Council Member Charles Barron denounces the City of New York’s campaign to strip municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare coverage at a rally outside City Hall in April. Photo by Joe Maniscalco

By Bob Hennelly

On this Juneteenth Edition of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour we’re broadcasting from from Washington DC at the Poor People’s Campaign Moral Poverty Action Congress convened by Rev. Dr. William Barber.

This week hundreds of Poor People’s Campaign leaders from over 30 states are confronting Congress about the deepening crisis of poverty in the United States as the nation’s richest individuals and corporations continue to take an ever-larger portion of the nation’s wealth. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Americans are being kicked off of Medicaid, child poverty is on the rise after the expanded child tax credit was allowed to expire, and the federal minimum wage continues to sit at an immoral $7.25 an hour.

Part I: We hear from New York City Councilman Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn). He takes Mayor Adams to task for forcing New York City’s retired civil servants, including many whose wages were historically low, on to a for-profit Aetna Medicare Advantage Care Plan that will require pre-authorizations and reduce their access to healthcare. Barron says the Adams administration is running a significant surplus as it overspends on the NYPD and cuts every other city agency by four percent.

Part II: James Henry, a Yale Global Justice Fellow from Long Island joins Valeria Gheorghiu, an attorney who represents the Ramapough Lenape and Munsee Nation to discuss the grass roots fight to stop the dumping by Holtec International of millions of gallons of radioactive water tainted with tritium into the Hudson River from the closed Indian Point nuclear reactor.

Henry goes into detail about the success Holtec has had in enlisting some unions to endorse the project. Gheorghiu explains how the Ramapough Tribe worked in coalition with other groups to successfully stop the Pilgrim Pipeline.

Listen to the entire show below: