Listen: Biden Bails, Unions Rally to Harris
Vice-President Kamala Harris was moved to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden announced will not run for re-election.
By Bob Hennelly
President Biden ended weeks of speculation and announced that he would not stand for re-election and would instead endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris for his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention scheduled in Chicago later next month.
This remarkable turn of events came in the form of a letter in which he wrote saying that it’s “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”
Biden, 81, tweeted minutes later endorsing his 59 year-old vice-president.
Unions, including the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the United Steelworkers, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Communication Workers of America, and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees all endorsed Harris.
On this week’s episode of the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we check in with New Hampshire-based progressive talk show host Arne Arnesen, host of the The Attitude with Arne Arnesen. She is a lawyer by training and served for several years in the New Hampshire State Legislature. Arne was the first woman to run for governor of the Granite State.
In the second half of the show, we ask retired New York City Firefighter Khalid Baylor, 1st vice-president of the Vulcan Society, the FDNY’s Black fraternal society, to comment on the tenure of New York City Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh, who last week announced her departure.
Back in 2013, the Vulcans settled a landmark racial discrimination lawsuit which required the City of New York to improve its recruiting practices and to pay out over $90 million dollars in recognition of its past race-based discrimination that kept the percentage of Black firefighters at just three percent.
We wrap of this episode with Alexis Plues, who traveled to the RNC Milwaukee convention from Binghamton, New York to speak with Republicans about the nation’s overdose crisis, which also claimed the life of her son in 2003. Plues and and her non-partisan group, however, were kept far from the convention by RNC security. Plues links the nation’s fatal overdose epidemic to our scarcity-based healthcare system that puts profits over people.
Listen to the entire show below: