Listen: Profit-Driven to Extinction?
New Jersey nurses in the streets fighting for safe staffing.
By Bob Hennelly
We kick off National Nurses Week with an update from Debbie White, RN and president of HPAE, New Jersey’s largest nurses union, which is in major contract negotiations revolving around getting local hospitals to establish and abide by safe staffing levels.
As regular listeners to the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour know, it has been America’s healthcare unions, like HPAE, that have been the only institutions holding the for-profit American healthcare system accountable for its abject failure during the COVID pandemic to protect both the American population and its healthcare workers who died by the thousands because of the failure of infection control that can all be linked back to inadequate staffing.
The U.S. is 4 percent of the world’s population, but we were 12 percent of the COVID death count. Thanks to the profit motive driving our healthcare policy, the U.S. has the world’s most expensive healthcare system with the poorest outcomes and transparency and accountability are almost non-existent.
In the second half of the show, we also address our failure to deal with the worsening climate crisis brought on by the consumption of fossil fuels combined with the rapid deforestation of huge swaths of the planet even as multinational corporations step up their greenwashing of their brands to convince us they have these planetary matters well in hand.
We continue to recklessly develop, clear cut and subdivide the land, short circuiting the ability of the planet to hydrate and cool our atmosphere which decimates our soil. News Flash, it’s not just the rain forests. It’s here in the Tri-State region as well where we are losing tree cover.
Between 2000 and 2022, we have deforested a landmass as large as México and Central America. National Geographic reports that since 1990, the planet has lost one billion acres of forest, which are essential to preserve the earth’s regenerative water cycle and restoration of the fertility of its soil.
We will speak with James Henry, a friend of this program and a Yale Global Justice Fellow who has done such important work on issues like reviving New York State’s Stock Transfer Tax. He is joined by Ed Huling, a New Jersey based soil scientist with decades of experience as an organic farmer, as well as a researcher at the USDA, and advocate for nutrient-dense food. Jim and Ed are part of a Global Reforestation Alliance composed of dozens of subject matter experts around the world who bring a sense of urgency to this crisis that’s required.