Listen: Confronting the Scourge of Poverty-Stricken Kids Living On a Melting Planet

Record-breaking temperatures kill.

By Bob Hennelly

On this week’s edition of the Moral Monday Labor Radio Hour with Rev. Dr. William Barber & Bob Hennelly, we’re confronting kids in poverty, our out-of-control-war economy, and our melting planet. We’ll also discuss why we march.

In this episode, we take a closer look at social conditions in Atlantic City, New Jersey and Rochester New York where more than half of the children live in poverty. We’ll discuss New Jersey’s capital city Trenton, a city of great historic significance during the American Revolution, but one that’s been too long neglected and now has 3,000 vacant homes with a growing army of homeless. Yes, that’s the capital city of a so-called BLUE state that’s also home to stupefying wealth. 

Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, assistant director at Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, fills in for Rev. Barber. We hear from Bev Quinn, president of UAW Local 8888, which represents Atlantic City casino workers who are being forced to inhale second hand smoke. Local politicians and the casino operators insist that they must continue to maintain indoor smoking to preserve tourist traffic. Quinn makes the case that the gaming industry should clear the air inside—and help address the city’s massive homeless and drug abuse epidemic.

Rev. Rupert Hall, founder and executive director of Hope for the City, talks about how Trenton’s economic decline—played out over decades—has caused apathy and despair to take root. “We have a deficit of hope,” Hall says.

We also visit with Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and the executive director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Kelly Smith, tri-chair of the New York State Poor People’s Campaign, discusses how the decision by Congress to roll back the Expanded Child Tax Credit resulted in millions of children falling back into poverty, while the “unwinding” of Medicaid tossed over 10 million people—including millions of children—out of the safety net program.

Justin Murphy, the Democrat Chronicle's education reporter, and author of Your Children Are VeryGreatly in Danger shares the history of Rochester's school segregation and how that racist past casts a shadow on the 21st century Rochester where over half the children live in poverty.

We’ve got just 12 days to go before the June 29th “Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly & Moral March on Washington D.C. and to the Polls.” Activists from around the nation are mobilizing against a U.S. war economy that devours close to a trillion dollars of borrowed money in the pursuit of death and ecological destruction planet-wide.

As we continue to organize, the New York Times is reporting tens of millions of Americans from Texas to Maine face sweltering weather conditions this week, as a heat wave takes hold in the eastern half of the United States with rising temperatures hitting the South, stretching over the Midwest and then spreading to the East Coast by midweek. That means temperatures in the mid-90s in the New York metro region—home of this live broadcast. And it’s not even summertime yet.

According to the newspaper, the expected high temperature in Pittsburgh will be the highest ever recorded there during the month of June since reliable records started being kept in 1875. This June is now the 13th month in a row in which the average global temperature on planet Earth has been the highest on record for that month. Last month was the hottest May ever. 

Extreme heat kills on average over 1,200 people, and we know it also extracts the highest toll in the neighborhoods where the 85 million low wage and low wealth voters—more than a third of the electorate—live. We also know who bears the brunt of this—our senior citizens living in un-air-conditioned apartments, and our beloved children left to suffocate in the back seat of a car by an exhausted parent who forgets they’re there as they race to be on time for their low wage, non-union job.

This is our America. 

Listen to the entire show below: