We Decide: America at the Crossroads with Jenna Flanagan
Our all star reporter panel discusses President Trump calling “affordability” a Democratic “hoax” and his escalating armed conflict with Venezuela. Reporter Laura Jedeed, Washington DC correspondent David Levinthal, and Egberto Willes, host of KPFT's Politics Done Right make sense of it all.
In the B Block, we examine the continued dismantling of the current health care system by the Trump administration with Michelle Jones, a nurse practitioner, at Flushing Hospital in Queens. Jones is also the secretary of the New York State Nurses Association and a vice president of National Nurses United.
She was joined by Dr. Steven Auerbach, former public health advisor at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
From downgrading nursing from being a profession to taking healthcare away for 15 million Americans, the Trump administration is radically altering our healthcare sector as venture capital consolidates its control over the sector putting profits ahead of people.
“SAFE TO BREATHE” NOT!
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman said the air in lower Manhattan was “safe to breathe”. New York City Mayor Giuliani went along with that reassuring message and nearby Wall Street stayed open.
In 2003, the EPA Inspector General reported that the US EPA’s statements and press releases had been crafted with the help of the Bush White House to downplay the very real environmental risks present in lower Manhattan.
The EPA actually suppressed data it had about the dangerous levels of asbestos in the air first responders and civilians were breathing in.
In the years since, thousands of first responders and civilians have died as a consequence of their 9/11 WorldTrade Center exposure. Congress passed the Zadroga Act and the Victims Compensation Fund.
For decades, it's been an open question about what then Mayor Giuliani knew and when he knew it. For years, the City of New York has refused to release its files from that 9/11 WTC period.
In the C Block, we examined the revelations in a newly discovered trove of 68 boxes of city documents from that era. We spoke with Council member Gale Brewer, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, about why the City Council wants full disclosure of the documents.
Brewer was joined by Lila Nordstrom, who in 2001 was a high school student at Stuyvesant High School, that was adjacent to the World Trade Center. Nordstrom, a 9/11 WTC Health Program participant, describes the fallout from the Trump administration’s cuts to this lifeline program.
AILING BEHIND BARS
In the D block, we looked at the failure of America’s prisons to provide adequate and timely medical treatment to the growing population of elderly prisoners caught up in the US prison industrial complex.
We hear from Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, about how Mumia Abu-Jamal, incarcerated for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer he says he did not commit, has been effected by this systemic healthcare failure.
