It's July 3rd, the federal holiday marking the 250th anniversary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
This major milestone comes at a time when the Gallup Poll finds that American patriotism is at a 25 year low with only 43 percent of surveyed households saying they were going to display the American flag outside their home.
In our first hour we heard from Paula Rogovin, New Jersey peace and social justice activist as well as Dr. Joe Wilson, labor historian and biographer of A. Philip Randolph, the iconic civil rights and labor leader.
Record heat saw temperatures approach 100 degrees with a "feels like" heat and humidity index approaching several degrees above that.
Throughout the heat emergency, scores of FDNY EMS ambulances sat idle, due to lack of staffing according to the FDNY EMS unions which noted call volumes exceeded 6,000 a day with some calls being held for a couple of hours.
The majority of the FDNY EMS workforce is composed of women and people of color and both EMS unions have brought an employment discrimination case linking the poor pay and inferior benefits to gender and race based bias.
For several years DC 37 Local 2507, which represents paramedics and EMTS as well as DC Local DC 37 Local 3621, which represents EMS officers have pressed the City to address the vast pay and benefit gap between their members and firefighters, who are mostly white males. As a consequence, they say their members either leave EMS or opt to leave EMS for the FDNY fire service, which pays tens of thousands of dollars more.
As a consequence, the city loses experienced EMS workers in a profession where having more experience saves more lives
In 2014, the deBlasio administration settled a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by the Vulcan Society of Black Firefighters and the Center for Constitutional Rights against the FDNY which included $98 million in backpay as well as a consent decree outlining reforms to recruiting.
According to the latest Mayor's Management Report, short staffing has been leading to longer response times to life-threatening medical emergencies to almost 11 minutes while "the average number of peak ambulances per day steadily declining over the last several fiscal years, and the number of such medical emergencies increasing over time."
Dr. Steve Auerbach, a retired captain and senior Medical Epidemiologist with the US Health Service explains why reversing the New York City's FDNY EMS meltdown needs to be a top Mamdani Administration priority, particularly with hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers set to lose their Medicaid due to cuts made by the Trump regime and GOP Congress. For many New Yorkers, FDNY EMS is their Urgicare.
We finished up with a conversation with veteran meteorologist John Morales with Climate Power USA who wrote a powerful op-ed recently entitled "The World Cup Has Cooling Breaks. Latino Neighborhoods Don't."
Morales wrote:
"As a meteorologist, I can tell you that the heat these communities will face this summer is not normal. Climate change is making extreme heat events more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting. The number of days per year exceeding dangerous thresholds has increased measurably over the past several decades, and it will continue to rise. What felt like a rare heat emergency a generation ago is becoming a recurring summer reality.
"In many host cities, majority-Latino neighborhoods run 10 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than wealthier neighborhoods just a few miles away. Same city, same summer, different reality. Miami-Dade estimates roughly 600 heat-related deaths each year. In Houston, heat deaths jumped 231% in 2023. Many of those lost are Latino. And these deaths don't happen only outdoors. They happen in poorly insulated apartments where families turn off the air conditioning because they cannot pay the bill."
The difference between living and dying is often a zip code — and right now, the systems built to close that gap are being stripped away.
I know that heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the United States, claiming more lives in a typical year than hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. I also know that protecting people from extreme heat depends on strong forecasting, reliable emergency communications, and well-resourced public agencies."
Last year, more than 500 New Yorkers died prematurely from preventable heat linked diseases. In Europe, in the last several days of June health officials reported 3,700 heat related deaths in France, Belgium and the Netherlands alone.
The elderly and those with heart disease or asthma are at even greater risk as are infants and elderly.
Last week, the Mamdani administration issued what it described as an "unprecedented Heat Emergency Plan" for at-risk New Yorkers and the 1.3 million workers who must work outdoors.
The City set up a fleet of cooling vans and a network of pop-up cooling centers.
Meanwhile, the Trump regime, which maintains that the climate crisis is a "scam" and a "hoax" has canceled billions in alternative energy projects that would reduce fossil fuel emissions while taking aim at cutting back on vital research at agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
