Listen Here
In this episode of What's Going On we spoke with Bishop William Barber about his latest Moral Monday initiative, an eccumencial campaign involving pastors of all faiths to organize 1,000 local marches to polling places around the nation to be timed with the start of early voting ahead of the very consequential midterm elections on Nov. 3.
Last Monday, Bishop Barber was arrested in the U.S. Capitol following a demonstration after he and other activists tried to meet with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, to express their opposition to voter suppression and President Trump's SAVE America Act.
"We have a Congress now that the way it is because of only 7,000 votes and 90 million people who stayed home and did not vote," Bishop Barber said. "Ninety million low wage and low wealth voters did not vote in the last presidential election for any candidate."
Bishop Barber continued. "If just ten to twelve percent of those voters who stayed home turned out, the
racist and violent course of Trump's policies could be reversed.
Bob and Bishop Barber discuss last February's 51 miles march from Wilson to Raleigh, North Carolina to highlight the Trump regime's push to gerrymander out of existence a traditionally Black House of Representative district. Bishop Barber recalled how that march, which started out with just a few hundred marchers in one of the state's poorest communities, culminated in several thousand in the state Capitol and in turn helped boost early voting significantly.
Our current events panel with Larry Hamm, Dr. Joe Wilson and Charlie Hall, RWDSU Local 108, weighed in the fallout from Mayor Mamdani's firing Haitian civil servants here on the Temporary Protective Status after the US Supreme 6 to 3 decision backing President Trump's decision to end it.
In a statement, Mayor Mamdani praised the Haitian TPS holders' contributions to city life and called upon President Trump to restore TPS.
Mayor Mamdani also pledged the City would "do everything in its power to support TPS recipients in this time of incredible instability, including through free legal consultations to assess eligibility for other forms of work authorization, as well as assistance navigating health insurance and other resources for employees and their families."
Union officials in the transport and healthcare sectors have confirmed members with Haitian TPS status have already been terminated by employers.
In the B Block, we got an update on the increasing scrutiny being applied to Delaney Hall, the private 1,000 bed for-profit prison in Newark where two detainees died in just the last few weeks, one of whom was denied medical attention.
Kathy O’Leary, with Pax Christi of NJ and Dr. Kate Sugarman discussed the deadly risk posed to chronically ill detainees when ICE and private jails fail to provide them with their necessary prescriptions
Dr. Sugarman describes how healthcare clinicians can successfully advocate on behalf of their detainee patients who often are improperly shackled while getting treatment in the hospital.
In our second hour, Debbie White RN, president of NJ HPAE, recounts a recent vote by healthcare workers to vote to join HPAE Local 5147 from Secaucus University Hospital. The new unionized titles include social workers, pharmacists, physical therapists, dietitians, and speech pathologists.
This most recent boost in NJ HPAE ranks comes as the Gallup Poll finds that close to 70 percent of Americans support the union movement, a historically high water mark for the labor movement at a time when actual union density hovers around just ten percent.
Debbie covers the importance of holding hospital for profit operators accountable when they flout New Jersey's existing regulations covering hospital closures.
