New York, NY – On this edition of Stuck Nation Radio we’re talking about New York City Parks and ongoing efforts to properly fund them. We’re also delving into the power low-income people actually have at the polls, as well as how the community can protect itself from yet another gas powered power plant being built in their backyard. [Listen Below]
Part A
The Labor & City Parks Connection: LaborPress’s Bob Hennelly interviews NYC City Council Member Shekar Krishnan, Chair of the City Council Committee on Parks and Recreation about how a coalition of city worker unions and local community activists can use their collective power to hold the city accountable for maintaining and improving neighborhood parks. Krishnan warns that more than two years into the ongoing pandemic, we need to demand that Washington make a multi-year funding commitment to the city’s parks and other critical infrastructure permitted to deteriorate for a generation. FDR’s New Deal was such a multi-year commitment and we deserve no less, Krishnan reasons.
Part B
A Pro-Union Agenda for America – One Vote at a Time
Shaily Gupta Barnes, Policy Director with the Kairos Center, discusses her October 2021 national research project for the Poor People’s Campaign that looked at the 2020 voting trends of the nation’s low-wage and poor households, a cohort not usually engaged by candidates. What she found was that more than a third of the people who voted were struggling economically and helped both the Biden Harris ticket while enabling the Democrats to win control of Congress.
“There were another 22 million low-income voters who were registered, but did not vote, meaning that out of the 215 million registered voters in 2020, 80 million — or 37% — were eligible low-income voters,” according to the report.
Barnes warns that in the years since, many states have moved to make voting harder, which requires voters to start now familiarizing themselves with the changes.
PLUS
Rachel Dawn Davis-Public Policy and Justice Organizer with Waterspirit, a New Jersey based environmental advocacy non-profit, updates us on the local community fight against the construction of yet another gas powered power plant in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, already dealing with some of the highest juvenile asthma rates in the nation.
