Bob Hennelly: The Politics of Labor and Public Safety in New York City (May 2023)

good afternoon everyone my name is Charles Jennings I'm director of the Christian reaghard Center for emergency response studies here at John J College of Criminal Justice and uh I'd like to welcome you and thank you for attending our uh final spring 2023 uh seminar for the uh for the center uh for those of you who do not normally attend uh we hold these events monthly during the Academic Year and we have a range of subjects related broadly to the issues of Emergency Response um and uh we're very pleased to uh have today's speaker uh Bob Henley um you know a lot of times in the in the business that we're in if you come up through the technical side of the house uh politics is viewed as kind of a dirty word um and and there's some uh attempt a lot by the professions to pretend it doesn't exist uh when in reality it does and uh we're all influenced by it and try to influence it and so um our our speaker today is is uh obviously uh well not obviously we'll be obvious in a minute is extremely well qualified to discuss that and that's Bob Henley uh Bob is an award meting independent journalist he focuses on labor Public Health Public Safety Occupational Health the economy and the environment uh he's a regular contributor to Salon uh work bites Insider New Jersey and the Village Voice uh he's also a veteran broadcast journalist who's worked for NPR WNYC wbgo uh for those of you who aren't uh hip to that that's a great uh NPR jazz station in New York uh he's also worked as a TV reporter for w PX uh he's worked for CBS money watch and CBS is 60 Minutes uh many of you in the public sector may know him from his writing for the chief leader where he was there for many years uh focusing on the FDNY the MTA as well as federal civil service uh through the pandemic he's focused on issues of Frontline First Responders Health Care Professionals and transport sector workers Bob's other work experiences in demolition construction loss prevention agriculture nonprofit management as well as Union and public administ rtion help inform his reporting he hosts a weekly radio program on WBAI that focuses entirely on the issues of working people uh his work has appeared in the uh New York Times the Detroit Free Press the guardian Christian Science Monitor and dozens of other news outlets uh he's the author also of a book a recent book called stuck Nation can the US change the course of its history of choosing profits over people which a title by the way Bob that that only an academic would come up with um and so uh the last plug before I forget is uh uh your show on WBAI it's I'm not an early riser thankfully as 7 AM uh but it it is worth getting up for and it is actually uh uh preserved on the web web page so you can go in at at a a civilized 10 o'clock and uh or whenever see what Bob was up to that day so with that uh I want to welcome you Bob and uh turn it over to you and you've got some kind of opening remarks and then some back and forth right and and Charles uh what a great honor I mean I'm uh Christian reagen Hart is no abstraction to me I I um and Sally reagen Hart and the entire 911 World Trade Center Community I've been uh privileged to be involved with in in the Years uh since uh much of stuck Nation actually uh its structure is looks at Labor rights and the role of collective action by unions from the triangle fire right on through covid and the importance of people acting in the common interest together collectively to protect themselves and their families in the broader community so I'm going to uh talk a little bit about the media landscape uh that we're in now because as people that are concerned with Public Safety that's something we have to be aware of um how do we know what we know that may seem awfully simplistic and yet it's perhaps the most foundational question we can ask because it's the first step in authenticating information that Command Decisions and yes even lives can depend on news is after all the basis for the Public's situational awareness their sense of risk or potential danger is framed through the prism of whatever news source they choose through which to see the world they live in in just the last three years we've seen our national public health response to a once in a century Mass death event fractured by competing narratives about the covid virus rest assured as experts in PhD candidates are churning through the excess mortality data zip code by ZIP code for covid they are studying the role that information played in how the pandemic played out on January 6 for the first time in the history of our Republic the peaceful transition of Presidential Power that happens months after the general election was marred by mob violence in the capital yet another example of what can happen when we don't share a common news narrative about Which presidential candidate actually won an election so in order to navigate this fractured media environment it's important to understand how it came to be let me offer my lived experience it's after all how I know what I know close to a half century ago I started as a part-time reporter for the Ramsey M reporter in Northwest Bergen County I was still in high school and got paid 10 cents a column inch and $5 if I took a photo at the time even in these sleepy Suburban communities where I covered the Town Council school board meetings were you know there would be two sometimes three other reporters who were grown-ups with family obligations who are making their full-time living reporting on local news this meant that they would stop by the local police station would actually go out and cover fires similarly in the county seat and state capitals across this nation there were thousands and thousands of reporters just like me covering meetings and doing investigative reporting over the last 20 years that Workforce has been decimated and is a shadow of its former self as local newspapers have been B up by Wall Street oriented conglomerates like kette which owns one in five of America's local newspapers according to the University of North Carolina's hman School of Journalism and media the their report expanding News desert since 2004 our nation has lost 1,800 newspapers including more than 60 dailies and 1700 weeklys regardless of the corporate actor the play is always the same sell off the physical real estate which usually includes a printing plant as well as a newsroom who needs a printing plant the layoffs is uh they lay off as much news staff as possible now meanwhile the same thing was happening in local TV and radio stations as the Congress deregulated the broadcast industry Paving the way for the Advent of Mega corporations like Fox News having formally locally owned newspapers TV and radio stations be subsumed by corporate behemoths from nowhere in particular would Prof profly altered the news landscape to the Public's disadvantage consider the example of a dear colleague of mine who was a news director for a familyowned Jersey Shore radio station you know top 40 they had a robust Newsroom which he built with several reporters covering the local community when it was brought by a national chain the reporters were all fired and cilling my friend a devoted listener called at my friend who had left his job as news director to complain because the radio station hadn't warned the area about a tornado because the station was broadcasting the weather for Southern California you see the civil defense linkage here lack of local reporting simultaneous of local news media Outlets were increasingly Consolidated unauthenticated social media aggregated into free content filled the void left by the depth of authenticated local and Regional news Twitter and Facebook became the way an increasing number of Americans got their news which was being fed to them based on their prior personal use data analytics talk about a feedback loop whether it be a once- in a-lifetime Mass death event or the challenges posed by the climate crisis of well-informed population including to the actual local conditions around them is the essential Foundation of a durable civil defense it's not political it's about people getting through a difficult challenge with the same Playbook understanding what challenges they face what challenges their First Responders face so they'll cooperate and be helpful so that's a quick look under the hood of the 21st century news universe that I currently work in so how are the catastrophic mass casualty events reported in this environment one journalism Axiom that seems to have endured is if it bleeds it leads historically events like a mass casualty fire can have a galvanizing impact on the political economy they happen in consider the triangle fire in Laura Manhattan on March 25th 1911 which claimed the lives of 146 mostly young immigrant female garment workers the catastrophic fire in the subsequent investigation which revealed exits have been locked brought Global attention to the sweat shop conditions in New York City's garment industry ironically 16 months earlier 20,000 mostly female garment workers had made labor history when they went out on strike for four months and emerged with recognition of their Union in the international ladies garment Workers Union as well as a 20% raise triangle Factory owners Max Blanc and Isaac Harris were anti-union holdouts to what had been a widely accepted deal by the other garment manufacturers blank and Harris were t uh tried twice for mans slider but were acquitted subsequent civil lawsuits on behalf of the surviving families paid out roughly $75 per victim several of whom were only 14 years old at the time time of their death deeper research raises questions about the owners of the triangle Factory actually employing off-duty police officers to harass suspected labor organizers while new laws were created in the aftermath of the catastrophic fire there was no law enforcement of the laws that were already on the books at the time while the owners took the Judgment of History the public officials responsible for LAX code enforcement had let conditions like the ones at the triangle uh Factory building become all too common Citywide were they paid to look the other way or was it municipal government promoting Commerce a combination of both if a question of whose point of view is informing The Narrative is the person who lost a loved one is it there are they telling the story is it the firefighter who finds a body is it the elected official trying to deflect blame or a candidate looking to to get traction with an issue scroll forward over 100 years to the January 2022 twin Parks high-rise fire in the Bronx that killed 17 residents including eight children in the immediate aftermath of the fire FDNY commissioner Nigro said it was primarily the failure of residents to close her apartment do that drove the death toll fair enough as time passed however additional facts emerged about the last inspections the General State of disrepair of the building that led to the widespread use of March space heers there were jurisdictional issues about just which agency was responsible for enforcement there was the fact that one of the owners of the building was a donor to Mayor Adams campaign and served on his transition team which is not of itself Central to the fire but is just another example of the sway of the real estate industry with every level of our government through their campaign donations just a real world reality that we all have to deal with and then there's the issue of the fire engine Staffing itself consider the admission by fdny's acting chief of Department John hodkin that was prompted by a line of questioning at a city council meeting it was at that uh meeting that he explained that they had normally maybe had five firefighters on an engine but a certain work rule had been tripped and they had four and so this is just another angle of the story again it goes back to whose point of view is telling the story is it the people that are doing the work is it the people supervising them or is it the elected people uh of government who are trying to take responsibility or credit for either deflect blame or to accept responsibility for a job well done and so what ends up happening is we get this kind of tabloid sensation for the initial coverage and yet we don't see the follow through because of a diminished landscape a New York City that does not have the number of daily papers that it used to have and by standards it has a better environment than most but it considerably degraded from when I started and so if you don't have a a a robust media environment where people are aggressively competing for new information and the accuracy of that information you find yourself open to as I said this social media environment where it's not a question of authenticated information it's the amount of things that are getting clicks and as it's been disclosed by these social media platforms they even got to a point where they knew from their research that certain kinds of uh content would engender conflict which they promoted because it drove traffic so if you're a public safety individual trying to operate in this environment you have to be aware of the fact that these are the dystopian realities about the information ecology that you are trying to perform your your job in it's also very important to go back and look at this question of point of view and narrative one of the things that I saw firsthand during the pandemic was the focus was the hospitals and that was because the elected officials whether it be Governor Cuomo Governor Murphy had made the focus the what was happening inside the hospitals but when I went about reporting it I was reaching out not for the political leadership that was trying to deal with this disaster but with the actual workers doing the work so that meant reaching out to uh the people that were from dc37 Union uh Union that represents the um medical uh Legal Investigators whose respons possibility it is to go into an environment and make some estimation of what happened what was the cause of death to talk with the detectives who have as you may know if you're on the job you know their responsibility is to go into an area of undetermined cause of death and get some sense of it and secure the body uh the EMS people I reached out to every single Union and spoke to people doing that work and what I found was that their experience was was very much different than what we were hearing on the TV and they had a key piece of the puzzle they were noticing that individuals were going to the hospital getting treated being reported on when they left as a success story and then going home to die from covid and that feedback loop was not making its way into any of the ways that the governors were framing what was going on their situational awareness was framed only by their own agenda now I don't want to second guess anybody with that awesome responsibility but in terms of after action it's important to look back and see what was it that these folks were saying that were doing the work that maybe we should have listened to earlier one of the things that I heard from efdm uh FDNY EMS local 2507 and officers 3621 was that they were going into households where they were all of a sudden because of that special order that was put in place you may be aware of the fact that because of the the crisis uh the state authorities that set the ground rules for EMS basically said if you can't revive somebody in the field don't bring them to the hospital well one of the things that the suits hadn't accounted for was that changed the entire Dynamic historically when you have some an elder who has a heart attack or anybody and their family surrounds them uh you can at least continue to work on them in many cases bring them back we know they have that wonderful brunch uh at least before the pandemic they did celebrate those occasions when that happens but it also has another positive effect in that you're moving the theater of action away from the home and it's happening at the hospital and you're keeping suspending the the uh the bad news for a little bit but that's critical and so one of the things that was happening is all of a sudden EMS found themselves with these emotional situations that hadn't been anticipated similarly they were not um extracting information and they didn't have a way of feeding back information to um the the folks that who were in the command structure about what they were what they were dealing with because it was of course you know a chaotic situation but on reflection they were saying you know what if we really want to beat this disease the place we have to fight it is not just in the hospital but in the community they were saying this two months into the pandemic they were they were years ahead of the folks who were in command and control and so the failure to have that feedback loop from the people doing the work taking the risk I believe added to the body count similarly brothers and sisters working for the MTA tww Local 100 uh January February these people uh for some reason this an assumption that working people are not well read indeed these people were reading their financial times they knew that there was a global pandemic they started wearing masks and so what happened what was the responsive management oh don't wear that mask that's going to scare the customers uh we have to save The Masks because we're short of supply and so that's a case where working people had a common sense response which was then suspended by people trying to manage the situation and we know what the subsequent death toll was from that over 100 tww Local 100 members passed and made the ultimate sacrifice to keep Society functioning similarly when we look at what was happening with uh nurses uh that's why I'm so concerned about the disconnect between the experience of committed Professionals in um in emergency services in healthcare uh and in transit where their lived EXP experience tells him what is a common sense response and yet it's ignored Cas in point would be the the nurses uh very early on around February the CDC came out with a um directive that the n95 mask which everybody knows when you do your clinical training that you have to dispose of it after each clinical encounter oh no the CDC says we've got a shortage we want you to ad stop that as a pet and bring it back and forth to lunch in your ground paper bag and so at the time at the time the nurses predicted that because of that they themselves would experience infection they would die and the hospitals like Elmhurst would become a vector for the infection and the failure to listen to what working people were saying committed professionals I believe resulted in a situation where we have 4% of the world's population and 12% of the covid deaths I think you have to look at that and say we need an after action report but part of it was driven by the fact that working people who do this work professionally were not sufficiently at the table and it began to be something where people were managing it for political outcomes and that with this media environment that was so badly fractured fed a situation where our response became tribal and not uh holistic and I think that now as we go forward we're going to see that what does endure is this fractured information environment and so as folks that are uh involved may find themselves involved with interacting with the media I think there's some crucial ways that you can U choose to deal with the media when you're encountered in a position of of course you always want to make sure that you have whatever cover you have from the hierarchy before you speak with a reporter but I think it's also important to kind of uh feel uh to feel confident to actually um test them a bit and so one of the things that I always do and I ask uh tell folks that I uh that I advise what you should do is with your first interaction with the reporter you should say we don't know each other yet one are you taping this phone call and sometimes that may actually be a preferable thing to make sure that there's a a common record but if they're not you would say well let's have a little let's get to know each other a bit I'm not saying anything on the record until I agree to do so and then after you give your first online or something that you want attributed to you ask the reporter to read it back and any reporter with their s should be willing to do that because ultimately you don't have to uh find yourself being used by a reporter who has an agenda and it's really important for people that are I think also it's important for you as someone that has an involvement with whether it be law enforcement Public Safety um fire safety to uh be ass assertive in general when you see things that are reported that are that in some ways don't take into account this essential role of the first responder uh that is that is crucial one of the things that and you should assert it and you should do what you can to make sure that that perspective is part of the story I one of the things that we saw right in the uh immediate aftermath of the recent East Palestine disaster and I wrote about this a lot at work bites and salon and I think we did have some impact on the national conversation in the first few days after that disaster the voices in The Narrative were driven entirely by the state agencies and the officials and the elected officials whether it um be Governor Shapiro or Governor dwan because it was in Pennsylvania and Ohio what was absent from the conversation was the voice and perspective of Labor and when I say that I mean a more a broad definition not just where the railroaders excluded from that conversation but also the volunteer firefighters who in East palestine's uh situation it was their obligation to go out there and fight the fire and so by raising that I focus my reporting reached out for the fire unions and what emerged was the fact that they were there was like two responses that went on there there was no unified command and the railroad really took advantage and put the first responders in the position where they had to react to the decisions that they that the railroad experts were making in real time for instance they were told the first responder team uh unified command was told they were going to detonate one Vinyl chloride car the railroad decided to do five so that's it's important to capture that narrative so that people understand that it's not just some kind of uh accident like something like a weather condition but that choices we make and choices we have failed to make set the stage for something like a disaster like East Palestine and one of the things that's also important is that you know in New York City our experience is instructive to the rest of the country and one of the things that happened early on was there was tremendous public skepticism about the comments by the agencies like the EPA and state U environmental agencies that everything was fine in the environment and part of that had to do with the dissonance of like 3,000 fish showing up dead within the first 24 hours of the the uh the action but also there was this residual skepticism about official pronun uh pronouncements and what was instructive to me is remembering back to the 9911 World Trade Center and the representations made by the EPA well documented in the 2003 Inspector General report by the EPA which showed that Christy Tod Whitman's comments were driven by things external to the actual environmental conditions there like keeping Wall Street open and that as a consequence of saying the air was safe to breathe we're now in a world where more people have died from their occupational exposure than died on the day of the attack and so the epa's failure to understand that kind of inconsistency lingers and so that's why it's important to hold government accountable because I submit to you that a lot of the skepticism related to the covid response is particularly in in uh uh New York City's first responder uh Community was related to that lived experience so that's that's what I've got so far I'm willing to take questions I have a whole bunch of other scenarios to talk about I think we've covered some ground yeah uh we covered a lot of ground that was that was a uh that was a a 20 28 minute Master Class there Bob so thank you for all that so there's a couple things before we move on from that because I think it's it's important uh that you brought out the whole you know uh is is I I teach a class that and and part of the class it's it's a little we do a unit on risk communication and and I show uh Network news coverage from Three Mile Island which for those of you you know it's ancient history um it was back in the Carter Administration uh or prehistory well yes but but that was back in the day of the big three networks right right when everybody in America stopped what you were doing at six o'clock or five o'clock you know at six o'clock you'd watch the local news for a half hour or whatever it was and then everybody would watch one of three National newscasts and it was striking um you know how far we've come uh both the whole issue of you know the the 24-hour channels which um just have this fill space even when there's nothing new they just you know repeat stuff but the the the distinct perspectives that you get and then this this influence of social media uh and we look at how things have really you know fragmented and even with covid um you know we've got a large group um you know of of emergency responders who are basically you know opposed to mandates for the vaccine and some for reasons of you know labor rights some for reasons of of you know uh whatever but you've got that then you've got people you know to this day are publishing trying to say that oh well masking doesn't really make a difference with covid and it's just to me it's just my gosh you know you've got on on active shooter events you know you've got now people claiming that they're you know reenactors that it's not a real you know it didn't happen um you know how and then you make that connection to emergency preparedness and and public warning you know I'm really concerned as a as uh you know New York has probably got it less you know we're much better off than a lot of parts of the country right uh but in other places where you know where's the where does this stop right uh people like you know the the weather service is some kind of a you know uh Global conspiracy and and tornado warnings are you know are are some kind of a plot and I'm and I'm you know going to exercise my constitutional right to you know sit out on my back patio when the tornado comes I mean where does it end well I would say that it's funny because over the Arc of uh my career and when I had the the privilege and honor to work with Ed Bradley I remember I was worked as a segment producer and reporter on a few things and one of the lines of senior producers producers would say well we're going to have 40 households knocking on your door to talk about that big tent you referenc right that you were coming to whatever uh investigation with the robust Ro robustness of the entire nation and so there has been a fracturing of the media space in the big tent and part of that has to do with the fact that there is this idea of that there um we used to have this notion that you had to be like current events that every citizen had an obligation to be well informed Med and so part of that is the degradation of civics education in school the de emphasis of things like history and we can't even get consensus about what history to teach and so one of the things that is a byproduct of that is that it's in this media Market if you w to uh watch Martha Stewart 247 and watch yet another way to fold the napkin by George you can have that and you can stay in that bubble and even avoid Amber Alerts so that polity has shrunk and become fractured on top of that this we have major media organizations and I include MSNBC and Fox as kind of representing maybe different political points of view but the machine runs the same which is that they're telling you things based on your prior audience choices that fit into the narrative you already have so there is no so that has created a situation where it's accentuated the differences and created this parallel universe where people can experience the same event and have two totally different realities now that means that when you're in a u an emergency situation where you have to get the Buy in from the public you have to really work very hard to make sure you're acting on authentic ated information because nothing is worse than being in a middle management emergency situation where you're acting on bad info so that means that you have to say so where' you see that and be able to look for in disa that means that it is not actually been something that checks out yeah there was there was some talk about that earlier on uh a few years ago mainly in the context of you know adversarial misinformation but now it's it's just uh you know because I'm on you know I'm on Twitter usually For Worse sometimes for better right um and I've noticed almost any time there's a kind of a breaking um you know disaster or you know mass casualty event that there is a phony content that comes over Twitter and it's typically it would be a photograph of a previous event you know that may have been three or four years ago and they'll just throw up a photo of you know bodies on a sidewalk and say you know years from you know Kentucky this afternoon well part of that and so just so when I was working uh when I started at the I was my first Daily News job was at the Hudson dispatch which was a scrappy Blue Collar paper I covered from Fort Le to Bon and I was the 4 to2 guy so that meant that if they came up shirt I had to go find news it's also when weird stuff happened and so uh what I did with that job was I actually would try to go to Every police station I would try to make sure that I checked in as much as I can and so the loss of you go in and look at the plotter right right and which was a record of everything everybody got locked up every call would be there right well and the weird thing though is in certain communities they also had this annoyed me no major activity uh so what they I started breaking the hole a little riding around with the police radio in Bergen County that did not endear me so when they take a stiff out of a hotel on uh rout 17 I drive up and say is this tomorrow's no major activity okay we've got a couple of questions and we've got a lot of content but we've got a small group so let's just go ahead and uh so let's you can ask the question just keep your video off uh and and and Katherine you were in line first so uh Katherine if you want to have a question for Bob okay uh Bob pill you go ahead and look at the Katherine uh in a minute um hi Bob umk thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us um how how do you think we walk this back I mean in terms of um you know news as entertainment you know uh I I I think it you know maybe it was during the Reagan Administration where where news news started to get ratings neelen ratings it never got neelon ratings before that so once it got neelen that was the slippery slope in my mind and maybe I have the time wrong you you definitely know better than I but it's it's an interesting problem and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that well so I would say that one of the things that happened was uh there was a shift and you're right you track it to Ronald Reagan in the sense that when cable came along um there came to be a certain uh shift in the policy surrounding uh broadcast licenses so forever in a day uh leading up until the uh I say like the 1980s the idea of a broadcast license was considered a privilege and and it's a matter of a point of law now the broadcast air wives belong to the public okay so it's important to understand that a license to broadcast was uh considered to be something that uh they bestowed the public the FCC on behalf of the public bestowed that license upon you to act in good faith and here's funny thing there's actually a morals Clause to be of good character to maintain that broadcast license over time as these broadcast entities grew bigger and bigger and turned into multinational corporations and cable was able to go and Behemoth were able to go and buy up local TV stations it became that the idea of a broadcast license was a property right the whole thing shifted that was it was pursu looked at by the courts and indeed by policy makers as you own that station once that happened where the ground began to slip at one time a lot of people made a living in the public affairs Department of a broadcast um TV and radio station uh and this isn't this wasn't like public radio like we had WNYC places I've worked bjo this was just every broadcast license had an obligation for a certain amount of public affairs programming and also a certain amount of local news coverage and as someone who's been uh one of my uh my lost youth um a station uh program director um you filled out reports you had to actually fill in how many hours who was doing this so you may remember local news would have and yes they would put it on the the non-revenue producing gosh awful times at like before sermet at 6:00 am there would be the public affairs program but there was this space where issues could be discussed in the public interest and so now somehow we permitted the standard to slip so that's become a brand so like public radio is like this little ghetto when in reality the entire medium should be required to have that same threshold similarly with equal time at one time you couldn't go and have the station become the total provenance of one particular ideological base and now look what we have so I suggest getting it back in the box is a matter of just enforcing the law and as consumers demanding that uh they act in the public interest and to return to the standard that was really the law of the land forever which is that a broadcast license is a privilege and I would actually extend that because for some reason they decided in a very convoluted way and this is happened in Clinton in the 1990s that cable was a different animal you probably hear this a lot well social media it's a different animal uh Twitter it's a it's it's not quite it's a and so they have not put on these entities that really are utilities the same level of accountability that should be required when you're making one that kind of money and two having that kind of effect on Public Safety thank you so much it was really interesting to hear you talk about that um just going back to East uh Palestine um and I think you did a great job for that uh and so you know you shifted that narrative and I think very rightly so uh you know the kind of the railroad industry and I I was not I had not followed it you know I casually was aware of the labor issues uh where the Biden Administration basically went in and and you know uh imposed an agreement um but this whole notion of really long trains and they don't want to staff anybody on the trains and the trains I don't know you know how long they can be but it's crazy but the the thing that struck me I don't know if you saw this piece from propublica uh I think last week of there's parts of the country where these freight trains will just stop in the middle of a town and sever the town yeah yeah but and then kids can't get to school and youve got literally like you know elementary school kids crawling under trains to go to class in the morning to come back and the train and there's no guarantee that the train won't move and and and one of these kids could get you know I mean sliced in half this is right and this is the third world isation of America's Corridor community so let's talk a little bit about what's been happening in railroading another job that I had was I was a crew caller for the irel laana railroad it went out of business it's not my fault uh my dad worked for the railroad um and so one of of the things that has been happening is in the 1980s there was roughly 47 class one railroads that's major substantial organizations with Rolling Stock in multiple States it's now seven and so what's happened is the political economy and that's a word I I use a lot uh of the railroading industry now replicates the very same abusive concentration of ownership that Teddy Roosevelt so successfully tried and did bust up so in the time when we were living Our Lives struggling to make a living and getting by they have reconstituted themselves into these Behemoth and so part of that is that Wall Street has financialized that Transportation sector to such a degree that they were looking for rate of return that could only be achieve by pummeling the workforce into the ground and so one of the ways that they achieved that was to create something called Precision schedule railroading imagine this is the equivalent to what we know happens in Amazon warehouses where there's a certain amount of time to go to the bathroom where human beings are treated like machines and when they break down they throw them away that's kind of how America led its railroads uh be run and it's instructive to know that railroads started and it's uh to some degree brought out in stuck Nation they really had a leg up they they enjoy a very special place in America's history because they only came to be on the scale they were because we gave them the land that we seized and stole from the Indians at the point of a gun so if you can't have a profitable business model when you start with that kind of basis and so it's all been looking back at this now they are in a situation where they treat Corridor communities doesn't matter who you voted for Trump Biden doesn't matter they treat them as disposable and they run through these two mile long trains they were trying to get by with having a single engineer and maybe a a conductor and that eventually East Palestine blew that up but it's important to know that this was ruminating back in 2014 14 in Quebec L manati was a village that uh was up in uh Quebec and one of these situation it was a very long um um uh you know like a crude uh blankin crude uh ban crude train and it was one of these situations where they thought they could have one engineer the engineer ran out of time so had to park the engine and he didn't have anybody to relieve him he parked it there was a fire he wasn't there he was getting some 40 Winks local fire department comes puts out the fire and inadvertently releases the air brakes and that puppy rolled down the mountain and incinerated the village so that should have been a moment don't you think but yet we didn't really hear about that in railroad circles it was clear but that's that's kind of the kind of things that happened and there's not a connection similarly I will say to you one of the things that East Palestine begs for is a national conversation that it might be time for America to put on its big boy pants and have professional firefighters and EMS in Corridor communities if we're going to have Vinyl chloride Caravans going through communities dear Jesus let's make sure that every firefighter and every railroad worker has a self-contained respiratory device do you think we could do that sorry I'm this gets me agitated well and and uh yes excellent point and and you know and the railroads are profitable right this is not a struggling industry um and uh yeah absolutely absolutely and and that brought up some issues there is a national disaster safety board legislation that was in produced I don't know I don't think it's uh I don't think anything H is happening in the house right now but um but that that was proposed you know certainly the center here one of the first things we did was proposed that that uh a portion of any federally declared disaster goes to an independent third party after action analysis right good idea this speaks to it uh and the fact that we still don't have it uh but but absolutely and and we actually you'd be interested in knowing there's a method ology from the the military uh that we identified that the Army as a center for Army Lessons Learned and that is a very much a bottomup after action process and so that the results that you get you know absolutely are unassailable because they're coming from the people on the ground right is it more expensive and timeconsuming yes is that what they call in the fire department a hot wash well the problem with the hot wash not to get off on another topic well I'm learning too right Professor yes but the hot wash almost never gets written down oh and those lessons perish uh you know uh they they live around they live in the people's heads in fact we talked with uh Vincent Dunn uh retired fdm Chief right about specifically that whole issue of of there's so much of that knowledge that gets lost and we need those people writing the books so uh to get back we had uh just a a question that came in Via chat and it was it was basically let me paraphrase it um you know most young people uh are totally dependent on social media platforms for their for their public affairs you know their awareness and I um and and you know cuni as an example does have uh ability for our students to get a a I don't know if it's free or or you know uh significantly discounted subscriptions to like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times but how do we how do we get young people people engaging with kind of the the you know the the real investigative the real reporting out there as opposed to something that's going to give them you know here's what we found on on uh Tik Tok here's a fist fight uh in in Ohio of you know a clerk at a Target getting hit in the head with the bottle and that's our public discourse you know yeah right I I would say that of course I'll do a Shameless plug work bites which is the um the labor website and that is Joe Maniscalco and Steve wishnia and Tim Sher we are labor journalists we are committed to talking about and Reporting on the story of working people it has National stories it has local stories one of the U stories that we really have been digging in uh uh on is the the stuff related to EMS uh we did a quite lengthy investigation about the situation um where uh we really uh people have no idea uh I mean people in the service know about assaults but it is just really a serious issue and the FDNY is is only collecting a fraction of the information about the the assaults that are happening because they only look at fdn Ys and fail to register the other agencies and the other individuals that are responding so it's a lot of people don't know there's four distinct deployment models operating in the five burs the FDNY voluntary hospitals private inter facilities and community volunteers so this had started when there was a an EMS uh uh guy from uh Richmond University Medical Center uh Tim mcau he got shot dealing with uh an unruly patient and as it turned out um it was something that normally wouldn't get captured in the data that the FDNY Y is keeping so imagine in 2018 there were 163 um violent assaults they say and then that's jumped up in 2021 to 386 but that's only a fraction of what is going on so that's an example where because we're not getting actual reporting that's authenticated and looks at even what are the parameters of the metrics that we're using we're not getting proper attention to what is really a public health emergency which is the assault on EMS around the country yeah absolutely uh Bin and of course we had the The Five-Year I think uh you know legal process playing out in the the murder of the fdms m in the Bronx and and you know thankfully there was a conviction there um but but you know on yeah the working in difficult circumstances and that's a national problem but we're uh on to the we have another we have a question here Sally did you want to uh did you have a question yes I'm just trying to enable the video is this Sally that's actually Sally hi Bob Henley I was so happy to hear that you are really honoring the Christian reaghard Center by uh this webinar today and so far your information is so excellent I really want to take this opportunity to share with the other people on this webinar what an important integral role that you played in getting the truth out about what happened to this city what happened to the Uniformed Services re who had to respond to the World Trade Center um your articles uh in the chief and of course your articles now were so essential to getting the word out because everything that you've said regarding the twin Parks regarding the Railroad disaster any disaster when the official Talking Heads of government they're the only people that are are giving the public information and it's it's always the advocacy groups people like you uh who who did so much for us that you know gives this information to the public you know back in the day of 911 the public believed what they read in the paper and what they saw on TV of course you know some people believe in uh you know the official story but there's always another story so Bob you I can't wait to read your book I want to thank you for everything that you have done for the working person uh especially the Uniformed Services but all unionized people or all workers in general there are far too few voices out there and I really really want to thank you for that wow I am just so moved and we we haven't seen each other in a long time I sometimes I do give you a ring but yes definitely we definitely have to get together right now I'd like to ask and um you mentioned the air and Christy Whitman I attended that Congressional hearing I was one of the really advocated for it we had so much hope uh for that hearing but instead of a real hearing that put this woman on the line to hold her accountable and responsible uh the panel threw her soft balls right okay it was so frustrating and it was just one big Love Fest and we were so outraged by it so that's the system for you I'm sorry if there's any uh politicians listening to this doubt it because they things like this but um getting the official word is a very flawed way of finding out what is going on your articles everything that you did you really helped us and I just want to say on that point regarding 911 and regarding getting out the facts to the public there's five people who are responsible for for helping us cly Glenn and Charles from John J yeah wonderful civil rights attorney Norman seagull yay Norman uh and certainly yourself and Vinnie Dunn these are people that all contributed in their own unique way and um I want to thank you so much for that finally I don't mean to hog this I want to ask you about a issue that is so critical to labor to every anyone who's in a union who works for the City of New York for example my husband was on the NYPD for 40 years right as time goes by that's going to be more and more unheard of we one of the reasons as you know Bob that people start to work for the city is not because of the great salaries but most essential thing is their health insurance right but want to ask your opinion on it I'm sure you're aware that City PA has unilaterally decided to take our civil rights away the right to Quality Health insurance and is putting us in a very dangerous situation the major hospitals two of which I know of officially through my contacts are not going to participate in this Medicare Advantage program which is really a disadvantage program it's an HMO disguised as something else Bob what is your opinion on this so right I I spent a lot of time on this because it is a signature issue and it's a national issue yes uh work bites uh is committed and so is my radio program to creating a platform for the 250,000 retired civil servants by way of a background I I just need to do a little bit of um uh this is stuff year lived experience but for the record and because hopefully people will tune into this who aren't on the call now the seeds for this were set during um Michael Bloomberg's tenure and so for several years he made a calculated decision to not sign or um reach contract deals with the city's unions as anyone who um runs a household or responsible for a family's finances no compound interest works for you but it can also work against you and so over the years the failure to close contracts had an impact on the welfare funds because that's the thing that supports all of it there's a contract deal for wages and hours and and then there's the welfare funds and the various things prescription drugs and all that is made whole Michael Bloomberg actually like planted little IED devices in the system and so when Mayor DeBlasio came in he had to close roughly a hundred contracts in 18 months and as a consequence because nobody wanted to do something basic like collect the stock transfer tax we've been refunding since the 1980s to the tune of $138 billion dollar they didn't want to make anything uncomfortable for the corporations they spent down um the um the health stabilization fund to fund the UFT contract no one begrudges the teacher a contract so that set the stage for the current moment where the unions particularly dc37 UFT Teamsters 237 the wolf is at the door mayor Adams comes in uh this had started under mayor deaso he attempted to migrate folks to Medicare Advantage and then in the process came up with this uh measure that if you wanted to retain your current coverage you could pay $191 a month and rightfully that b right yeah and so Mary and Pisa the Retirement Group they went and they were successfully able in court because that was such clearly a violation of what you describe as deferred compensation in essence what people got as part of the social contract for being part of the public Workforce was this deferred compensation now they're cashing it in to have this Medicare Advantage situation and I it's important to give people a sense of what this business model is because this precious little basic explanation of it uh one of the things the way it works is Medicare Advantage comes in and they manage the Medicare program and the way that they make money is by telling CMS which is the agency at the federal government said sends the money to cover the care they have clinici Ians look at your chart and they create the worst case scenario that you're the sickest you possibly can imagine then you as the patient have to go through all kinds of Hoops to get access through prior authorizations and that's the viig that's the premium that's what they make money on so in essence they're acting as a speed bump for folks who need care now where this gets really bad is for the several thousand there are that many civil servants who did not make the first responder test for 9911 but were ordered because there was no zoom in 2001 were ordered to sit at one Center Street and do their job now have cancer some of them are terminally ill many of them have already died and so they have a very fragile Health Care architecture with and so it's been working and the one thing that I want to do is has it thrown up in the air with this Wall Street driven financialization of something that was created by unions for all of America and now unfortunately certain unions are selling out uh it's despicable and uh it's really a violation of our civil rights the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness because if you don't have your health and if you don't have access to the top hospitals and top Physicians you don't have a chance and finally you said uh clinicians uh you know look at the the charts or they you know make decisions these things I read articles from you know a uh bonafied verified uh articles which indicate that they even use Bots AI right AI okay so a a machine is looking at your you know what you have and so on and so forth and they're making decisions uh I believe Bob that you you're such a great voice for Labor uh in this city or you know in this nation really uh this is going to set a standard it's not just about the retirees who are going to be afflicted by it but this mayor City Hall is setting a standard to take away the rights of these union workers take it away and what's going to happen in the future it's going to uh uh it's going to be the program for the rank and file also once you give City Hall an inch they're going to take a foot they will do it and other cities and other states look to New York basically they look to New York and California for making decisions and so on and they it's going to go across the country it's going to be the end of really all the rights that workers need to have I think it's a catastrophe and it is a crime so I wanted to say one thing uh that's important I think it brings to the four the problem uh this country is very reluctant to the the the people in power uh every time it's been suggested in the Senate to have an after Action Report like the 911 Commission uh and I might say you and Glenn to just give so much prop to you what you deserve really use that that process of looking back to create a whole uh important conversation about skyscraper safety and so it's possible when there's a mass tragedy like that to use it as a platform to Galvanize a better day yeah and to visualize an alternative that puts people first and elevates people and so what notice though that we for whatever reason have the stomach yet to do this about this pandemic and so we have President Biden in his bomber jaer moment with the aviators saying on May 11th the pandemic's over and as we speak right now we have no idea how many entral First Responders pass as a consequence of their occupational exposure and why that matters is that we need to know what were the pathways how can we reduce this because this is happening again we know from all the expert uh evaluation of this it's not a question of uh if but when and so we owe it to all these people when you know the idea of like um uh not forgetting and remembering applies to CO as well because these people that in those first several months without sufficient PPE without vaccine who went out to kept the world working and moving we owe it to them to remember them for their sacrifice but we owe it to society and the future generations to hold ourselves accountable for how singularly unprepared we were well uh no one was held accountable or responsible for any of the failures of 911 to the police to the firefighters to fire radios it's a long list no they got away with that so 911 set a standard for government you know whatever to get away with murder and you know uh the good thing was that because of your articles and because of uh Glenn and Charles and and Vinnie Dunn gave me personally validity because uniform services aren't really used to listening to a a young uh uh proby's mother but uh because of Vinnie D and and you great people um and Norman who said to me even firefighters have civil rights and that's why he championed our uh uh organization and our initiatives okay and you I don't know if you know this it's very interesting Norman seagull's brother was a firefighter on the fdn Y for did not know that very lowkey I met him and you know the last time I saw him I believe they were retired in Florida one last thing I want to say uh you know City Hall is first attacking the weakest group the weakest group being senior citizens who are retired who are scattered all over this country uh who who aren't necessarily living in New York City but they're going to be affected and you start with them and then you go for for all the other unions and all the other employees so this is an atrocity and uh it it is going to be a disaster for people who don't have access to the proper Medical Care through dealing with a bot uh for your survival well I also I would say that one of the things though as uh what this brings to a focus is the problem that we have and I have done a lot of research on this one of the things that is coming out is the linkage between the elevated death toll in the United States so it's important to know that we're 4% of the world's population and 12% of the covid deaths and that in the initial mapping that's been done what it is clear is that the zip codes where access to healthc care was a problem where people didn't have access is where the death toll was highest why that matters is when a disease gets Traction in a community it then becomes a threat to the entirety of the country irrespective of your status of zip code do you live in a gated community or not and so this is really kind of like a new a lesson out of the New Testament right in the sense that the fate of our own health is intimately tied to our neighbors irrespective of race gender class and so the problem is this begs the question is a time to have Universal healthc care and that's I know it's a longer discussion but one of the saddest things is for em it's been exposed this country's fractured EMS system where it is uh it's not required by the way in state law that you have an EMS Squad and so you have some parts of the country where it's voluntary some places where it's minimum wage other places it's civil service and this is one of the institutions that was seriously fractured by covid and there were hundreds of deaths of EMTs and so it's kind of like the country is moving on but I do think that this needs to be part of a broad National discussion of professionalizing with dignity this essential work and I think that as long as you have a Carter community that is one bad rail bearing away from Bal we need to have professional firefighters and EMS on the other side of that disaster okay thank you thanks that was a great issue uh thank you for for raising that uh and it's it's a huge one in our remaining time here uh we've got a couple of big big picture items and while we're talking about EMS uh you know one of the persistent issues uh that we've had to deal with in New York City is this frankly second class status of uh FDNY EMS now I know you point out rightly so that uh you EMS is delivered by multiple you know agencies uh which which I honestly think half the city council probably doesn't know that but uh that's another we don't have time to bash the city council right now so we'll we'll have to do a followup for that but why is it well I know some of it why is it I mean there's absolutely zero labor solidarity between the firefighters and the EM EMS and the fire inspectors but this this Workforce as you point out B the Brunt of covid uh High you know heavier workload terrible working conditions really critical work uh and yet uh everybody talks about oh yes you should get more pay but they never seem to be able to pull that off so I would say that one I would say that there's a little bit of daylight because uh one of the perverse uh incentives in the system is that if you're three years on EMS it you can get promoted by taking a test to get on the fire department so what's happened now is that there are some firefighters and fire officers who came up that way and so there is a uh Charles there's a willingness or an understanding it hasn't percolated to the top of the Executive Board of the unions but there's some shared experience it's not like they don't know like when the city was first when juliani made the decision which I think was a corrupt one to break off EMS from the hospital system so let's do a a a quick repre of that because that laid the foundation for some of the problems right so juliani comes in he decides he's involved he's in bed with some of these Private Hospital uh private ambulance characters um and of course the political economy again there's that word he decides to pull um EMS out of health and hospitals Corporation and give it to the fire department and it's not an accident at that time structural fires were declining the FDNY did need uh an enhanced Mission and so that became the rules of the road now there is a plantation system and I'll say that's what it is because even after this last contract settlement which did make some progress we're still in a situation where your starting pay is tens of thousands of dollars different than a firefighter and so what's happened is they've built in an incentive to use those first three years as a stepping stone to get to the fire department where by the way you enjoy unlimited sick whereas if you're an EMT it's 13 days how does that make sense people that are the front lines of infectious disease for you we going to be finite with sick time firefighter unlimited sick that's just one example of what is a plantation system now um as ji Carlin my friend labor lawyer U and representative of 2507 and 36.0 on this matter points out this is also the fact that the EMS job title is primarily filled by women and people of color and so the other aspect of this that needs to be considered the building inspectors have a similar case going forward because when you compare their salary as peace officers hear me they're peace officers so they're a step up in the Civil Service hierarchy as law enforcement and they're making less in building inspectors and so we do have this system that also what it does do is it promotes people leaving EMS that's bad for people that are in the public because all the literature tells us it takes at least six years to get that level of Competency to deal with cardiac arrest in the field there's a survival rate much higher for people when you're administered you're ministered to by somebody who's had some years under their belt and so now they created this churn effect where it's not a career now I would say to you that back in the day with health and hospitals what was lighted about that approach is if you wanted a career in medicine and there's a number of er docs around and you're workingclass stiff who may not have access to money to go to med school you could ride a rig in the city you love get the chops to together go to school and become a doctor that path is not the same today okay uh and and what what politically what legally is the impediment because I you know there's there's certain people on the council who get away with running around you know quote unquote championing EMS and then it goes on over years and nothing ever happens so so this has to do with um back in the during the Bloomberg era the city city council did formally pass the uniform designation for EMS right and Bloomberg just decided that he wasn't going to abide by that and so subsequent administrations have pretty much followed along with that and so I mean one of the things that's just crazy is a a newer more modern places like west of the Mississippi and in some parts of uh newer places in America like say ones were founded after the second world war municipalities you'll see the Ms and fire function merge together and so there's some talk that that's actually a healthier job where you spend two weeks riding a rig healing people and two weeks dealing with the fire we have we have not done that here we've not integrated those services and I also think that uh the uh the EMS uh folks were done at disadvantage because there was this perception and even shared by mayor deasio who said to me an answer to a question when I asked him about this lack of parody he said well EMS work is different so I don't know what it is some holdover idea that they don't go charging it to burning buildings or whatever but I would have thought during the pandemic where where they did pay such a heavy price that this would have been something that um would have become politically apparent but you're right there are run they do run out the clock uh one example of kind of like scoff law Behavior VMS unions successfully got a law passed in Albany requiring upper level EMS captains Deputy captains to have a civil service test because up to now that's been political appointees and the uh Adams Administration and their decast person has just decided but we're not going to follow that so a lot of it has to do with the the importance of EMS getting the word out and that's another reason why programs like my show I would even say the city paper got to get them some props they've done some good labor reporting my colleagues at the Gothamist I mean we are seeing uh more labor uh reporting but we've got to hold these Outlets accountable yeah well uh yeah absolutely and and I you know I think the the consensus uh and I see it you know around the country is that EMS is is you know no pun intended uh you know on life support uh it's just a dysfunctional system uh the funding streams are not there there's a human crisis um and it's just you know for the same Dynamics playing out can I can I give you the Bob Henley uh two steps to fix America well yeah just sure okay sure uh no charge let me get my notebook ready yeah no so but just one of the things when you investigate the fire service you understand that one of the things that works for promoting uh fire departments is our Casualty Insurance business and so throughout the country insurance companies determine their premiums they charge you for uring your factory uring your condo whatever based on the robustness of your local response time if this country was serious about healthc care they would be do a similar thing with link ing EMS to our healthare system and so while I know people get very nervous about something like Universal healthare oh and they like the fact the United States spends the most in the world on health care with the poorest results there are something to be proud of so if we can't get around Universal care because the um Pharma and the insurance companies owner politicians let's start with universal EMS that is that if you're in your last moments before you meet your maker guarantee you'll be picked up by a qualified and well-paid and well-trained emergency medical technician what do you think can we get our arms around that it's a it seems non-controversial though uh but yes and absolutely that's a good point um and I'll I'll I'll the fire yeah the fire insurance industry uh is interested in property insurance and and in the insurance industry property and life insurance are separate businesses and so you know because we value property don't want to get to in my but this is the thing like we property is important casualty ah we who is the casualty well and and and it's insured right if you don't have life insurance I mean not to you know but the insurance industry is indifferent whether you live or die if you don't have a policy right right exactly they prefer you die actually they can keep the premium yeah well so all right now uh last thing we want to do let's come back to where we started kind of sure uh which was twin parks and twin Parks has been singularly frustrating for me because you know as as somebody who keeps an eye on high-rise fire safety issues you know we always think well the next one we're going to get you know and we're following up on the supposed Progressive turn of the DeBlasio Administration right uh and I'll just leave it at that uh but you have twin Parks you have This calamity um and yet and and then there's this action to form this task force this the city you know Citywide task force on firee Twin Fark Citywide task force on fire prevention which had a hearing in April of last year and basically increased fines for uh self-closing doors and as far as I can tell I have a call in to one of the co-chairs I've corresponded with them uh we had a seminar with one of their staffers uh early on when we were fairly optimistic about what might happen and it just goes on and but I don't know what way to say that not a not a damn thing has happened there's never been any substantive proposal for fire alarms public address systems heaven forbid Sprinklers and we look around the country you know Chicago right undertook a regulatory regime and and high-rise residentials uh we just had this action in Minneapolis they had a fire in a public housing they killed four people it shocked the state so severely that the senate senate delegation the two senators jumped on board with Federal funding to put sprinklers retroactively into all public housing why is it that there seems to be such indifference to this issue here in New York uh aside from if you want to be just Cress you know that it's the you know the the the tentacles of the real State industry uh you know around our politicians so I think uh uh this uh it's funny because I pulled an article I did about the grenfell fire which is so instructive because that was a case where and that was in London uh was it London Lon and so catastrophic loss of life much uh hand ringing uh another example of where the public articulated the Expos osure and the problem and no one listened and so this becomes a political question the ability to hold people accountable I had a similar waking nightmare I'll give it um after uh the uh the Deutsche Bank building so I was working fory covering the Redevelopment of the World Trade Center which had all kinds of Integrity monitors we're making a fortune next prosecutors keeping an eye on the organized crime demolition oh we got your back and so the crazy idea that they were trying to deconstruct the Deutsche Bank building at the same time as decontaminating it anybody who's done anything knows that well if you're going to create a negative air pressure with plywood and heavy plastic to create containment for asbest abatement you don't want to have a settlin torch on top of it cutting the steel from the place you just uh decontaminated you might have a problem because the Arc of the Sparks coming down might set a fire but then you know I'm not a professional when that was happening and the city was hellbent to take that building down no matter what the residents of community board one went to the Lower Manhattan uh develop Corporation and said you have nefarious actors that are getting the contract that have been debarred by the department of Investigations taking apart that building this was before the Deutsche Bank fire when that same company went in and cut the standpipe and set the stage for the catastrophic event 150 firefighters killed to uh graffanino and um other firefighter 150 injured right and so that so what I'm saying is like the problem is we need to make sure that we support media that reports that when it happens and then when the public turns out to be right holds elected officials accountable for not taking action so I will make a commitment to you that work bites will do such a story on the anniversary and we will have a checklist and we will hold them accountable to see what exactly they've accomplished we have a deal you help me with that I I'll be happy to help you with that I I went so far we had an Author Peter apps who did the I think one of the best books about grenfell um oh really yeah it's called show me the bodies I'll send you a link but we have a nice interview with him uh but the I actually went so far as I mailed a copy of the of the book to each of the co-chairs of that committee wow and of course I've not heard from them uh but it it's yeah it's it's pretty you know it's like you get to a certain stage and it's like well how many more of these are we going to have and is this going to be how I'm going to go out of the game I will spot I was in and I started in the 80s you know right the other the other thing about this is that we do have this kind of another example was that horrendous Queen's fire in the child care center oh yeah now I uh I regularly monitor what's going on and so I saw oh there's like one little kid was seriously hurt uh were 13 or so it was a a lithium battery it was a location in illegal daycare center that had was collocated with the dental lab and I thought oh I put some time in told Joe maniso I'm gonna go big on this and I thought the city would be well let's take an inventory about the status of illegal daycare centers crickets because nobody wants to upset the apple cart and so they're waiting for the next tragedy to clutch the pearls yeah pretty much well okay um I was trying to end on a I don't there is no high note here but uh I think with our our pledge to to keep fighting is uh is probably as good as any and I want to thank the audience and we will have this up online and and I know if you if you got a link to it I did put into the chat a link to a YouTube video you made the point and I don't know if you've been exposed to the work of the walles rodri and Deborah no uh but they the exact point you made about public health and really Co they they they documented covid basically took hold in the Bronx before it took off nationally uh I mean to start on the west coast the east coast and the Bronx and they make exactly that point that um you know uh you cannot ignore certain communities and those public health issues will will fester and they will spread out uh or as a a politician uh a colorful politician African-American woman uh Pioneer down in Orange County Florida Mabel Butler uh in the uh uh late 80s I had an did a project down there and she was pretty colorful uh and she had a great statement which I think still resonates uh said mosquitoes May breed in My District but they bite asses all over the [Music] county meaning that you know uh you you can't can't that no that that pretty much up uh so that that's probably worthy of a PhD in public health but um you know but there you have it so so Bob I want to thank you again uh this has been great uh I oh I want to give everybody a plug for the book uh stuck Nation it's available if you go to Bob's website I did send the link out uh quite affordable and uh and and as I said the WB show what's going on seven o'clock on Tuesdays Mondays and then also it lives on the work bites we yes my Twitter handles isation because as we've discussed we surely are oh there you go all right thank you very much Bob thanks guys take care bye bye for