The decision to form a coalition and call the protest was made at a June 5 meeting of thirty representatives of anticutback groups from seven different hospitals.

The meeting was called in response to the Health and Hospitals Corporation’s decision to close four city hospitals by the end of June.

The coalition decided to organize the June 16 protest around the slogans "No closings of any hospitals," "No cutbacks in hospital services," "No layoffs," and "No compromises."

Protests focused at each of the individual hospitals have been only partially successful. That was one factor that motivated activists to form a city-wide coalition.

Another factor was the desire to link up with workers at the hospital, particularly American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 420. That union represents the municipal hospitals nonprofessional staff.

A strike by the largest union representing municipal hospital workers had the potential to unite the communities and other hospital unions in the fight and might have forced the city to reverse its plans.

But on June 3, top AFCSME leaders and city officials agreed to submit the question of layoffs to nonbinding arbitration and the strike was called off.  
 
June 16, 1952
Two years of "Operation Killer" in Korea presents a grisly preview of what imperialism holds in store for humanity as it drives toward World War III.

To stem the tide of colonial revolt and the socialist struggle for emancipation from capitalism, Wall Street and its Pentagon butchers will stop at nothing.

On Koje island the barbaric massacre of prisoners of war herded behind barbed wire is an act of enraged rulers determined to drown the revolutionary spirit of the Asian people in their own blood.

Millions of Koreans have been slaughtered, whole villages and cities incinerated by napalm bombs. From June 25, 1950, to this very day, imperialism has been systematically destroying Korea. Rather than allow the Korean revolution to achieve the independence of that nation, to drive out the landlords and erect a new society, American capitalism is exterminating the people and laying waste their land.

This counterrevolutionary war has been "limited." But that is only for the time being.

If imperialism has its way the earth will soon be engulfed in the flames of global war. To impose the rule of the dollar against rule by the people, the U.S. atom-imperialists will find themselves compelled to try to put all humanity into stockades, like those on Koje.

But Korea is not only a ghastly preview of the future toward which U.S. imperialism is plunging the world: it is also a promise of the invincible power of a revolutionary humanity inspired with an idea.  
 
 
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