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California Nurses Association/Institute for Health and Socio Economic Policy, Jan. 28, 2011

Robin Hood rides to France.   French President Nicolas Sarkozy has followed through on his promise to put before parliament a financial transaction tax – calling it a “Robin Hood Tax” –  of 0.1% on stock trades to commence in August, according to reports.   Absent from the tax: bond sales.  Sarkozy also proposed raising  the basic consumption tax (VAT)  by 1.6 percent, to 21.2 percent, and upping  by 2 percentage points the taxes paid on financial profits.   His proposed targets of new revenue:  an increase in construction of low-income housing and creation of an “industry bank” to make cheaper loans to small and medium companies.

The Enduring Demise of the Austerity Doctrine.   The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, reports that four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground in terms of growth.   New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes that that failure undercuts any argument that the austerity doctrine – prominent in elite circles in both Europe and the US for the last two years – will address economic demise and gross inequality  it perpetuates. 

Britain has been pushing “expansionary austerity.”   But, asks Krugman, “How could the economy thrive when unemployment was already high, and government policies were directly reducing employment even further?”  State and local governments in the US, have slashed spending and employment which, Krugman maintains, “has been a major drag on the overall economy. Without those spending cuts, we might already have been on the road to self-sustaining growth; as it is, recovery still hangs in the balance.”

Why not a “living wage”?  In New York, key Democrats have introduced a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour, a 17 percent increase.   The Empire State now joins Delaware, reports the Times, which  recently passed a minimum wage increase, and raises are in the mix in  California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri and New Jersey.

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg supports the Dem’s proposal; however,  Gotham’s chief  executive – whose personal wealth is estimated at $20 billion —  beat back a living wage proposal of $10 an hour after his re-election   “It is impossible to live in this city on $15,000 a year,” Micah C. Lasher, Mr. Bloomberg’s director of state legislative affairs, told the New York Times.    Working at $8.50  an hour full-time grosses a worker $17,680 a year.

Had the national minimum wage kept pace with inflation over the past 40 years, it would be at $10.39 now, according to the  National Employment Law Project.  Says Paul Sonn, the Law Project’s legal co-director,  $8.50 an hour “really is not enough for New York’s cost of living and New York’s economy.”   Not by a long shot.

Technology’s great tradition.  Among those attending the World Economic Forum in Davos was Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.  He was talking up social media and related technologies.  Schmidt first came to the Davos event 15 years ago.  “At Davos the conversation is really about economic growth and the reality is that technological advancement benefits those who are educated but endangers jobs that are routine and automatable….This has been true for two hundred years with technologies,” said Schmidt.  With estimated wealth of $7 billion, Schmidt is the 136^th richest person in the world. 

Attention: Wall Street parents!  The cost of private school in New York City is breaking the $40,000 per year barrier, according to a recent report.  That’s just tuition.  Add-ons include spring training in Florida for sports.    Over the past 10 years, the median price of first grade in the city has gone up by 48 percent.  The New York Times reports that unlike public schools, which have faced severe cutbacks in the face of dwindling state and local revenues, private schools seem only to add courses, such as  languages.   “Offering Mandarin is a way to prepare students for the 21st-century world we live in,” said Trinity School’s headmaster.  Trinity has three theaters, six art studios, two tennis courts, a pool and a diving pool.

The percentage of students receiving financial aid has not increased alongside tuition. At the schools for which financial data was available,  18.5 percent of students received financial aid, the same figure as a decade ago.  

Oh where or where will Tim Geithner go?  With the announcement that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is to leave his post at the general election, speculation as to his destination is afoot.  Wall Street would be a solid guess.  Bill Moyers and Michael Winship reminded readers recently that  Jack Lew, President Obama’s new chief of staff used to work for Citigroup, as did Clinton-era Treasury chief Robert Rubin. Bill Daley, who Lew replaced, labored at JPMorgan Chase, “where he was maestro of the bank’s global lobbying and chief liaison to the White House,” write Moyers and Winship. Daley replaced Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who once worked as a rainmaker for the investment bank now known as Wasserstein & Company, where in less than three years he was paid a reported $18.5 million.  

Geithner will be playing catch up.  Average income for the richest 400 families in the US in 2008 was an $270 million, according to David Morris.  Had these tribes actually paid the statutory tax rate of 39 percent, Morris points out,  an additional $500 billion in revenue would be raised over 10 years.  

What they do pay, writes David Cay Johnston, is a whole lost less.  “The federal tax burden on the richest 400 has been slashed,” he writes,  “thanks to a variety of loopholes, allowable deductions and other tools. The actual share of their income paid in taxes, according to the IRS, is 16.6 percent. Adding payroll taxes barely nudges that number.”

If there is one enduring message from the past year, it is that the days of silent suffering are over for the millions of Americans who continue to face a daily struggle to survive while Wall Street high rollers have yet to be called to account for ruining our economy.

The Occupy movement has transformed the status quo, and built an experienced army of activists who will be heard from again and again.

Similarly America's nurses who spent much of 2011 helping to revive the call for meaningful action against Wall Street to demand restitution for the economic ruin are planning a year long campaign to continue to press for real reform.

We're starting with the premiere of a new video ad, "A Nightmare on Wall Street:"

The ad depicts an imagined encounter between a Wall Street banker and the victims of financial misdeed and the government's too-big-to-fail policies -- carried out at the expense of Main Street's small businesses, students, unemployed and elderly.

It's a fictional nightmare for the banker juxtaposed against an every day nightmare for the tens of millions of families enduring job loss, priced out of needed healthcare and educational opportunity, facing the loss of their home, and staring at a bleak and uncertain future, all while the 1 percent continue to enjoy their 50-foot yachts, corporate jets, and vacation homes.

With the video, we have a message for Wall Street. It's time to pay back for the damage you have wrought. A meaningful tax on stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies, and other financial instruments could harvest up to $350 billion every year to help reframe the economy and heal America.

Many world markets already have such a financial transaction tax. The European Union is widely expected to pass a continent wide FTT this year.

With the help of National Nurses United members -- who held protests last year on Wall Street, outside the White House and Treasury Department, at dozens of Congressional offices, brought the message into Occupy protests coast to coast, and joined with international labor, environmental and non-government organizations to press the issue at the G-20 summit of world leaders in France, it's on the agenda again in the U.S.

Don't be misled by temporary blips in jobs numbers -- this crisis is real and enduring. With 18.5 million vacant homes and foreclosures apace, 3.5 million homeless and one in two Americans at or near poverty, America's nurses are sounding an online alarm.

Without a commitment to substantial new revenue, this appalling demise will continue with grievous consequences. In their hospitals and communities, America's registered nurses are seeing the very tangible results of an America engulfed in poverty and insecurity -- stress-related illnesses, mental and emotional collapse, suicide.

The nurses are not alone. In a recent national poll, 85% of primary care physicians and pediatricians identified "low household income" as a negative effect on health in more than half their patients. "Low access to adequate health insurance" measured the same.

Yet, the 1% grow richer. Their average annual household income is more than $1.5 million and average net worth in the tens of millions. Compensation pools at the seven biggest U.S. banks totaled $156 billion in 2011, a 3.7% increase over the previous year's record-breaking number.

The time is now: taxing Wall Street transactions is the starting point for a national recovery.
In addition to the ad, National Nurses United (NNU) has revamped an innovative website www.ProtestIntheUSA.org to help provide information for the movement of the 99 percent.

Visit the site are sign our Petition to Support a Real Financial Transaction Tax on Wall Street and to upload details and videos about protests in which they are involved.

Let's bring an end to the American nightmare, and genuinely restore the American dream.

Follow RoseAnn DeMoro on Huffington Post here

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently proposed changes to the conditions of participation that hospitals and critical access hospitals must meet in the Medicare and Medicaid Programs.

Billed as changes to “lift burdensome and duplicative regulations”, many of these changes represent a real threat to the autonomous practice and patient advocacy role of Registered Nurses.

National Nurses United is very concerned about this potential assault on our practice and has written a full response to these proposed changes which can be accessed here. Please read it here.

Below is an example of one of the proposed changes and an extract from NNUs response that you can craft your own response from:

The Deadline for comments is: 5 pm EST, December 23, 2011

URGENT ACTION NEEDED:

Submit your own comments on these egregious proposed changes

CMS PROPOSED CHANGE:

Proposed Nursing Services §482.23(c) (6) that would allow hospitals the flexibility to develop and implement policies and procedures for a patient and his or her caregivers/support persons to administer specific medications (non-controlled drugs and biologicals).

NNU RECOMMENDATION:

Disallow hospitals the flexibility to develop and implement policies and procedures for a patient and his or her caregivers/support persons to administer specific medications (non-controlled drugs and biologicals). Continue existing standard of practice. Clarify and define “biological”.

RATIONALE:

Unlicensed care givers, family members and friends do not have the education, training, and sophistication to monitor and treat the complications of illness/injury or its treatment. All safety and outcome data in published, peer reviewed studies argues against the industry assertion that medication administration, treatment or monitoring of patients admitted to acute care and critical access hospitals can be safely done by unlicensed caregivers or volunteers.

It would be incredibly difficult and burdensome to keep accurate records if patients were taking their own medications. RNs are only supposed to chart what they have directly observed and what has actually occurred. When a patient has their own medications in their room, and takes those medications when they usually do but without a nurse present, is it assumed that they took all the necessary medications? Assessing the capacity of the patient or the patient’s caregiver/support person adds to already extensive duties of nurses. The proposed regulations do not suggest additional staff to perform this function.

TAKE ACTION HERE:

Submit your own comments on these egregious proposed changes

by National Nurses Movement

A new NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation survey released today documented again the direct link between the economic crisis – you know the one Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman now says we ought to start calling a Depression – and families undermining their health.

Of 1,500 U.S. adults polled, half of whom have been without jobs for more than a year or work part-time while looking for full-time work, the study found that three-fourths of those unemployed or underemployed say they or a family member have delayed medical care because of the cost.
 
Let that sink in a minute – 75 percent of those in American families who have been discarded in the economic meltdown are self-rationing needed medical care.

Among the key findings:

• 46 percent skipped recommended medical treatment or a diagnostic test
• 40 percent did not fill needed prescription
• 63 percent postponed dental care or checkups
• 43 percent had problems paying medical bills
• 33 percent said their mental health has gotten much worse or somewhat worse as a result of their employment status

This is not a surprise to nurses. Months ago National Nurses United identified broad declines in health and living standards for substantial segments of the U.S. population as a direct consequence of low wages, unemployment, hunger, substandard housing and prohibitive medical bills. Among them:

Heart ailments in younger patients, especially in men in their 40s; hypertension; pancreatitis, typically an adult disease now increasingly found in children due to high fat diets linked to low incomes; a range of "gut" disorders, such as colitis; increased obesity linked to poverty; manifold mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders, in youth populations; and higher asthma rates with reports surfacing of deaths as a result of the delays tied to poverty or insurance obstacles.

The economic pandemic is global, of course. But somehow the impact on health is worse in the U.S. That’s what a Commonwealth Fund study last month showed. It compared 11 of the world’s richest nations, and found that sicker adults in the U.S. took top honors for having healthcare cost and access problems.
More than one-fourth could not pay medical bills over the past year, compared to just 1 percent to 14 percent in the other countries. Further, 42 percent of U.S. adults said they had put off visiting a doctor, filling a prescription or getting other recommended care, twice the rate for most of the other nations.
What’s the difference? Those other countries have some form of a national healthcare system or single payer system, such as our Medicare program that so many U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle are itching to cut.

Some of their counterparts abroad are equally shortsighted, such as the conservative Cameron government in the UK, now pushing major cuts in their crown jewel National Health System. The last thing British patients need is for politicians to be emulating the U.S. model and pushing toward a more broken healthcare system with its great race to the bottom.

Every day nurses see the living embodiment of the patients and families behind the statistics listed in the NPR/Kaiser survey, one reason that U.S. nurses have long advocated a more humane healthcare system not based on ability to pay, but one that guarantees healthcare for all in a single payer system, such as expanding and adequately funding Medicare to cover everyone.

That’s been a fundamental plank of NNU’s call for a Main Street Contract for America, which also calls for good jobs with dignity for everyone, which along with guaranteed healthcare is the only effective solution to the deplorable numbers found in both the NPR/Kaiser survey and the Commonwealth Study.

NNU has also been stepping up the campaign for a major funding mechanism with a tax on Wall Street, the very banks and financial firms which tore that giant hole in our economy by gambling with people’s mortgages, pensions, and other reckless financial misdeeds.

The nurses’ proposal a small financial transaction tax of just 50 cents on every $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other major trades (exempting normal consumer activity) could raise up to $350 billion every year to help reframe our economy, heal America, and end the shame of people sacrificing their health and lives due to the cost.

In a year of ghastly stories from the economic implosions on Main Street, this one might have been the worst.

A Texas woman who was blocked from receiving food stamps for five months for the most bureaucratic of reasons, inadequate paper work, shot her own children and herself in despair after a seven-hour standoff in a Laredo, Texas state services offices December 6.

The mom had applied for food stamps in July, facing denial after denial, delay after delay.

Sadly, it's far from the only story of a family destroyed by economic calamity in recent months. In August, a woman -- not someone on welfare, but a professional -- was reported to have shot and killed her 13-year-old son and herself in Kensington, Md.

A note found on the scene contained the chilling words, "Debt is bleeding me. Strangled by debt." She was particularly anguished with the high tuition costs for school for her special needs son.

Can we do something at long last about the economic plight ripping black holes through the social fabric of our society and destroying families from coast to coast.

While a shooting understandably garners headlines, there are far more cases like the story of a Denver woman whose 9-year son died when he was denied Medicaid he needed for life saving medications for asthma, despite her repeated calls.

If millions of Americans are living lives of quiet desperation it is up to the rest of us to make sure they do not suffer in silence.

The lack of compassion for the poor is a national disgrace, especially as the economic nightmare places more families every day in poverty. Today, tens of millions of Americans are one paycheck or one illness from being the poor. Enough already. We need Robin Hood!

Months ago National Nurses United began speaking out, and campaigning for a Main Street Contract for the American People, premised on the basics that should be the foundation of the American dream -- especially jobs with dignity, healthcare for all not based on ability to pay, and full funding for quality public education.

NNU also has a program of how to pay for much of it, a tax on Wall Street. It's not unique to the U.S., part of what makes this idea so universal and resonant. There's a global campaign for what the British call a Robin Hood tax, as portrayed in this stellar video featuring great British actor Bill Nighy.

Our proposal is a small tax of 50 cents on every $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, and other financial transactions that could raise up to $350 billion every year. That revenue alone could fund 9 million new jobs, fund the food plans of 24 million families of four for a year, or lift 3.8 million female headed households out of poverty for over nine years.

Why do we need Robin Hood, in Britain and the rest of the developed world? On the same day of the bloodshed in Laredo, a new report released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development documented the highest level of income inequality in more than three decades in the 34 developed countries it tracks.

Overall average incomes of the richest tenth were nine times the bottom tenth; the U.S. ratio was 14-1.

The original Robin Hood was fed up with income inequality and took direct action to re-balance the priorities.

Now, he has more than a merry band dancing around in the woods on his side.

Supporters of the Robin Hood tax include not just nurses, but also the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury from England, the former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, the conservative leaders of France and Germany, Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and a long list of prominent economists, including the former chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz. And, many international labor, non-governmental, environmental, and consumer groups.

Enactment of a Robin Hood tax will be too late to help the families in Laredo and Kensington, Md., but for millions of other families falling through the cracks, a Robin Hood tax could be a vital lifeline.
Learn more and tell us your story here.

As more than 2 million nurses, teachers, paramedics and other workers held the largest strike in over three decades across Great Britain, National Nurses United, joined by other union members, held energetic support rallies in six U.S. cities to show solidarity with their embattled British counterparts.

At rallies outside the British embassy in Washington, and British consulates in Boston, Chicago, Orlando, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, nurses picketed, and delivered a letter from NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro to consular officials showing support for the massive British strike.

The United Steel Workers, Teamsters, AFT, ATU, SEIU, AFL central labor councils, Unite-Here, and members of Occupy DC and Occupy Chicago, were among labor and community activists joining the solidarity actions.

The historic British strike was called by the workers to protest brutal cuts to their pensions and retirement benefits.

As nurses and other union members and activists said in the support rallies in the U.S., American workers face similar fights.

NNU Co-President Karen Higgins, RN speaking at DC rally

After she was allowed inside the gates of the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., Karen Higgins, RN, NNU co-president, told the approximately 200 protestors gathered outside, “I said to them, if people have to keep working with no pensions, it is hurting everyone. I told him he needs to get in touch with his comrades across the pond and tell them this cannot happen.”  

Washington Hospital Center RN Rajini Raj said, “We're here in support of the more than two million people striking in Great Britain today. We know an injury to one is an injury to all even if there is an ocean between us.”  The nurses were joined by members of several national labor unions, including AFT, SEIU, the Teamsters, and the D.C. Metropolitan Central Labor Council  along with dozens of people who joined from Occupy DC.

Tommy Ratcliff, President of Teamsters Local 639, said, “It's going to continue to happen to public workers and private workers. 14 million people are out of work -- where will it end?  It's just corporate greed. It's the difference between the 1 percent and the 99 percent.”

Boston action

Chicago rally

More than 100 people, including USW members from both the greater Chicago area and Indiana, rallied in Chicago. Rally speakers included NNU co-president Jean Ross, RN, and representatives of the Chicago Labor Federation, UNITE-HERE, Amalgamated Transit Union, Chicago Teachers Union, Progressive Democrats of America, and Occupy Chicago. After police initially blocked entrance to the consulate, consular officials eventually agreed to come down and meet with a delegation.

Los Angeles rally

A similar scene occurred in Los Angeles, where the consulate stalled on meeting with protesters, but agreed to meet when the rally participants, who numbered over 100, made it clear they would not be turned away. The action included nurses and members of the California Teachers Association, LA County Labor Federation, and the Physicians for a National Health Plan.

In San Francisco, where a delegation of nurse leaders met with the city’s consular general, 100 people from NNU picketed the downtown consulate.

Zenei Cortez, RN delivers letter to San Francisco Consul General Priya Guha

“Even though we all live in different parts of the world, we are all fighting for the same issues,” said Zenei Cortez, RN, a co-president of the California Nurses Association, and an NNU vice president addressing the San Francisco picket.

In her letter, addressed to Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Great Britain’s Ambassador to the U.S. and copied to other consular officials, DeMoro noted that U.S. nurses strongly support British workers “who are standing up for their rights and for the integrity of public services in your country.”

“We urge the British government to stop its attempt to make public-sector workers pay more and work longer to receive a smaller pension when they retire.  The government’s plans will impact women the most, who already suffer from lower pensions.   This attack on the people who provide patient care at the National Health Service, teach school children, and provide essential public services is unconscionable,” DeMoro said.

Among major participants in the U.K. strike is UNISON, whose members include many nurses and other healthcare workers. The strikers are saying no to “pay more, work longer, get less,” a so-called “triple squeeze” in which pensions are reduced and age eligibility extended.  

“The plans are just a cynical move to raise 4 billion [British pounds] to pay down the deficit caused by the bankers,” said Karen Jennings, UNISON’s assistant general secretary.  

One solution put forward both in the U.S. and in the U.K. is for passage of a financial transaction tax (FTT) – in Britain termed a “Robin Hood Tax.”   An FTT is a sales tax aimed at speculative trading and would raise up to $350 billion a year in the U.S. alone.  

“NNU supports an FTT around the globe,” said NNU Secretary-Treasurer Martha Kuhl, RN at the San Francisco picket, “so that everyone can enjoy the essential services they deserve, and so that the workers who provide these services don’t have to take cut backs.”

“Nurses see what this economy is doing to our communities in stress, dislocation, and poverty,” said Karen Higgins, RN and NNU co-president. “We are going out in support of UNISON, drawing the line against cuts to retirement security and other essentials for working families.”

RELATED LINKS:

This blog also posted on DailyKos.com

See a collection of Solidarity posts from U.S. RNs and Allies to U.K. Nurses and Public Workers

US Nurses and Allies Stand by UK Nurses,
Public Workers in Rallies in Six US Cities

More than 2 million public sector workers staged a nationwide strike, closing schools and bringing councils and hospitals to a virtual standstill in the UK today. Deep resentment over proposed cuts to public sector pensions provoked the huge strike, the largest in a generation. The action – with 29 unions participating - included walkouts by UK Border Agency staff, probation officers, radiographers, librarians, job center workers, courts staff, social workers, refuse collectors, midwives, road sweepers, cleaners, school meals staff, paramedics, tax inspectors, customs officers, passport office staff, police civilian staff, driving test examiners, patent officers, and health and safety inspectors

Here, National Nurses United led solidarity protests at British government offices in six cities and protesters were reminded of parallel threats to Social Security. Read the full press release here.

We sent an email asking our members and friends to attend rallies and many of you did! We also asked that you post solidarity comments. Below are some we received. Thank you!

WASHINGTON, DC

As a former Unison member and former NHS RGN, I stand in complete solidarity of  their actions to walk out on 30 November.  It is a deplorable action the British government has chosen to take and I will be supporting you. Hopefully the RCN will come to their senses and join you! Good Luck and I wish you Success in your struggle.
Cathy Hampton, RN
Washington, DC

We support our brothers and sisters at UNISON in their struggle to protect their retirement security from unjustified attacks by those responsible for the financial debacle.
Mark Langevin, Trade Union Organizer
Washington, DC

NEW YORK

They break the promises they make to you as well as to all other healthcare workers. They don't care about the needy and poor that we care for knowing they need all the help we can give. But when those legislators and wealthy business people need us, they are all doe eyes and sad faces grimacing in the agony of their infirmity. Where they want the very best care possible which we give because we have promised to do the best regardless of who the patient is. Stay strong for the poor, the needy and the downtrodden, for they are truly deserving of the care we give them. Remember Our fight if for more than fair pay and benefits."
Guy Nichols, EMT
Jamaica, NY

Nurses, Workers of the World Unite!  Make those greedy corporations pay you the decent wages and benefits you deserve!
Amy Harlib
New York, NY

FLORIDA

We stand together to assure that patients get the care they need.
Joan Verret, RN
Lakeland, FL

I stand with all nurses globally. Do not suspend our right to a secure retirement.
Diana Hatsis, Clinical Research Assoc.
Boynton Beach, FL

The nurses here in Orlando support you all the way. We are all fighting for the same cause.I wil be there we my other co-workers. We must stay united.
Denise Klein, RN
Kissimmee, FL

Lift up your voices in unity and you cannot fail. Stay strong. Know that over 170,000 nurses in the US support you.
Mary Fentress, RN
Pinellas Park, FL

My strong support for a NNU and United Kingdom. Was that NNU is doing a great job. I would like to someday get to participate in its activities.
Maria de Lourdes Torres, RN
Miami, FL

I have worked with many outstanding UK nurses over the past 37 years.
 I stand with you and support all efforts by nurses to protect patient care by protecting themselves.
Dr. John Silver Ph.d, RN, Educator
Plantation, FL

I stand by all my brothers and sisters in spirit today as we continue to fight for sane working conditions and liveable wages and benefits.
Pamela Smith, RN
Port Charlotte, FL

ILLINOIS

I honor your activism and compassion and will be with you in spirit. Nurses united will never be defeated!
Connie Hawley-Lowe, RN
Makanda, IL

UNITED WE STAND! CORPORATE GREED IS DESTROYING HUMANITY. We must STAND STRONG. No sacrifice No surrender!
Dawn Peckler, RN
Chicago, IL

Stand up for your rights. We're with you.
Barbara Hardin, RN
Cicero, IL

I support the National Nurses United, Occupy Wall Street, and all of the 99% people like me!
Paul Haider, Psychologist
Chicago, IL 

If the workers of the world do not stand together, the 1% will use them against each other to further their greedy purposes.  NurseGloria
Gloria Maloney, RN
Roscoe, IL

MASSACHUSETTS

Keep up the struggle for fair and descent working conditions. When we struggle together, the fairness spreads. Its like lighting a fuse, it soon spreads and expands to many worldwide.
Abigail Howes, Coordination of Care Aide
Berkley, MA    

Thank you nurses and workers in the UK for refusing to accept responsibility for what the banks and financial "wizards" did to our economy. We will take the economy back! In solidarity.
Rosemary Kean, RN, CS
Boston, MA

Protect the worker rights of nurses. Society needs good nurses. Tax the tax cheats and corporations that do not pay their fair share.
Kathleen Hursen, Retired RN
Framingham, MA

MICHIGAN

Solidarity from the US, keep up the good fight, this is a global movement now!!  We must all rise up, and fight against those who through fraud and corruption are stealing from the citizens around the world their rights to a decent living, and life.
Julia Williams, RN
Fraser, MI

To All of My British Colleagues, Thank you I am in solidarity with you! You are fighting for nurses and patients the world over.
Margaret Kingsbury, RN (49 years)
Lansing, MI

I stand with you in mind and spirit!  We must stand up for what is right.
Theresa Premo-Peaphon, RN
Lansing, MI

OHIO

Support sent your way!
Sharon Pollard, RN
Euclid, OH

TEXAS

We are on your side 100%
Linda Kendrick, RN
Sugar Land, TX

CANADA

Go Nurses! What an amazing force you can be when we work together.  This Canadian nurse is behind you 100%.
Suzanne Hrynyk, RN
Winnipeg, Manitoba

CALIFORNIA

We will keep our "Oil Lamps Burning For You"
Suzanne Anderson, RN
San Jose, CA

I stand with you in spirit. I am unable to attend a rally. As a Registered Nurse for the past 43 years, and as a Human Being on this planet, we all deserve respect. I myself face living in poverty at retirement. Can't we all support each other? I think we can. Keep up the fight!
Joan McCusker, RN (43 years)
Livermore, CA

As an AFT union member and teacher myself, I understand that the same wealthy elite are trying to steal your retiree pensions the way they are trying to steal from me.  When you stand up to those  thieves, you stand for me and my family as well as for your own.  Thanks for all you will do tomorrow to raise awareness and to FIGHT BACK against losses that will make us work until we die.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Jackie Goldberg, Faculty Adviser, Teacher Education Programs    
Los Angeles, CA   

You all are an important assets to our communities and our families we are the 99%. Thank you for speaking out and standing up for what's right for humanity.
Betty Buchanan
Bakersfield, CA

United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Elizabeth Castillo, RN
Lakewood, CA  

Keep up the good work and Patient Care and eventually our words will be heard throughout the world.In support of my UK brothers and Sisters in SOLIDARITY WE STAND!
Rick Solinger ER Nurse
Santa Cruz, CA

We are coming to San Francisco to march in support of our sisters!
Joan Silva, RN
Atascadero, CA

Si Se Puede!
Michael Misquez, Retired
Pico Rivera, CA

We stand with you professionally, personally and as union brothers and sisters. We are Universal Nurses United.
Elizabeth Pataki, Retired RN
Sacramento, CA

I am a Public Sector Nurse. We Stand with you! The day has come for International Solidarity to protect Public services and all workers.
Maureen    Dugan, RN
San Francisco, CA

Fellow nurses stay strong, stand up for your rights! We who spend years of our lives caring for others often at the expense of our own bodies and health deserve to retire with
dignity and financial security. Nurses in the US understand your message and support you in your struggle. Licensed since 1982. Hoping to retire someday!
Ann Magner-Danz, RN
Pacifca, CA

All nurses stand with you as we stand for our communities and patients.
Richard Sandness, RN
El Dorado Hills, CA

I am a retired RN and I understand in "real time" the importance of retirement security at the end of your life.  I am in solidarity with you as you fight back against the forces of injustice that working against you.
Victoria Bermudez, Retired RN
Carmichael, CA

Stay together and WIN!
Lonnie Kidd, RN
San Francisco, CA

Stand strong nurses. All of us American nurses are pulling for you!
Laurie Trent, RN
Plumas Lake, CA

Thank you NNU for showing support for nurses all across the world.
Melanie Tang, RN
Daly city, CA

I am a member of CNA. I stand behind you 100 % and wish I could be there to stand beside you!  It is criminal what they are trying to do.  You give so much and expect so little and even that they want to take away!  Are we not entitled to a pension to be able to live after retirement like the big CEO's who make millions each year and have more benefits and retirement, enough to take are of several people when they retire!  Let's see some benefits taken away from them!  Hang in there we will fight the fight with you.
Elizabeth Malmendier, RN
Folsom, CA

YES! I support the force.
Marie Di Peri, RN
Beverly Hills, CA

A RN in Moreno Valley supports YOU.
Monica Medice, RN
Moreno Valley, CA

I stand united with you in spirit. May you continue to fight for the basic needs we all deserve. Don't give up!
Alexis Cooper, RN
Carson, CA

I stand in solidarity with my fellow nurses and workers in Britain.
Vicki Gutierrez, RN
Irvine, CA

I am a retired professor and public health worker and I am in solidarity with you.  If my state pension, which I paid into, were to be reduced I would be in serious financial trouble.  We face the same problems worldwide, and I want to thank you for your resistance.  It helps all workers.  Stay strong!  And win!
Ayesha Gill, Retired
Oakland, CA

On the web at: http://www.nader.org

If that were true, though, these leaders, including Michigan's Fred Upton and Dave Camp, would have considered a solution that works for the 99 percent and makes the 1 percent pay their fair share.

That solution is a financial transaction tax - a minuscule fee on Wall Street trading that's used effectively in more than 40 countries, including those in the world's seven fastest-growing financial markets.

As tireless advocates for their patients at the bedside and beyond, Michigan nurses have pushed this solution to support America's workers and families who are struggling while corporations collect record profits at their expense.

A tax of less than one percent on activities like stock trades and derivative sales could raise up to $350 billion to immediately put people to work and protect essential safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The tax would target the big banks and Wall Street traders who gambled with Americans' mortgages and pensions and crashed our economy. It would also discourage excessive speculation, the main cause of the 2008 crash.

Our country is in this mess because politicians sold out working men and women to reckless banks and Wall Street gamblers whose unchecked greed threw us into a recession. Then they gave those corporations trillions in taxpayer bailouts to support the richest powerful Americans, leaving Michigan mired in double-digit unemployment, foreclosures, and rising poverty.

Michigan's nurses see the human suffering that this ongoing economic crisis has caused every day in their patients' lives. They've called on Congress to rebuild our country by supporting our Main Street Contract for the American People. The contract focuses on jobs at living wages; quality education; guaranteed health care; secure retirement; good housing and protection from hunger; a safe and healthy environment; and a just taxation system where corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share - including the financial transaction tax.
 
The U.S. had a financial transaction tax for decades, up to 1966, and many have tried to bring it back. It's no surprise that they find little support in Washington, where the corporations and CEOs who write campaign checks have more say than ordinary working Americans.

Rep. Camp, for example, is pushing to cut corporate taxes, although dozens of profitable multibillion-dollar corporations go years without paying a dollar in taxes, yet still pay their CEOs huge bonuses and donate plenty to politicians.

No, without a tax on Wall Street, "everything" has not been on the table - especially not the values of the 99 percent, including accountability, taking care of each other and paying one's fair share.

The window has closed for the supercommittee to heal our nation's broken priorities and create an economy that works for everyone.

The doors are wide open now, though, for citizens to demand louder than ever that our leaders stop protecting their campaign donors on Wall Street and start supporting our workers and families on Main Street.

###

Amidst the scourge of inequality sweeping the world, marked by continued profits, pay-outs and record levels of cash hoarding -- the spoils of the 1% -- one group has come forward with a remedy, refusing to stand down. Nurses from four continents gathered at the G-20 Summit last week to tell world leaders that time is running out: revenue is needed now and the starting point is a global finance tax.

That call for remedy is resonating. It is loud and it is getting louder, and half measure legislation is not a substitute for a movement.

Just last week, in addition to the actions at the G-20, 2,000 people, including RN members of National Nurses United joined by the AFL-CIO and other unions, environmental and community groups, and participants from the Occupy Wall Street movement, marched on the White House and Treasury Department.

Like the nurses at the G-20, they were calling on the Obama administration to support a tax on Wall Street, the U.S. version of a financial transaction tax to raise desperately needed revenue to heal our economy. Similar marches occurred in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Nurses have been rallying for months, and putting pressure on the White House and members of Congress to support a meaningful tax on Wall Street to provide the funding necessary for such basic needs as health care for all, jobs with dignity, and quality public education.

An FTT, a sales tax on trading in stocks, bonds, derivatives and targeting speculative activity, is now on the world agenda. For the first time, the 20 most powerful countries convened to discuss raising revenue from such a tax.

Pressure is also mounting within the U.S. One bill by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), has been introduced. However, the estimates cited in print of $350 billion are over nine years -- far short of what is needed to reframe our devastated economy. We do not have nine years to wait. A better approach would be an FTT that raises $350 billion every year.

Moreover, the revenue in the current bill is earmarked for deficit reduction, i.e. further job reduction and infrastructure destruction which would only make matters worse. There are trillions of dollars sitting idle or wasted in the market casino, as such, and we are building a social demand for the FTT to be used as an economic stimulator and to reorganize the social priorities of our country. The 99% want a solution now that actually changes our lives now.

FTT proposals share critical underpinnings: speculation and manipulation in financial markets triggered collapse from which the world has not emerged; poverty and near-poverty are rampant and spreading, engulfing millions of families in the U.S. alone; financial profits should be tapped for meaningful revenues to save the many communities in crisis; and financial taxes are a starting point--- a down payment. In this country today we are witnessing the greatest transference of wealth upwards in our entire history. That dynamic, here and elsewhere, must stop now.

The financial tax the nurses support would provide up to $350 billion every year in the U.S. alone and billions more in other societies. We know what is needed to put Americans back to work, provide quality health care and schools for all, to start restoring our environment and address hunger and homelessness. "The number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty," wrote the New York Times on November 4, "grew by a third over the past decade...." Nearly 50 million Americans live in households deemed "food insecure."

Wall Street firms, in the meantime, including banks and their trading arms -- are making massive fortunes, "more profit in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the entire Bush administration," according to the Washington Post, November 6.

We also know that in the face of overwhelming community need, trillions of dollars sit on the sidelines. Trillions.

Cash holdings of non-financial S&P 500 are over $1 trillion--"more cash than in decades," according to the Templeton Income Fund, with cash held abroad by U.S. companies adding $1.5 trillion. Cash holdings at European non-financials is now 800 million euros, putting Greek protests in some perspective. Trillions more sit in the accounts of wealthy individuals on both continents.

"How can the financial sector triumphantly continue to march," said President Sarkozy of France at the G-20, "indifferent to the world around it, carelessly and without a care for the disorder it has more than its share in causing?" German Chancellor Merkel agreed. And President Obama, disregarding the unwavering counsel of Treasury Secretary Geithner to leave Wall Street to its own devices, indicated that while not favoring the tax he would not seek to block others from enacting it.

Sarkozy, Merkel and Obama were listening when thousands protested, including the nurses, last week in France -- an outcry of global proportions certain to repeat. An array of support comprised this protest -- Oxfam, unions, consumer groups, ecologists, Occupy Wall Street and other armies of occupiers -- all committed to a reordering of world priorities and in support of a finance tax. "[A] billion people [are] on the edge of starvation or worse, but not beyond reach by any means," said Noam Chomsky on November 2. We won't stand down in the face of this challenge.

This extraordinary commitment to cash by the 1% is incendiary.

Meanwhile, Congress considers cutting essential programs, including in Social Security and Medicare. All these programs are on the cutting block even as the Census Bureau announces increases in poverty. Millions more would be in poverty, the new study contends, but for the programs government intends to curtail.

Nurses will continue to focus on building a movement. The nurses bear daily witness to the awful effects of the colossal demise engulfing communities everywhere and we will not stand down. The nurses commitment to care does not end at the bedside.

For more about the movement in the U.S. as well as globally, and to find materials, literature, bumper stickers, and more, visit our website at www.mainstreetcontract.org.

NNU has entered a new era in becoming part of an international campaign to advocate on behalf of not only our patients and Main Street communities at home, but people in crisis around the world, and to hold Wall Street and other global financial institutions accountable to heal our nations.

Activities by an NNU delegation to the G-20 summit of world leaders in France November 3 capped the final leg of three days of international actions, organized by an unprecedented number of trade union, environmental, NGO, student, and anti-poverty organizations, all protesting the G-20 summit and the global economic crisis. Nurse organizations from four continents, at the initiative of NNU, were front and center in these actions.

Our year long campaign calling for a tax on Wall Street financial transactions to help raise needed revenue to fund programs like healthcare for all, good jobs, quality public education and other social needs to address the plight of American communities has converged incredibly with global efforts by the international labor community, and non-governmental (NGO) organizations like Oxfam and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to pass a “Robin Hood” financial transaction tax (FTT) to address needs including poverty and social development.

Jill Furillo, RN and other NNU nurses march in Cannes, France to urge
international support for a Financial Transaction Tax. See more images here.

On Tuesday, November 1, an international delegation of nurses, including RNs from France, Korea, Ireland, Australia, and the US (NNU) lead the contingent of the CGT, a trade union confederation representing over 700,000 French workers, in a massive march through the streets of Nice, protesting the G-20.

NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro addressed the crowd from a flatbed truck, calling upon the G-20 countries to pass the FTT to fund social services throughout the world, and was loudly cheered by environmental, trade union, and community groups – all ecstatic that we were all fighting the same fight.

On Wednesday, our delegation participated in an a.m. press conference in a large hospital in Cannes, organized by the CFDT – another huge trade union federation representing over 825,000 workers in France. Together, all of the nurses spoke in support of the French nurses and healthcare workers who are fighting the austerity plans of French President Sarkozy, who proposes to cut 10% of healthcare services, eroding staffing standards and harming the national healthcare system.

An international group of nurses and Oxfam spokesman and actor Bill
Nighy during a press conference at the G20 summit in Cannes, France
promoting a Financial Transaction Tax. See more images here.

Each group spoke to the importance of solidarity in our commitment to push for the FTT in the international arena. Our group participated in several discussions with these unions about strategies for future actions and shared stories of our recent actions that have built this movement in our respective countries to date. We met simultaneously with NGO's from numerous countries on collective strategies to move the FTT forward.

On Thursday, we gathered with representatives from   Public Services International, which represents 20 million public service workers in 150 countries,  the International Trade Union Confederation, the umbrella federation representing the labor movements in all the G-20 nations, WWF, and well known British actor and Oxfam Global Ambassador Bill Nighy, to host a press event. It featured a spirited skit displaying the unique role nurses are playing in advocating for the FTT, as a first step in funding social services, healthcare, a healthy environment, and jobs and education programs.

Nurses present more than 300,000 petition signatures to staffers of the Senate
Finance Committee in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 3 as part a global day of action
in support of a Financial Transaction Tax. See more images here.

Our actions garnered extensive press. We were also invited to address an international gathering of the ITUC who applauded our leadership in building momentum for passage of the FTT. We also had a great meeting with the leadership of the Robin Hood Tax group who frankly, love the nurses.

These events have placed NNU at the center of the international movement to pass the FTT. Many of the groups mentioned above have been watching our work on this issue in the United States with our Main Street Contract campaign, our marches in front of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in May, our large rally on Wall Street in June, our Sept. 1 events in front of 60 Congressional offices, and our work in supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement – including providing first aid to occupiers while bringing the message of the FTT to that movement.

As we concluded the international events on November 3, nurses rallied simultaneously in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles, again, garnering national and international press coverage.

Nurses march in Los Angeles as part of a global day of action November 3
to push political leaders to support a FInancial Transaction Tax. See more images here.

Our work on this issue is respected and admired globally, and we will continue to engage in the international arena because it will take international solidarity to hold Wall Street accountable and pass the FTT.

Building these international relationships will be fundamental to ensuring our success in challenging global corporate giants, from the banks to the healthcare industry,  to change national and international priorities, and ensure that policies are implemented throughout the world that put protect our communities.

Jill Furillo, RN, is the National Bargaining Director for National Nurses United

###

From Madison to Wall Street, from St. Paul to Washington D.C., people are seeing nurses dressed in red scrubs, holding not a stethoscope but a megaphone. We are carrying signs. We are marching en masse. And we are raising our voices. This may seem unusual behavior for our profession, but in truth, our history is deeply rooted in social advocacy, as well as the bedside advocacy you’ve come to trust. We’re doing more because we must.

We are facing a crisis in our profession and in the realm in which it serves. Anger is building. We see it in the weary faces of our colleagues, hear it in the exasperated tone of our voices and feel it in the now-permanent clench of our jaws.

But we’ve recognized that if this is true for the majority of us, an insidious grand scheme is working. Wall Street power brokers are counting on us to assume the role of submissive, quiet caregivers who don’t question or protest.

Imagine their surprise to discover, instead, enraged and engaged nurses. We’ve connected the dots that directly link power and greed to inadequate staffing and unsafe conditions for the patients in our care. The deplorable conditions in which we work right now are fully intentional. Wall Street is literally getting away with murder.

It is up to us to expose the travesty that financial inequity inflicts on our society; 2.7 million nurses in the United States do have a voice – and we are obligated by our social contract to use our influence for good.

We witness Main Street hurting. Millions have lost their jobs and their homes, face bankrupting medical bills and are jammed into over-crowded classrooms and emergency rooms. Soup kitchens, food pantries and food stamps now provide sustenance for millions more. Meanwhile, Wall Street-funded politicians are intent on stealing more from working families.

That is why nurses across the nation have been leading the movement for a Main Street Contract. We protested last spring on the streets of Madison, where our supply of signs demanding a “Tax on Wall Street to Heal America” was drained within minutes. And on Sept. 1, nurses held 61 actions all over the country urging elected officials to commit to the principles of the Main Street Contract to rebuild the American dream.

We are cheering and marching and even lending our professional hands now with the Occupy actions arising all over our country.

Nurses are turning our anger into action, realizing our power – and making a difference.

We must make Wall Street pay for the devastation it has caused families on Main Street. Our clear-cut, concise solution is a Financial Transaction Tax. It is a modest levy on trades of stocks, derivatives and currencies that could generate billions in revenue to help our ailing economy, stimulate job growth, re-fund essential services, and discourage the reckless, high-volume/short-term profit computer-driven Wall Street gambling that lead to our current economic crisis. First proposed by a Nobel Prize winning economist, the initiative is already in play in more than 40 countries around the world.

But as we all in the labor movement continue to speak up on this larger scale, we have no doubt we will be subject to ridicule poisonous onslaughts from every corner. It has already begun. An editorial in the Boston Herald in response to our Nurses National Day of Action questioned our organizational right to demand economic justice.

Here’s their direct statement: “We assumed a labor union that represents nurses was in the business of negotiating fair pay and decent working conditions for those who do the difficult work of caring for the sick. We didn’t realize that federal tax policy and securities regulation were part of its portfolio.”

This patriarchal, condescending venom is directly aimed at instilling self-doubt among our ranks. It is meant for us to question our role in social justice – both as nursing professionals and labor activists. It is a menacing shot across the bow to intimidate us from using the strongest tool any society has against oppression – that of collective action.

So get out the vaccine, friends. Take the strongest dose possible, and duly prepare yourself for more vicious attacks.

This is no time to question ourselves. Indeed, question everything else except our own role, our own power and our own vision of a healthy America.

– Linda Hamilton is president of the Minnesota Nurses Association. Bernadine Engeldorf is first vice president of the MNA. Jean Ross is co-president of National Nurses United. All three labor leaders are registered nurses.

Our nurses are currently operating RNRN/NNU First Aid Nurses Stations in the following locations major Occupy Wall Street sites:

• San Francisco, CA
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Washington DC.

Although there have been attempts in numerous cities to shut down the First Aid Nurses Station, RNs have successfully protected the First Aid Nurses Station. 

Thank you for rising to the occasion, once again, and being there when you are most needed.

Will President Obama be the main holdout when world leaders meet early next month at the G-20 summit in France?

Will President Obama be the main holdout when world leaders, under growing pressure from the occupy Wall Street protests across the world and demand building for a tax on international financial transactions, meet early next month at the G-20 summit in France?

Nurses from at least four continents, including a U.S. delegation from National Nurses United, will deliver that message November 3 at the G-20 summit meeting November 3 in Cannes – urging enactment of a financial transaction tax that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year to heal global economies, promote sustainable development and environmental security, and strengthen quality public services.

Nurses will be joined by labor, environmental, non-governmental, and community activists who have made the push for a global FTT an international movement that has sparked the adoption of an FTT by more than a dozen nations, and prompted the European Commission to propose a global FTT which is expected to be a major topic at the G-20 summit.

The call for a FTT, sometimes called a “Robin Hood tax” (a form of such a tax was actually in place in the U.S. for most of the first half of the last century), has become a powerful force in Europe especially.

But a major stumbling block continues to be the opposition of the Obama administration, led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who has personally lobbied European finance ministers to oppose an FTT despite the support for the proposal from ostensibly more conservative governments in Germany and France.

That’s one reason nurses from across the U.S. will hold a concurrent protest on November 3 on Geithner’s doorstep, with a protest outside the Treasury Department in Washington.

As the campaign for an FTT has mushroomed internationally, it remained under the radar in the U.S. until NNU helped rekindle the call for a tax on Wall Street transactions earlier this year.

NNU leaders, seeing the broadening decline in health status and living standards directly linked to the seemingly intractable economic calamity – from ailments linked to poor nutrition to patients rejecting needed medical care because of cost – reasoned that a tax on Wall Street could help raise the desperately needed revenue for such critical social needs as health care for all, jobs at living wages, full funding for quality public education, and a healthy environment.

Some major U.S. economists, and organizations including the AFL-CIO, Oxfam, Institute for Policy Studies, and Public Citizen have long supported implementation of a tax on Wall Street stocks, bonds, currencies, default swaps, and other major financial transactions that are now largely untaxed.

This past spring, NNU, with the support of labor and consumer allies, began a highly visible public campaign for the tax as a major way to make Wall Street begin to pay for reviving an economy that it crashed. They did so through reckless gambling with family mortgages, worker pensions and other misdeeds that were the prime cause of the 2008 crash and resulting crumbling conditions in Main Street communities with devastating consequences for the health and welfare of American families.

In June, NNU brought thousands of nurses and friends to the Washington headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street’s main lobbying arm, and to the New York Stock Exchange to sound the call for an FTT.

From July through mid-September, NNU members held multiple actions from coast to coast, including soup kitchens, health clinics, sit-ins, and street theater, culminating in a national day of action on September 1 with thousands of nurses calling on 60 Congressional offices in 21 states. NNU signs, urging “Tax Wall Street” become a highly visible banner throughout the nation.

It was just a few weeks later that tens of thousands of other Americans began their own form of protest against Wall Street’s excesses that became a prairie fire now forever known as Occupy Wall Street. Not coincidentally, many Occupy Wall Street protesters have also endorsed the call for a tax on Wall Street and the Canadian magazine Adbusters, an initiator of the proposal for the occupy protests, has also publicly urged enactment of an FTT.

Calls for an FTT now ring the airwaves, and can be found not just in obscure blogs, but in the columns of leading writers in all of the major U.S. media.

That’s one reason that reviews of a significant new book on the Obama White House, “Confidence Men” by Ron Suskind, routinely note that President Obama himself once leaned toward supporting an FTT but was dissuaded by his former top economic adviser, Larry Summers who, like Geithner, has a substantial, long term ties to Wall Street.

With the constellation of the occupy protests and the broad international movement for the FTT, the moment for achieving the tax, and the critical revenue it can provide to help revive struggling economies, has never been greater.

But only if all of us raise our voices demanding that the Obama administration support an FTT.

We need your voice as well. Join us on November 3 in Cannes or Washington D.C. Call the White House, 202-456-1111 and tell them to tax Wall Street financial transactions and get on the side of Main Street not Wall Street. Learn more about our campaign at www.mainstreetcontract.org.

###

World leaders who gather for the G20 economic discussions in Cannes, France in early November will get fiscal advice from an unexpected group – nurses, who will prescribe the immediate application of a financial transaction tax for the economic health of communities everywhere.

Public Services International is working with the International Trade Union Confederation to stage a colourful action in Cannes where nurses will take symbolic emergency measures and inject an FTT to resuscitate the ailing global economy.

At the same time, global union leaders will deliver the "prescription" for a financial transactions tax directly to the current chair of the G20, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and other heads of state.

“That nurses are courageously taking their demand for a financial transactions tax to the G20 draws attention to the important role of healthcare workers in speaking out about the economic issues that affect both quality of care and working conditions,” says PSI General Secretary Peter Waldorff.

“It’s also an opportunity to highlight that women are among the hardest hit, through loss of jobs and the burden of increased unpaid labour in providing care, when public services are cut.”

The European Union has proposed a bloc-wide financial transactions tax on bond and stock trades to raise billions of euros a year. A global FTT would be most effective. It could fund basic health care for mothers and children, saving millions of lives. It could help tackle the economic downturn and strengthen quality public services, the basis of inclusive and caring societies.

PSI affiliate nurses and other healthcare members in Europe are invited to join a delegation from National Nurses United, and civil society allies, for this event in or near Cannes on 2 November.

The NNU, which has been leading the call in the US for a “Tax on Wall Street”, will also hold a major action in front of the US Treasury Department in Washington DC on 3 November.

Resolution #1 of the Massachusetts Nurses Association annual business meeting, October 6, 2011, passed overwhelmingly.

Whereas, working people and the poor face an historic unemployment crisis and the danger of the deepest cuts in decades in federal spending of essential social services; and
 
Whereas, there is a desperate need for major resources to be directed toward a large federal program of public works to create jobs; and
 
Whereas, polls such as the September 15th New York Times/CBS News poll show that 80% of Americans would support a program of federal spending on infrastructure like bridges, airports and schools as a means to create jobs; and
 
Whereas, Congress set up a bipartisan Super Committee to propose at least $1.2 trillion of cuts to the federal budget, possibly much more, by November 23; and
 
Whereas, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - the three most essential and popular social programs working people depend on - could face unprecedented historic cuts; and
 
Whereas, one of the two national co-chairs of the Super Committee is Massachusetts Senator John Kerry; and
 
Whereas, by organizing major protests in Boston, we have a rare opportunity to attract media attention and have an impact on this national debate.
 
Be it resolved that the Massachusetts Nurses Association join the growing list of endorsers for the National Week of Action for Jobs Not Cuts and supports building the largest possible protest on Thursday, November 17 to let John Kerry, a member of the Super Committee, know our opposition to these unprecedented attacks; and
 
Be it further resolved that the protest adopts the following basic demands:

• Hands off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid! No cuts to education and social services!
• We need jobs, not cuts! Fund a federal public works program to create millions of jobs!
• Make Big Business pay! For major tax hikes on the super-rich and corporations!
• End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Slash Pentagon spending!

Be it further resolved that the Massachusetts Nurses Association mobilize its members and supporters to the protest; and
 
Be it further resolved that the Massachusetts Nurses Association donate $200 to the Jobs Not Cuts Campaign.

Friday, September 30, 2011

To suggest that nurses who fight to provide safe care every minute of every day are using the death of one of our patients for our own gain is genuinely disturbing. One only has to view the video of the candlelight vigil held honoring Judith Ming to recognize palpable grief in all of our faces as we honored the life of a patient caught in the crosshairs of a system gone awry. She died from a medical error by a replacement nurse who was tossed into a chaotic situation with little preparation.

As nurses, we never take the decision to strike lightly and it's a measure of very last resort. Our employer, Sutter Health, decided to make us stand outside for five more days. They did not have to make this choice; Kaiser did not lock out its nurses.

Why did we strike for 24 hours? Because our ability to provide safe care is being seriously threatened by Sutter Health. In the case of a strike, this one being no different, we have a Patient Protection Task force ready to send in a nurse to care for a patient if needed - and in fact, nurses were sent in when they were needed during this strike.

The driving issues that left nurses no choice but to strike were Sutter's extraordinary proposals to eliminate essential provisions that allow us to effectively advocate for our patients; punishing us if our decisions to keep patients safe go against management; taking away our ability to call in more nurses if our patient load becomes unsafe; and doing away with sick pay, forcing us to come to work sick, compromising the health of our patients,

We have chosen to be nurses because we are caregivers, and it is our professional and legal responsibility to ensure that our patients have the safest quality care while in the hospital, care that permits them to return to their loved ones and live a healthy and full life once again.

It wasn't always like this. Hospitals used to be locally owned and managed. Decisions were based on care, not cost. Registered nurses are the last line of defense between our patients and corporate decisions that have no business in health care. In the last six years, Sutter has amassed $3.7 billion in profit, its CEO taking home more than $4 million in 2009.

The fact is that nurses unions make for safer care. The presence of a professional nurses union in a hospital was associated with a 6.8 percent reduction in deaths from heart attacks, according to a 2004 Cornell study of 344 California hospitals.

Christine McCargar, one of our colleagues who has been a nurse for more than 40 years, speaks for all nurses when she recently wrote: The California Nurses Association "has allowed us to bargain for patient safety. If you believe that corporate decisions are made based on what is best for the patient, you are naive. Unfortunately, what matters is the bottom line and coming in under budget. We are not enabled to succeed, but rather challenged to maintain safety.

"Our advocacy is based solely on the well-being of our patients. I check your medications for appropriateness, dosage, timeliness and contraindications. I assess and make recommendations, I intervene, I perform skin assessments, position you for comfort, provide pain medication, monitor you and the well-being of your baby. I will do all this at the sacrifice of my physical well-being, because you are a human life and I value you. I am what stands between you and potential disaster."

Genel Morgan is an RN at Mills-Peninsula Hospital and Rita LaBarge is an RN at Sutter Alta Bates Summit Medical Center and members of the California Nurses Association.

To view the video, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMtpCyCGoSg

I am afraid the registry* RN had little or no experience, had no resources or backup, and was in an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar equipment. The registry failed her and the patient.

The strike could have been averted if Sutter Exec's had come to negotiate in earnest. Sutter is trying to take advantage of fear about the economy, the political climate, and ignorance about health care operations.

CNA has allowed us to bargain for patient safety. If you believe that corporate decisions are made based on what is best for the patient, you are naive.

It may well be that we end up paying for part of our health benefits. What you don't know is that with each round of negotiations Sutter has presented more "takeaways", we have not gotten to the give and take, we are stuck in the take and take.

If you had any idea what takes place in the hospital you would be chilled. We are not enabled to succeed, but rather challenged to maintain safety. We are the only entity that provides direct care without being reimbursed based on the itemized care/procedures/diagnostics/or unit designation we provide.

Our advocacy is based solely on the well being of our patients. I have gone nose to nose with physicians, and administrators for my patients.

I check your medications for appropriateness, dosage, timeliness, and contraindications. I assess and make recommendations, I intervene, I check your skin, wipe your bottom, turn and position you for comfort, and provide pain medication.

I maintain your vital signs with medications, I monitor your ventilator. I will give you CPR, defib you with 200j biphasic, push epi, bicarb, calcium and save your life.

I will do all this at the sacrifice of my physical well being, because you are a human life and I value you.

You should value me. I am what stands between you and disaster. If you think I ask too much that's OK. I will still care for you, because I am a nurse.

*The registry RN she refers to was a "traveling" nurse which Sutter used during the one-day nurses strike, and for the five day lockout period during which Sutter refused to allow regularly scheduled nurses to return to work.

- Sacramento Bee, 9/15/2011

It was the most extraordinary citizen organizing feat in recent White House history. Over 1200 Americans from 50 states came to Washington and were arrested in front of the White House to demonstrate their opposition to a forthcoming Obama approval of the Keystone XL dirty oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada down to the Gulf Coast.

Anyone who has tried to mobilize people in open non-violent civil disobedience knows how hard it is to have that many people pay their way to Washington to join a select group of civic champions. The first round of arrestees – about 100 of them – were brought to a jail and kept on cement floors for 52 hours – presumably, said one guard, on orders from above to discourage those who were slated to follow this first wave in the two weeks ending September 3, 2011.

The Keystone XL pipeline project – owned by a consortium of oil companies — is a many faceted abomination. It will, if constructed, take its raw, tar sands carbon down through the agricultural heartland of the United States — through the Missouri and Niobrara Rivers, the great Ogallala aquifer, fragile natural habitats and Native American lands. Major breaks and accidents on pipelines — four of them with loss of human life— have occurred just in the past year from California to Pennsylvania, including a recent, major Exxon/Mobile pipeline rupture which resulted in many gallons of oil spilling into the Yellowstone River.

The Office of Pipeline Safety in the Department of Transportation has been a pitiful rubberstamp patsy for the pipeline industry for 40 years. There are larger objections – a huge contribution to greenhouse gases and further expansion of the destruction of northern Albertan terrain, forests and water - expected to cover an area the size of Florida.

Furthermore, as the Energy Department report on Keystone XL pointed out, decreasing demand for petroleum through advances in fuel efficiency is the major way to reduce reliance on imported oil with or without the pipeline. There is no assurance whatsoever that the refined tar sands oil in Gulf Coast refineries will even get to the motorists here. They can be exported more profitably to Europe and South America.

In ads on Washington, D.C.’s WTOP news station, the industry is claiming that the project will create more than 100,000 jobs. They cannot substantiate this figure. It is vastly exaggerated. TransCanada’s permit application for Keystone XL to the U.S. State Department estimated a “peak workforce of approximately 3,500 to 4,200 construction personnel" to build the pipeline.

The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) oppose the pipeline. In their August 2011 statement they said: “We need jobs, but not ones based on increasing our reliance on Tar Sands oil […] Many jobs could be created in energy conservation, upgrading the grid, maintaining and expanding public transportation — jobs that can help us reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and improve energy efficiency.”

The demonstrators before the White House, led by prominent environmentalist Bill McKibben and other stalwarts, focused on President Obama because he and he alone will make the decision either for or against building what they call "North America's biggest carbon bomb." He does not have to ask Congress.

Already the State Department, in their latest report, is moving to recommend approval. The demonstrators and their supporters, including leaders of the Native American Dene tribe in Canada and the Lakota nation in the U.S., filled much of the area in front of the White House and Lafayette Square. On September 2, I went down to express my support for their cause. Assistants to Mr. McKibben asked me to speak at the final rally at the square on Saturday. I agreed. At 6:25 p.m. we received an e-mail from Daniel Kessler withdrawing their invitation because of “how packed our schedule already is. We’d love to have Ralph there in any other capacity, including participating in the protest.”

The next day, many of the speakers went way over their allotted five to six minute time slots. Observers told me that there were to be no criticisms of Barack Obama. McKibben wore an Obama pin on the stage. Obama t-shirts were seen out in the crowd. McKibben did not want their efforts to be "marginalized" by criticizing the President, which they expected I would do. He said that “he would not do Obama the favor” of criticizing him.

To each one's own strategy. I do not believe McKibben's strategy is up to the brilliance of his tactics involving the mass arrests. (Which by the way received deplorably little mass media coverage).

Obama believes that those demonstrators and their followers around the country are his voters (they were in 2008) and that they have nowhere to go in 2012. So long as environmentalists do not find a way to disabuse him of this impression long before Election Day, they should get ready for an Obama approval of the Keystone XL monstrosity.

But the Minnesota nurse continues to work at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis where she cares for children.

Gray has no choice.  The wife and mother of three must work to maintain health insurance for her family.  Her husband -- a self-employed cabinet maker ­– has tried but can’t find a job with health benefits in the current economy.

“My biggest concern is how to keep the insurance up so that I can get my healthcare and I can provide for my family,” she says in this video. “I have insurance through my hospital but the chemo I get is so expensive. There’s no way I can afford to pay that if I didn’t have insurance.”

For the Gray family to go onto the open market to buy health insurance, it would be difficult and cost prohibitive. This is another reminder of why we need a better healthcare reform, such as expanded Medicare for all.

Like hundreds of others, Gray has shared her story with National Nurses United as part of its campaign for a new Main Street Contract for the American people.

Nurses are fighting to reclaim the American dream – quality education, housing, protection from hunger, a secure retirement, a fair taxation system, good-paying jobs and healthcare for all.

Researchers found earlier this year that as many as one in five people don’t take drugs a doctor has prescribed because they can’t pay for them, according to a study in the Academic Emergency Medicine journal.  

As nurses, we hear the economic horror stories from our patients. We see the chronic symptoms that could be prevented.

Gray understands this at a personal level.

One of her oral-chemotherapy medications costs $4,000 every three weeks. Nobody can afford that without insurance, she says.

 “It’s sad to think they could be getting care that could keep them alive for awhile . . . and they can’t do it,” Gray says.  

That’s why Gray and National Nurses United support the Main Street Contract. Everyone deserves healthcare and a chance to live.

While the battle continues, Gray grows tired.  

“I’m forcing myself to work,” she says. “I have to keep working until my husband can find a job that has benefits.”

Please share your own story of how our country’s financial downfall is hurting you and learn more about the Main Street contract.  

Go to www.mainstreetcontract.org for more details, or submit your own story there.

Why are nurses talking about a Wall Street tax to heal Main Street? Why did thousands of working nurses and supporters converge on scores of Congressional offices from Maine to California last week? How is it that nurses working long shifts at demanding jobs took time away from rest and family to appear before their representatives?
 
The simple reason is this: We are a nation that is worried sick. It’s of epidemic proportions, tied to an economy in freefall for many people and whose bottom is nowhere in sight. We nurses see the effects. We see them during every work shift, every day.  It is overwhelming—in the hospitals we staff, in our communities, in our own homes. Stress is bending our minds and breaking our bodies. With heart attacks in younger men, a range of gut disorders in people of all ages, severe anxiety—even among children. And more. All on the rise. The Wall Street economy is doing us in.

I have story after story. One fellow nurse told me of a man in his early 40’s arriving at the ER in Minneapolis suffering a heart attack and yet insisting on going back to work without delay.  He could not afford to lose pay from his temp job.  Nor could he – like growing numbers of Americans -- pay for the hospitalization. Patients cannot incur the costs of medicines, report nurses from around the country, with predictable consequences.

Among those who must forego their meds are heart transplant patients. Others are forced to put off critical scans or procedures, like colonoscopies for cancer patients, because of high co-pays. Mental health care is virtually non-existent for the millions of men, women and children living on the margins— so they must fend for themselves amidst the crushing consequences of severe emotional trauma.

New research from Janet Currie of Princeton and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State asserts a direct correlation between foreclosure rates and health declines in four states.  For every 100 foreclosures there was a 7.2% rise in ER visits and hospitalizations for hypertension, an 8.1 percent increase for diabetes and 12 percent more visits related to anxiety among 20-49 year olds.

We hear the corporate mantra—“we have no confidence” – and it makes us sick. “No confidence” in a government that cannot act because revenue is gone, used up to bailout financial institutions? The same institutions paying out billions in bonuses, again? Where tax rates are low and loopholes ubiquitous, to the point where some elites are even saying, “tax us”?  “No confidence” in consumers? When wages are flat and 25 million

Americans are looking for fulltime work? Impoverish tens of millions and wonder why they do not shop? “No confidence” in a society holding onto trillions of dollars, in an act of cash hoarding of historic proportions? Two trillion dollars sitting in corporate coffers, yet CEOs paralyzed due to their “lack of confidence” in America? The same CEOs being paid multi-million dollar salaries to figure out how to unravel their payrolls?  Companies with $1.5 trillion in profits overseas, unwilling to bring that money back to America without a special tax break? “No confidence,” say banks, as a way to explain galloping foreclosure rates? The same banks that showed no initiative in following through on promises to assist these same families? To use the bailout money we gave them – they are still holding $500 billion, according to economist Robert Pollin -- to keep people in their homes?

And about millions of lost homes? The Princeton/Georgia State study reports a 39 percent increase in ER admissions for suicide attempted post-foreclosure.

 “No confidence” in the richest country in the world? By far? Where S&P 500 companies averaged 13 percent return on their money last year?  It is enough to make you sick. And that is exactly what’s happening.

Their “lack of confidence” is a convenient way to explain the draining of the country’s working capital and its low tax revenue—and, with it, hope in a future.

The elites give no mercy in today’s America, as our fundamental state of health – even among our children – takes a backseat to Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for privileged lifestyle.  Who, we might ask, will be the first trillionaire? There’s a story pitch the national media would invite.

A fair and equitable tax system, where wealthy corporations and individuals start to pay their share, is the start. A Wall Street transaction tax – and other nations’ versions – now exist in 40 countries and at seven major stock exchanges. A tax was passed by the parliament of the European Union. Good jobs, retirements, schools, quality health care for all… let’s fund it. That’s why thousands of nurses hit the streets on September 1, andasked congressmen and senators in 61 locales: support a tax on Wall Street transactions – they can certainly afford it – and get the healing of Main Street underway.

Without it, this nation of sickness will get much sicker. Ask a nurse.

In a week that recorded no new jobs being created in the U.S. for the entire month of August, and many people struggling with what to do about it, nurses around the U.S. sent an entirely different message -- get out in the streets and demand change.

On Thursday, thousands of nurses, joined by other labor and community supporters, went to the doorsteps of 60 members of Congress in 21 states across the U.S.

Their common message -- America is hurting, we've had enough, and we have a solution. Tax Wall Street to fund the recovery to pay for jobs at living wages, quality schools, guaranteed healthcare for everyone, and freedom from hunger, housing, and retirement insecurity.

At every location, we called on the politicians to sign a pledge to support a tax on Wall Street financial speculation to fund the reforms Main Street communities so desperately need.

We had soup kitchens in San Francisco and dozens of other cities.

A town crier in Boston indicting the sins of Wall Street.

An 8-foot tall puppet of Michelle Bachmann who was grilled by her Minnesota nurse constituents.

A sit-in and speak out in front of the office of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Richmond, Va.

In Houston

and Las Vegas

and Chicago

and San Diego

And in towns like Pueblo, Co., Augusta, Ga., Orlando, Fl., and Merrillville, Ind., and Jackson, Mi. with an emphatic message.  

As National Nurses United Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro (third from right in the photo above) said at the soup kitchen protest in San Diego:

"I'm angry with what's going on in this country. We heard a lot about hope in the last election. Where is that hope? It's right here, right now.

"We have to say to Wall Street you have taken and you have taken and you have taken, and you have given nothing back. You have abandoned this country and you have abandoned our people. And we are asking every legislator in this country to sign a pledge to tax Wall Street to fund Main Street. There should be no hungry people in America, and no one without a job in America."

Learn more about our campaign here, and join us.

For nearly 14 million unemployed Americans, as well as nine million more who have had their paychecks and hours cut because of the economy, the idea of celebrating Labor Day this year is a cruel joke.

Labor Day was meant to honor American men and women who did the hard work and heavy lifting that built the world’s biggest, most productive and once prosperous economy.

Make no mistake, the contributions of American Labor – weekends, the eight-hour work day, child labor laws, a 40-hour week, workplace health and safety, all aspects of American life that we now take for granted – fully deserve the traditional Labor Day picnic and civic parade down main street.
 
But after the Category 5 economic hurricane triggered by Wall Street greed, and indifference to Main Street communities by Washington, this isn’t the year for parades and picnics. With double-digit unemployment, economic uncertainty, deep political unease, and widespread unhappiness, this is the year for Un-labor Day.

Consider that the average unemployed worker has been without a job 40 weeks, the longest span since that data was first collected in 1948. Remember that U.S.-based corporations the past decade cut 2.9 million U.S. jobs, while adding 2.4 million jobs in other countries.

Since the recession was declared “over” in June 2009, just one percent of economic growth has gone to wages and salaries, compared to 50 percent in the first 18 months after the 1991-1992 recession, and 25 percent for the same span after the 1981-82 recession.

One alarming consequence is the new Grand Canyon of income disparity, now the highest ever in the U.S., surpassing the Great Depression - of which inequality was a major cause. Inequality is now worse in the U.S. than in Bangladesh, much of sub-Sahara Africa and other noted poverty-stricken nations.

The crisis is not because of lack of wealth in the U.S. Corporate profits in 2010 rose at the fastest rate in 60 years. And the big banks and other institutions have spent $2.46 trillion in bailout funds. That same $2.46 trillion could have created 63.3 million jobs at a national median wage of $38,844 per year.

America’s nurses, who are appalled at the income disparities, at the broad declines in health and living conditions, poor nutrition and high medical bills, and the economic stress they see in their own families, have sounded the call for action.

Nurses propose a tax on Wall Street financial transactions to help pay for healing the nation and creating new jobs.  

On September 1, thousands of nurses, joined by others fed up with inaction in Washington, brought that message to the district offices of some 60 Congress members in 21 states, and set up soup kitchens, health clinics, speak outs and street theater to emphasize the point.

Because it was Wall Street’s cavalier and criminal shenanigans that devastated Main Street and crushed the hopes and dreams of millions of hard working, tax-paying Americans. All while the bailed out CEOs took home lavish bonuses, and 25 top hedge fund managers have made $22 billion.

A modest tax of just half a penny on every dollar of trading of stocks, derivatives, currencies, credit default swaps and other Wall Street transactions could raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year to fund the programs that are desperately needed to reduce the pain and suffering inflicted on so many families who feel abandoned in communities across this nation.

A similar tax, already in place in Great Britain and many of the fastest growing markets in Asia, may soon be also adopted by the 27 nations of the European Union.  

Our goal is a Main Street Contract for America with good jobs, accessible quality education and health care for everyone, and freedom from hunger and homelessness. For America’s nurses, it’s the most meaningful way to turn Un-Labor Day back to Labor Day.

RoseAnn DeMoro is national vice president of the AFL-CIO and executive director of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union and professional association of nurses.

We’ll be asking something very specific of our elected officials, and that is not about where or whether or not they take an August or Labor Day vacation.  We want them to pledge their support for those who damaged Main Street so badly to pay to repair it.  Main Street is taxed enough, let’s establish a Wall Street Transaction Tax — it could raise $350 billion to rebuild our country – an amount sufficient enough to make a real difference on Main Street, where the emergency is felt most directly.

The Wall Street Transaction Tax is a sales tax on the stocks, bonds, debt and other trades carried out by the financial industry. That’s the place to start. Imagine a country in which workers have jobs at living wages to reinvest in America, where there is equal access to quality public education and guaranteed healthcare, a secure retirement, good housing, protection from hunger and a safe environment. 

That’s the America our nurses not only imagine but, insist must be rebuilt.  

Large banks and Wall Street firms wrecked our economy. They wiped out pensions and portfolios. Because of their greed, they threw us into a recession, cost us millions of jobs, and squandered American productivity. Yet nobody has paid the price for this wrongdoing. No one has gone to jail. In fact, they remain some of the most profitable businesses in America, doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in executive bonuses. And they pay some of the lowest tax rates in the country.

The nurses say it’s not time to call anyone back to Washington, D.C., unless and until those elected officials have properly surveyed the damage they wrought on Main Street and have made the commitment to fix that damage.  Even from their various vacation venues, few of the nation’s lawmakers are more than a short distance away from one of the nurses’ September 1 Main Street events. 

Find an event near you, ask your elected officials to attend and insist that they pledge to be a part of healing Main Street, and then stay tuned as the nurses keep up the kind of pressure needed to hold those who pledge to keep their promises and those who do not to stand to account.  It’s time for a little reality check – and that won’t happen on Pennsylvania Avenue or on Capital Hill.   It will happen back home on our Main Streets of America.