Trust me when I say that politics has become very personal this year; I’m a nurse. As nurses we ask our patients to “tell us where it hurts.” There are those who are too young and too medically fragile who don’t have the ability to utter a word; yet we see the result of an eroding social safety net etched on their faces and wreaking havoc on their health. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Did you ever forget to vote? Were you ever too tired after a long 12 hour shift to make it to the polling place? (And how do you vote when you work a 7am to 7pm shift and that’s only the time the polls are open?) Did a sick child keep you home, or a cranky kid make you too late to vote on the way to work?

On Tuesday, October 2, the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) -- under which hundreds of billions of tax dollars were handed over to financial institutions deemed “too big to fail”-- the Robin Hood Tax Campaign and its allies in labor, health, religious and consumer organizations, will visit Congressional field offices in seven states to seek pledges of support for the “Inclusive Prosperity Act,” H.R. 6411. Join us!

If Prop. 32 passes, the California Hospital Association, which already has enormous influence in Sacramento, along with its allies in California Chamber of Commerce, insurance industry, and other corporate interests will be able to take dead aim at RN staffing ratios, meal and rest breaks, limits on forced overtime, oversight on hospital and nursing home abuses, and other workplace and patient safety protections – with little ability for nurses to use our collective voice to challenge them.

CNA strongly supports Proposition 30 to generate critical resources for education, healthcare and public safety mainly through increased taxes on wealthy Californians.