Nurses blitz 61 Congress offices

By Rap Lewis

Aiming squarely at Wall Street greed, an estimated ten thousand nurses and their labor and community allies organized simultaneous demonstrations at 61 Congressional offices in 21 states on September 1.

At each event, they called on senators and representatives to pledge to “support a Wall Street transaction tax that will raise sufficient revenue to make Wall Street pay fos the devastation it has caused on Main Street.”

On the initiative of the 170,000-member National Nurses United (NNU), the demonstrators organized street theater, community speakouts, soup kitchens and old-fashioned picketlines at Congress members’ offices in Boston, San Francisco and Chicago; Corpus Christi, Texa; Marquette, Michigan; Dayton, Ohio, and many other cities.

“America’s nurses every day see broad declines in health and living standards that are a direct result of patients and families struggling with lack of jobs, un-payable medical bills, hunger and homelessness,“ said NNU Co-President Karen Higgins, RN, at a picketline outside the Richmond, Virginia, office of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Wall Street trade in stocks, derivatives, currencies, credit default swaps, and futures/

Because of the great number of Wall Street transactions, even a modest tax on each would generate hundreds of billions of dollars a year to address the social damage for which Wall Street bears the responsibility, the nurses union says.