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.

Nurses confront Bank of America

 More than one hundred union nurses and other healthcare workers surrounded the Olympia branch of the Bank of America February 10, calling on the bank to give back its multi-million dollar tax break to help fund the state’s threatened Basic Health Plan.

Denied a meeting with bank officials, the delegation, members of SEIU Healthcare 1199NW, headed for the Capitol grounds to met with their legislators.

“Basic Health could be eliminated in the state budget, but we’re still allowing Wall Street banks to profit with millions in tax breaks,” said Vicki Neumeier, a registered nurse.  “We’re essentially giving revenue away, but we don’t know where our patients or families will go for health care.  It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not right.”