Nurses Rally for Wall Street Tax, Get Thanks from Gov. Brown
More than 1,000 registered nurses attending the National Nurses United (NNU) convention rallied outside the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco yesterday. The action was part of NNU’s ongoing campaign for a tax on Wall Street’s financial speculation to provide revenue for Main Street reforms, including jobs at living wages, guaranteed health care for all and freedom from hunger, homelessness and retirement insecurity.
Martha Kuhl, RN, at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, told NNU blogger Jonathan Farrell, “This economic recession has had an impact upon the well-being of many people.”
Each day our nurses are witness to heart-wrenching accounts of people impacted by the results of the downturn in the economy….If the government can make the effort to bail out the banking industry, why not help bail out the failing health care system or other important outreach services?
Addressing the convention Wednesday, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) told the delegates:
The big problems we face are the direct result of the mortgage banks meltdown. It was not created by nurses, or teachers or firefighters or the police. It was created by the bankers and mortgage lenders…the [problem] is not too much regulation, but too little.
Queen Meg’s Crown Jewels and Other Items Up for Auction
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You can own a piece of royal history, or even better, give a little something from the Queen herself as a holiday gift. Slow down, we’re not talking about some stuffy old English monarchial memorabilia. We’re talking about the one and only U.S.-born Queen Meg.
Surely you remember Queen Meg, the California Nurses Association’s (CNA’s) satirical imperial parody of free-spending billionaire Meg Whitman and her failed bid to buy California’s governorship.
The good queen has graciously donated some of her most prized possessions for a Royal Holiday Auction to benefit the Nicky Diaz Legal Defense Fund. Diaz is Whitman’s former housekeeper who worked for Whitman for nine years. She says Whitman knew she was undocumented for several years before Whitman fired her shortly before she announced her candidacy in 2009.
Businessweek Profiles CNA/NNU’s DeMoro
In a major profile of Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU), Bloomberg Businessweek writes:
DeMoro is expert at dishing out political pain with a flourish, a talent that has endeared her to her 86,000 constituents in the California Nurses Association. Under DeMoro’s leadership, the union has recast itself from a special-interest trade group to a consumer and patient advocate that lobbies hard—and volubly—for universal health care and patients’ rights.
“Nurses are the last line of defense for patients,” says DeMoro from a seat in her cactus-filled office at the union’s Oakland headquarters. “This isn’t about just bread-and-butter issues for registered nurses, this is about living in a good and a just society.”
‘Off With Their Heads’ Says Queen Meg in Attack on California Nurses
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Meg Whitman, Republican candidate for California governor and billionaire former CEO of eBay has picked a fight with the California Nurses Association (CNA) that political observers think may backfire and energize nurses across the Golden State to work even harder to defeat Whitman in November. Meanwhile, the California Labor Federation launched a new online video and video game (left) that highlights Whitman’s job-slashing corporate history.
The Associated Press (AP) reports that Whitman, who spent $90 million of her $1 billion-plus fortune to win the Republican primary, dipped into her pocket to buy a list of all the state’s 370,000 registered nurses, complete with home addresses and is now bombarding them with anti-union propaganda. According to the AP:
Whitman hopes to drive a wedge between union leaders and their rank-and-file—a tactic only a multimillionaire candidate could afford to try, because of the expensive micro-targeting it requires.
