Coming Up on Nurse Talk Radio
Why You Should Care About Health Care and Staffing Legislation sounds boring? Not so fast! AB 975 Charity Care? Check it out. Or maybe SB 631 Observation Study? You don’t want to end up in a hallway at the hospital for over 24 hours do you? Listen as we check in to see what the California Nurses Association has been doing lately to fight for nurses and their patients.
Breaking news and analysis of politics, the economy and activism.
The makers of We Are Wisconsin—the critically acclaimed documentary about the 2011 Wisconsin Uprising and its aftermath—are sponsoring screenings of the film Monday in communities across the country as part of a National Day of Recommitment to labor rights.
“The day is the second anniversary of the signing by Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin Act 10, which ended 60 years of progress for Wisconsin workers,” note the filmmakers. “The Walker assault led to battles all over America, challenging us all to stand up for working families, and to organize to put our country back on the right track.”
“Recommitment” is well-chosen word.
Despite the battering that unions have taken in recent years—not just in Wisconsin but nationally—a recommitment to labor rights is really a renewal of ideas and values that America once exported to the world.
There was a time, within the living memory of millions of Americans, when this country championed democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and the right to organize in the same breath.
When the United States occupied Japan after World War II, General Douglas MacArthur and his aides worked with Japanese citizens to write a Constitution that would assure Hideki Tojo’s militarized autocracy was replaced with democracy. Fully aware that workers would need to have a voice in the new Japan, they included language that explicitly recognized that “the right of workers to organize and to bargain and act collectively is guaranteed.”
When the United States occupied Germany after World War II, General Dwight David Eisenhower and his aides urged German citizens to write a Constitution that would assure that Adolf Hitler’s fascism was replaced with a democracy. Recognizing that workers would need to have a voice in the new Germany, they included a provision that explicitly declared: “The right to form associations to safeguard and improve working and economic conditions shall be guaranteed to every individual and to every occupation or profession. Agreements that restrict or seek to impair this right shall be null and void; measures directed to this end shall be unlawful.”
When former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the International Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that would in 1948 be adopted by the United Nations as a global covenant, Roosevelt and the drafters included a guarantee that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”
For generations, Americans accepted the basic premise that labor rights are human rights. When this country counseled other countries on how to forge civil and democratic societies, Americans recognized that the right to organize a trade union—and to have that trade union engage in collective bargaining as an equal partner with corporations and government agencies—must be protected.
Now, with those rights under assault, it is wise, indeed, to recommit to the American ideal that working people must have a right to organize and to make their voices heard in a free and open society. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said fifty years ago: “History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.”
History remembers, as should we. A recommitment to labor rights is a recommitment to ideals that enlarged America and make real the promise of democracy.
(As part of the National Day of Recommitment, We Are Wisconsin showings will be held across the United States. For more information on National Day of Recommitment events, go to: wearewisconsinthefilm.com/.)
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Coming Up on Nurse Talk Radio
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Listen and share the NNU segment:
Donna Smith’s Healthcare for All Segment
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By Pattie Lockard
Executive Producer
Nurse Talk Radio
This week one of our good friends returns to Nurse Talk to talk about her new project, Healthcare for All Colorado. None other than Donna Smith is with. Donna as most of our listeners know, worked for five years as National Nurses United Legislative Advocate based in D.C. She just returned to her home state of Colorado and now serves as the Executive Director of Healthcare for All Colorado.
Having (successfully) gone through two bouts of cancer, Donna has great advice on how to make your insurance company accountable–at least to some degree. In her new role she will do what she has done for many years, advocate and educate people about what can be done to access healthcare and to eventually change the current system to a nationwide universal healthcare system.
For more information about Healthcare for All Colorado and National Nurses United visit: http://healthcareforallcolorado.org and http://www.medicareforall.org
And—it’s time to get HIP about the issue of “low bone density.” That’s right it’s time to talk about your “bones.” And no one is more qualified than Dr. Kenneth C. Howayeck. He is an author, lecturer and osteoporosis educator.
Dr. Howayeck is an author of books on self-care, including Bone Health Made Easy.. Here’s a jaw dropper–”If you break a hip and you are over 50, 1/4 will die in the first 12 months primarily from that injury!” Not good! Only three in ten osteoporosis sufferers actually know they have this “silent killer” affliction. For great information from Dr. Howayeck check out http://bonehealthmadeeasy.webs.com.
And from our Scrubs Magazine Top Ten, Interesting Hospital Fashion
Moments: top of scrub pants rolled down complete with pink thong and muffin top hanging out…give me a break! Unroll the tops…it’s a hospital, not a nightclub!
Last but not least-we want to give a big shout out to all of you who are listening to Nurse Talk on Progressive Voices, on the Tune In app, live streaming from the San Francisco Bay Area’s KNEW 960 AM, the iHeart Radio app, iTunes, Nursetalksite.com and everywhere in between.
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Keystone’s XL Pipeline is not good for working people
OPINION
By: Deborah Burger, RN, NNU Co-President
As pressure from the fossil-fuel industry, conservative Canadian and US politicians, and some construction unions mounts on President Obama to greenlight the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline project, a growing coalition has a different message.
On February 17, tens of thousands rallied against the pipeline in cities across the US, including San Francisco — a testament to the climate movement, ranchers and farmers, First Nations leaders, most Canadian unions, some US unions (including my nurses’ organization), transport and domestic workers, and young people who are rightfully alarmed over the global impact of Keystone XL.
For nurses, who already see patients sickened by the adverse effects of pollution and infectious diseases linked to air pollutants and the spread of water and food borne pathogens associated with environmental contaminants, Keystone XL presents a clear and present danger.
First, extracting tar sands is more complex than conventional oil drilling, requiring vast amounts of water and chemicals. The discharge accumulates in highly toxic waste ponds and risks entering water sources that may end up in drinking water, as is already occurring.
Second, the corrosive liquefied bitumen form of crude the pipeline would carry is especially susceptible to leaks that can spill into farmland, water aquifers and rivers on route, threatening an array of adverse health outcomes.
Public health costs from fossil-fuel production in the US through contaminants in our air, rivers, lakes, oceans, and food supply are already pegged at more than $120 billion every year by the National Academy of Sciences. The Environmental Protection Agency warns that exposure to particulate matter emitted from fossil fuel plants is a cause of heart attacks, long term respiratory illness including asthma, cancer, developmental delays and reproductive problems. Global-warming inducted higher air temperatures can also increase bacteria-related food poisoning, such as salmonella, and animal-borne diseases like the West Nile virus.
That’s just the tip of the melting iceberg given the planet altering consequences of rising sea levels, intensified weather events including droughts, floods and super storms already in evidence, and mass dislocation of coastal populations and starvation that may well follow our failing to stem climate change.
Far more jobs would be created by converting to a green economy. As economist Robert Pollin put it in his book Back to Full Employment, every $1 million spent on renewable clean energy sources creates 16.8 jobs, compared to just 5.2 jobs created by the same spending on fossil-fuel production.
And, as one person acerbically commented on a recent New York Times article, there are no jobs on a dead planet.
Further, stumping for the pipeline puts labor in league with the many of the most anti-union, far right corporate interests in the U.S., such as the oil billionaire Koch Brothers and energy corporations, abetted by the politicians who carry their agenda.
The future for labor should not be scrambling for elusive crumbs thrown down by corporate partners, but advocating for the larger public interest, as unions practiced in the 1930s and 1940s, the period of labor’s greatest growth and the resulting emergence of a more egalitarian society.
Deborah Burger is a registered nurse and co-president of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest organization of nurses.
We’ve seen this picture before, and the U.S. is not about to get an Oscar.
Just last month, a study by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine found that the U.S. ranks last among 17 affluent countries in life expectancy (all the others have national healthcare systems, unlike our dysfunctional insurance model).
Now we’re losing ground in another arena – making the financial speculators pay their fair share for revenue needed for economic recovery.
The contrast was brought into sharp focus Monday in conflicting statements from Jack Lew, the Obama administration’s incoming Treasury Secretary, and European Union Tax Commissioner Algirdas Semeta.
In a Washington speech, Semeta described the rapid movement of 11 EU nations, including such giants as Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, to implement a financial transaction tax. The same day Bloomberg news was reporting a dismissive statement by Lew on an FTT for the U.S.that even went beyond public statements about an FTT from the outgoing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was well known as a champion of Wall Street.
The irony of Lew’s position could not be greater in a week in which Washington is frantic with the oncoming sequestration and the obvious need for new revenue sources to protect Main Street communities.
A major answer is staring us in the face – the Robin Hood tax.
The Inclusive Prosperity Act, authored by Rep. Keith Ellison, and expected to be reintroduced soon, would infuse up to $350 billion every year. The revenue would be used for such critical needs as jobs, healthcare, housing and fighting climate change and AIDS, by setting a small tax of just 50 cents on every $100 of stock trades and less on other financial instruments.
Virtually every other major market has already figured this out, as Semeta pointed out.
“The financial sector is under taxed compared to other sectors,” said Semeta. “We (the EU) are ready to lead the way.” Other EU countries signing on include Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Greece, Estonia, Slovenia, and Slovakia, joining with the fastest growing markets in Asia and other major world exchanges, some 40 nations in all.
“The tax also has supporters here which I want to encourage,” said Semeta. That would be the growing Robin Hood movement, which has held multiple actions promoting the tax, most recently during Lew’s confirmation hearing earlier this month.
This is not a hard sell for nurses who daily see the worsening health consequences of persistent economic crisis facing many families and know our communities need the help a tax on Wall Street can provide.
So why do we have a Treasury nominee who is showing more loyalty to Wall Street than to Main Street?
In a statement by Lew to written questions by Senator Orrin Hatch, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Lew even made the outlandish objection that an FTT “would be vulnerable to evasion.” That hasn’t spurred our government to crack down on the legion of corporate tax evaders, including some of the world’s biggest banks and oil companies who regularly avoid paying taxes and even get rebates.
But, in fact, an FTT would be simpler to enforce since trading is highly automated and more than 70 percent of trades go through computerized central clearing houses, making it easy to monitor and extremely difficult to evade.
An FTT would also serve to stabilize markets by limiting high-speed, high-volume trades and by constraining price spikes in essentials, like food and gas, tied to speculative trading. In his Washington speech, Semeta noted that high-frequency trading has led to transactions that “do not have any social value,” adding the tax would “reorient the financial sector” around the real economy.
Deborah Burger is a registered nurse and a co-president of National Nurses United
Associate Editor John Nichols has been with The Capital Times since 1993 and has become one of Wisconsin’s best-known progressive voices. He is the author of seven books on politics and the media and he also writes about electoral politics and public policy for The Nation magazine.
Sequestration threatens to cut vital public services and undermines the economy in order to achieve budget priorities that benefit Wall Street while damaging Main Street.
And, of course, sequestration asks nothing of Wall Street.
That’s austerity, just as it has been practiced in Europe.
That’s austerity, just as it has failed in Europe.
Worse yet, the Simpson-Bowles “Fix the Debt” campaign seeks more austerity. They’re already trying to exploit the sequester mess that will play out this week to achieve the ultimate goals of Wall Street: the acceptance of the “principle” that the only way to balance budgets is by undermining Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – with schemes like “chained CPI” cuts in cost-of-living increases for seniors, and an upping of the eligibility age for programs to qualify for earned benefits.
This is a critical moment for the proponents of austerity. They’ve lost at the polls, but they want to win in a moment of supposed crisis: using a new variation on the “disaster capitalism” strategies outlined in Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.”
But savvy unions are pushing back, with a message challenging the austerity lie that says there is no alternative to the painful cuts that could cause a new recession. Their message is precisely right: If the CEOs who claim to be so concerned about debts and deficits really want to do something to balance the books, they can start by paying their fair share of taxes.
“Wall Street CEOs, part of the misnamed ‘Fix the Debt’ group, are pushing for cuts in lifeline benefits like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to reduce our national debt. But a big part of our debt comes from their refusal to pay their fair share in taxes—and they want to keep the loopholes in place so they can keep right on doing it,” argue members of National Nurses United, the union that has taken the lead in promoting implementation of a “Robin Hood tax” that, by collecting a small fee on high-stakes financial transactions, could steer hundreds of billions into the U.S. Treasury.
NNU members are taking their message to the streets in cities such as Detroit, where the Michigan Nurses Association has organized protests outside banks, arguing: “We can save money — and protect critical social insurance programs — by taking … common-sense steps to close loopholes that cost our country, threaten the middle class and enrich the already wealthy.”
This is smart economics that bets on growth rather than the fantasy that America can cut its way to prosperity. And it ought to get an equal hearing in the debate over how to address debt and deficit issues.
NNU and other unions have “found the money” where too many politicians and pundits refuse to look: on Wall Street. They propose a fair-tax strategy that raises money for the U.S. Treasury while encouraging investment in the United States. To wit:
• Eliminate the tax benefit corporations receive from sending jobs overseas ($583 billion).
• Close other corporate tax loopholes so Wall Street starts paying its fair share of taxes (hundreds of billions of dollars over 10 years).
• Tax the income of Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers at the same rate as wage income ($21 billion).
• Collect a surtax of at least 5.6 percent on income greater than $1 million ($453 billion over 10 years) so fewer millionaires can avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
• Implement a “Buffett rule” to ensure millionaires pay an effective tax rate of at least 30 percent on all their income ($47 billion).
• Limit the extra benefit of tax deductions for the richest 2 percent of Americans ($293 billion).
• Collect that small “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street trading of foreign currencies, derivatives, bonds and stocks to discourage harmful speculation (raising more than $350 billion).
There are members of Congress who have picked up on key elements of the NNU plan. Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-chair Keith Ellison, D-Minn., endorsed a version of the Robin Hood tax and joined other progressives — including Michigan Congressman John Conyers, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky and Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva — in advancing a “Balancing Act” proposal that rejects the austerity agenda in favor of new revenue and growth.
Ellison and his co-sponsors are right to recognize that there are alternatives that can fix the debt and renew the U.S. economy. Those alternatives aren’t being proposed by the billionaire-funded “Fix the Debt” campaign. They’re being proposed by nurses in Detroit and cities across the country, as they seek to “heal the United States” rather than to cut it apart with austerity.
John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com
Noticeably absent from President Obama’s “fix-it-first” program for rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, highlighted in his State of the Union speech, is, so far, the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline project. Let’s keep it that way.
There’s heavy pressure from the fossil fuel industry, the politicians they influence, conservative Canadian interests, and some construction unions in the U.S. for the pipeline. But it’s not just the President’s decision. It’s up to all of us to put the pipeline in mothballs and leave the heavy tar sands crude oil in the ground.
National Nurses United, the largest U.S. organization of nurses, has joined with a growing climate movement, many ranchers and farmers, First Nations leaders, most Canadian unions, several other U.S. unions such as transport and domestic workers unions, and young people rightfully alarmed over the ecological impact to oppose Keystone XL.
Nurses already see patients sickened by the adverse effects of pollution and infectious diseases with a worrisome rise in asthma, respiratory and heart ailments, and premature death linked to air pollutants and the spread of water and food borne pathogens associated with environmental contaminants.
Now add in Keystone XL. First, extracting tar sands is more complex than conventional oil drilling, requiring vast amounts of water and chemicals. The discharge accumulates in highly toxic waste ponds and risks entering water sources that may end up in drinking water, problems already occurring.
Second, the corrosive liquefied bitumen form of crude the pipeline would carry is especially susceptible to leaks that can spill into farmland, water aquifers and rivers on route. Following the rupture of a pipeline near Marshall, Mi in 2010 state officials found more than half the residents in communities along the Kalamazoo River reported respiratory ailments and other symptoms.
Then there’s the broader consequences of a project NASA scientist James Hansen calls “the biggest carbon bomb on the planet” and climate change activist Bill McKibben says would nearly double the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide if all the oil in those tar sands is burned.
Carbon emissions are a major factor in intensifying climate change. Higher air temperatures, for example, can increase bacteria-related food poisoning, such as salmonella, and animal-borne diseases like the West Nile virus.
And that’s just the proverbial tip of the melting iceberg considering the devastation that will come with rising sea levels, intensified “weather events” like droughts, fires, floods and storms, mass dislocation of coastal populations and mass starvation that may well be the legacy of our failure to address climate change.
Public health costs from fossil fuel production in the U.S. through contaminants in our air, rivers, lakes, oceans, and food supply today are pegged at more than $120 billion every year by the National Academy of Sciences. The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that exposure to particulate matter emitted from fossil fuel plants is a cause of heart attacks, breathing difficulty, and long term respiratory illness including asthma, and reproductive, developmental, and cancer outcomes.
Some unions, desperate for needed jobs in a persistent recession that continues to plague American families, are lobbying for Keystone XL. But it’s like harvesting for fools gold.
The actual number of jobs that will be created is far less than has been claimed by the industry and its allies, and the U.S. State Department has now conceded that once the project is built, the number of people needed to operate and maintain the pipeline may be as few as 20.
As fossil fuel production has become more capital intensive, employment in the sector has fallen, according to a 2012 report by the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. In the U.S., for example, coal production has increased by one-third since the 1980s, but employment has fallen by 50 percent.
Far more jobs would be created by converting to a green economy, notes economist Robert Pollin in his book “Back to Full Employment.” Every $1 million spent on renewable clean energy sources, he calculates, creates 16.8 jobs, compared to just 5.2 jobs created by the same spending on fossil fuel production.
And union members families too are exposed to the health risks of the tar sands production and transport, as well as the devastating effects of climate change.
Finally, stumping for the Pipeline puts labor in league with the most anti-union, socially and politically regressive corporate interests in the U.S., such as the oil billionaire Koch Brothers, the American Petroleum Institute, and other energy corporations generally, abetted by the rightwing politicians who carry their agenda.
The future for labor should not be scrambling for elusive crumbs thrown down by corporate partners, but advocating for the larger public interest, the reputation labor deservedly earned in the 1930s and 1940s, the period of labor’s greatest growth and the resulting emergence of a more egalitarian society. Today labor should be on that path again, uniting with the very coalition of those opposing the Pipeline and working to rein in the frightening consequences of climate change the Pipeline would hasten.
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Advocates for American communities still reeling from the 2008 financial collapse are calling upon the Senate Finance Committee this week to press Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew for commitments to hold Wall Street accountable.. One way to do that is to get his pledge of support for the Inclusive Prosperity Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), which embodies the Robin Hood Tax —a small sales tax on Wall Street speculative activity that would raise up to $350 billion a year and start to turn around our hurting communities.
Lew, who is White House Chief of Staff, worked on Wall Street during the period of the collapse as an executive at Citigroup. The U.S. government guaranteed $300 billion in bad Citibank assets, invoking “too-big-to-fail.” For that amount of money, reported Columbia Journalism Review, “the government could have owned Citigroup outright.” Later, the government loaned Citigroup $200 billion at near zero interest, which was lent back to the government at 3.7 percent interest, “effectively handing Citigroup $7.4 billion a year for nothing,” noted the Review. “Citigroup has paid no federal income taxes for the last four years after receiving a total of $2.5 trillion in financial assistance from the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders last week.
Other Wall Street institutions have also done very well since the collapse. Just last week there were new revelations about Wall Street’s mortgage scams leading to the 2008 collapse. According to court documents and as reported in the New York Times, mega-bank JPMorgan Chase knew of “defective” loans, “altered” them and then “whitewashed” reviews. “Such investments eventually collapsed, spreading losses across the financial system,” report The Times. JPMorgan Chase profited from the scheme and continues to do so: the bank’s 2012 profit was its highest on record.
Down the street at Goldman Sachs, the wheels of financial commerce keep churning. The investment bank paid a multi-million fine for its role in the mortgage sleight of hand, but that was after having received billions in government assistance. Last year Goldman’s profit was $5.6 billion, and it “handed CEO Lloyd Blankfein and his top lieutenants a total of $65 million in restricted stock…,” reported Bill Moyers. Goldman profit totaled $26 billion in the last three years.
All told, more than $700 billion in taxpayer money went to bail out banks. But that’s the least of it. According to an audit carried out by the Federal Reserve, $26 trillion additional sums were loaned, granted or guaranteed by the U.S. government, bringing the total bailout to close to an astronomic $27 trillion.
Jack Lew is well aware of these events. To serve this country well and honestly as Treasury Secretary, he must acknowledge the wholesale transfer of trillions of dollars to Wall Street and get behind the Robin Hood Tax, a way to start to provide a real recovery to the many communities still hurting.
Signs of collapse are everywhere. Nearly one in four children in the U.S. suffered from food insecurity sometime during the last year. Official poverty is approaching 50 million Americans. More than 22 million adult Americans do not have full-time jobs. A three-year decline in longevity for older, pre-retirement Americans was reported this month as a result of unemployment, poverty and lack of access to healthcare.
The goal of the Robin Hood Tax is to stop these declines and to build a real economy. The Robin Hood tax supports the creation of jobs at living wages, retirement for all with dignity, quality education and healthcare, attention to the environment and rebuilding of infrastructure. The tax would also be directed to international commitments in research and treatment of HIV/AIDS and for climate control.
Let them know: Jack Lew, and the Senate Finance Committee before whom he appears on Wednesday, need to support the Robin Hood Tax and put that revenue to use to heal Main Street.
by National Nurses Movement
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They lined the hallways, crowded the stairwells and eventually packed the Hearing Room of the District of Columbia Council Monday. Room 412 may never have seen such a spirited gathering – 200 RNs – and some additional supporters, with a press section full up. Quality healthcare reaches into all our lives.
The way to get there for Washington DC patients, explained Rajini Raj, RN, is to pass and implement the Patient Protection Act, a new measure introduced by DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson with the support of 10 of 13 DC Council members.
The bill is already endorsed by National Nurses United Catholics United, DC Jobs with Justice, the Government Accountability Project, Housing Works, the Washington Teachers’ Union and many others. The outpouring of support for this bill is pervasive and powerful.
Rajini Raj, RN calls for nurse-to-patient ratios at DC press conference
“We’re here today to talk about what is nothing less than a patient care crisis in DC’s hospitals,” said Raj, a cardiac unit nurse at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, “and about a badly needed legislative solution.”
The proposed law benefits all patients in the District with mandatory minimum nurse-to-patient ratios by hospital unit, whistle-blower protections and an end to mandatory overtime. Nurses are burned out and that puts patient care in jeopardy. “This is a problem at every single hospital in the city,” said Raj.
DC nurses pack auditorium Monday to show support for Patient Protection Act
A survey of the DCNA nurses recently carried out showed that 57 percent of nurses say staffing is always or often inadequate; 64 percent say they have less time to care for their patients; and 60 percent say changes in their workload have led to worse outcomes for patients.
The DC legislation is modeled after the California ratio law pioneered by the California Nurses Association and underpinned by multiple nationally-recognized scientific studies. For example, a University of Pennsylvania 2010 study comparing California’s surgical staffing to that in Pennsylvania and New Jersey found that if those two states matched California’s ratios, New Jersey hospitals would have 14 percent fewer patient deaths, Pennsylvania 11 percent fewer.
Bonnie Linen-Carroll, RN, an OR nurse at Washington Hospital Center, emphasized, “I have dedicated my life to providing nursing care to people who are at their most vulnerable,” she said. Linen-Carroll set her sites on intransigent management. “[T]he hospital corporations refuse to ensure that there are enough registered nurses working at the bedside.”
DC RNs celebrate introduction of bill outside John A. Wilson building in Washington
At several intervals in the one-hour presentation, calls for “patient care above profit” were loud and clear.
Others at the press conference included Margaret Shanks, RN and president of the District of Columbia Nurses Association/NNU, Jos Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington Council (AFL-CIO), Rev. Dr. Carolyn Boyd-Clark, Plymouth Congregation United Church of Christ, Rabbi Elizabeth Richman, Jews United for Justice and Hedy Dumpel, RN, JD, and National Director of Nursing Practice and Advocacy for NNU.
Ratios in California, said Dumpel, led to greater patient safety. She added, “I would like to see the Hospital Association produce studies to back up their (opposition) claims!”
Mendelson,compared the legislation to the fight for an eight-hour day. He vowed to give the bill a high priority. And his colleague, Yvette Alexander, chairwoman, Health Committee, District of Columbia, concluded her remarks this way, looking out the hundreds of nurses in red smocks and tee-shirts: “We appreciate you, we admire you, we respect what you do.”
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Coming Up on Nurse Talk Radio
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Listen and share the NNU segment:
Ken Zinn on the Robin Hood Tax
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By Pattie Lockard
Executive Producer
Nurse Talk Radio
Well some of you may be old enough to remember Ernestine Tomlin, the blunt Ma Bell phone receptionist. Now, we find out she’s not just a pretty face–she is an advocate for Universal Health Care! “One ring-dingy, two ringy dingy’s…hello…” and she’s off to the races.
This week we have two very honorable guests to share with you. We promised them we would not tarnish their stellar reputations so they agreed. First, Ken Zinn the D.C. based Political Director for National Nurses United then retired army nurse captain, Vietnam war veteran and founder of the Women’s Vietnam Memorial, Diane Carlson Evans.
Ken talks with us about the recent announcement from the European Nations that 11 countries have signed on to a “financial transaction”tax, aka the Robin Hood Tax. The tax will raise billions of dollars by taxing financial transactions .50 per $100. Nurses in the U.S. have been on the leading edge of this concept and are making some headway here at home. Keep an open mind. If you listen to the simple details you might agree this is a very fair and doable measure.
AND…Diane Carlson Evans who served as an army nurse in Vietnam is with us to talk about the recent announcement by the pentagon that women can now serve in combat roles in the military. Diane shares her story and tells us that women have been serving in combat since World War 2, mostly as nurses. BUT because it was not “official” combat the women were not given weapons though were oftentimes still caught in the front lines of battle. This is an amazing story about the mostly unrecognized heroines of U.S. Wars.
Shayne and Casey compare social lives. Hmm—how does that go? Tune in and see for yourself.
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