01.14.13
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The Two Americas

There are more billionaires than ever, while children and seniors go hungry and record numbers of families struggle in poverty. Nurses can help by passing the Robin Hood Tax.

RoseAnn DeMoro
By: RoseAnn DeMoro
Executive Director, National Nurses United

As 2012 draws to a close, one anniversary received far too little attention in the recently concluded political season.

This year marked the 50th anniversary of a groundbreaking book, The Other America, by Michael Harrington, a searing examination of rampant poverty in the richest nation on earth.

Historians have said that a widely reported review of Harrington’s work in the New Yorker magazine was brought to the attention of then-President John F. Kennedy, and ultimately helped influence the Great Society reforms later launched by his successor Lyndon Johnson.

But half a century later, we seem to be back to square one. When NNU launched our Nurses Campaign to Heal America (also known as our Main Street campaign), it was spurred in large part by the alarming spike in patients presenting in hospital emergency rooms and clinics across the country who were having to choose among paying medical bills, paying their rent or mortgage, or feeding their families.

It was not an aberration. By 2011, with the recent recession showing scant signs of abating, official poverty figures had soared to nearly 50 million Americans. Some in the political arena tend to pigeonhole poverty by race, but this calamity crosses all lines of gender, geography, age, and ethnicity. Last year, almost one in four children lived in a family that regularly has difficulty affording sufficient food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

On the other end of life, 8.3 million people over 60 in 2010 faced the threat of hunger, up 78 percent from a decade earlier (a statistic the policy makers certainly need to think long and hard over before making fiscal cliff cuts to seniors).

Hunger and malnutrition, as nurses will attest, leads to a broad array of health problems, ranging from reduced immunity to disease or even organ failure. For children, poor nutrition can severely stunt cognitive development and growth. For adults and seniors, the consequences can include more chronic illnesses and shorter life spans. More than 20 million Americans live in extreme poverty—with cash incomes as low as $10,000 a year for a family of four.

Is it any wonder that the United States has the third-highest poverty rate out of 30 leading industrial nations? As nationally syndicated broadcaster Tavis Smiley, who in September embarked on a Poverty Tour with Professor Cornell West, put it, “You have three classes of poor people: the perennially poor, folks who’ve been stuck in poverty; you have the near-poor, folks who are just a paycheck or two away, low-income; and the new poor, the former middle class. So many middle-class Americans of all races, all colors, and all creeds have fallen into poverty because of corporate greed and because of political indifference.”

And, of course, decades of economic and political policies that have resulted in a massive shift of national wealth from working people to the corporate boardrooms and the yacht owners. Today, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine, 200 billionaires have a net worth of $2.7 trillion, about the gross domestic product of France. In contrast, real wage growth for workers has stagnated for 30 years, median household income has steadily fallen since the Wall Street-produced economic crash of 2008, and much of the limited job growth has been in the lowestwage sectors, primarily food service and retail.

When Smiley and West launched their Poverty Tour, it was an effort to get the attention of the presidential candidates on eradicating poverty. But the issue sadly remained as invisible on the campaign trail as it was when Harrington shocked the nation in 1962. However, it is not a shock to nurses who see every day the faces of poverty and the suffering of families left behind even as corporate profits once again soar and the parties and good times are back on Wall Street.

With all the enormous wealth in our nation, we really can do something about poverty and the overall economic morass that continues to plague not just the unemployed, or those working two or three jobs flipping hamburgers in Main Street towns and cities from coast to coast. Nurses have a solution. It is the genesis of our campaign.

Everyone deserves a good job at living wages; guaranteed healthcare based on patient need, not on ability to pay; equal access to quality education; a clean and healthy environment. And despite the obsession of too many politicians in Washington and many state capitals with inflicting more austerity programs on already hard-hit communities, there is a fairly simple way to pay for it—the Robin Hood Tax.

Our campaign to tax Wall Street speculation, embodied in Rep. Keith Ellison’s HR 6411, could generate up to $350 billion every year, an amount that could save more than 1.7 million homes from foreclosure, or finance 9 million new jobs at current average wage levels. Or it could fund the food plans of 24 million families of four for a year or lift all 3.8 million female-headed households out of poverty for nearly a decade. The “Other America” is all of us, and it is up to all of us to end this disgrace.

I personally urge each and everyone one of you to get further engaged in our Nurses Campaign to Heal America.

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RELATED NEWS:

NNU Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro to speak on health and poverty televised panel in DC

 

01.12.13
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NNU Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro to speak on health and poverty televised panel in DC

Thursday, January 17, Newt Gingrich, CBC Chair Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), Michael Moore, Jeffrey Sachs, NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro, Cornel West and others invited to discuss a ‘Vision for a New America’  

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*WASHINGTON — Just days before the presidential inauguration and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, broadcasterTavis Smiley is bringing together a bipartisan dream team to discuss the creation of a national plan to cut poverty in half in 10 years and eradicate it in 25. With the call for a national White House Conference on the Eradication of Poverty in America, Smiley and the panelists ask for a laser-like focus on the lives of 50 million Americans living in poverty on the brink of despair.

NNU Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro
NNU Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro

Be sure to watch RoseAnn DeMoro, National Nurses United’s executive director, talk Thursday about how bedside nurses are witnessing the devastating harm the economy has on patients and their communities.

She will join other speakers in the nationally-televised conversation — “Vision for a New America: A Future Without Poverty” — hosted by Tavis Smiley, a talk show host, author and advocate.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE:

Tune in and Share: “Vision for a New America: A Future Without Poverty”
Thursday, January 17 at 6:30 p.m. ET.

After the LIVE broadcast on C-SPAN, the show will rebroadcast:

The participants, who include Dr. Cornel West, Marcia Fudge, educator Jonathan Kozol and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, will discuss their perspectives on poverty and share solutions to America’s declining condition.  

DeMoro will give details on the Robin Hood Tax, a sales tax on Wall Street speculative trading, that can raise billions to fund social programs for people in poverty and start healing communities in need. The tax is embodied in The Inclusive Prosperity Act, sponsored by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and now with 16 co-sponsors. To learn more about the Robin Hood Tax, go to www.robinhodtax.org

“Millions of American families are still hurting as a result of the financial collapse in 2008,” said DeMoro.  “Unlike the banks that were bailed out, and the 1% who continue to amass enormous wealth, vast numbers of Americans have had no recovery.  Our nurses share stories every day about demise in communities.  People are sick and dying because of this grossly unequal economy.”  

The broadcast will take place at George Washington University, Lisner Auditorium, 730 21st St. NW, Washington, D.C.  Panelists will sign, together on stage, an online petition calling for a White House Conference on U.S. Poverty. 

“America is teetering on cliffs and bumping against ceilings,” said Smiley. “This is no way to run a country. Together, we can devise a plan of attack to fight poverty in America. Ignoring this moral issue is an abomination.”

In addition to DeMoro, the panelists are Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives; Representative Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH), chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; John D. Graham, dean, Indiana University School of Public & Environmental Affairs and author of America’s Poor and the Great Recession; Jonathan Kozol, author of Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America; Mariana Chilton, director for the Center for Hunger-Free Communities and associate professor of Drexel University School of Public Health; Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University; Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary Professor and author.

Please also share these RELATED articles by RoseAnn DeMoro:

* To learn more about the Robin Hood Tax, go to www.robinhoodtax.org

Please join the conversation and share this information widely!

Thank you!