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Nurses Say: Come Join Us on September 1 on Main Street, Don’t Return to DC
Main Street, USA – Nurses call their neighbors and their elected officials to come to Main Street on September 1, even as many of the elected officials continue chiding one another about returning to DC.
Main Street is where the damage has been done and is being felt most deeply; DC is where deals are cut to protect Wall Street with breath-taking regularity. This is not a time when political posturing for some distant election cycle by those largely insulated from the harsh financial realties they helped create ought to take precedence over the real-time, real-life needs of millions.
Lives depend on it; jobs depend on it; communities depend on it. 170,000 Registered Nurse members of National Nurses United throughout America have come together to re-build Main Street. We need you on our side. So, on Thursday, September 1, the nurses of National Nurses United will gather in more than 60 communities from Maine to Texas, and Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, Illinois, California and beyond to call on the nation’s elected officials to chose to protect and repair Main Street and stop cow-towing to Wall Street. Find an action on a Main Street near you and join in.
We’ll be asking something very specific of our elected officials, and that is not about where or whether or not they take an August or Labor Day vacation. We want them to pledge their support for those who damaged Main Street so badly to pay to repair it. Main Street is taxed enough, let’s establish a Wall Street Transaction Tax — it could raise $350 billion to rebuild our country – an amount sufficient enough to make a real difference on Main Street, where the emergency is felt most directly.
The Wall Street Transaction Tax is a sales tax on the stocks, bonds, debt and other trades carried out by the financial industry. That’s the place to start. Imagine a country in which workers have jobs at living wages to reinvest in America, where there is equal access to quality public education and guaranteed healthcare, a secure retirement, good housing, protection from hunger and a safe environment. That’s the America our nurses not only imagine but they insist must be rebuilt.
Join us on September 1st. Share the video, far and wide.
Large banks and Wall Street firms wrecked our economy. They wiped out pensions and portfolios. Because of their greed, they threw us into a recession, cost us millions of jobs, and squandered American productivity. Yet nobody has paid the price for this wrongdoing. No one has gone to jail. In fact, they remain some of the most profitable businesses in America, doling out hundreds of millions of dollars in executive bonuses. And they pay some of the lowest tax rates in the country.
The nurses say it’s not time to call anyone back to Washington, D.C., unless and until those elected officials have properly surveyed the damage they wrought on Main Street and have made the commitment to fix that damage. Even from their various vacation venues, few of the nation’s lawmakers are more than a short distance away from one of the nurses’ September 1 Main Street events.
Find an event near you, ask your elected officials to attend and insist that they pledge to be a part of healing Main Street, and then stay tuned as the nurses keep up the kind of pressure needed to hold those who pledge to keep their promises and those who do not to stand to account. It’s time for a little reality check – and that won’t happen on Pennsylvania Avenue or on Capital Hill. It will happen back home on our Main Streets of America.
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6 Comments so far
Show AllGood idea - I'll be there!
I would love to share this, not real computer literate and used to be able to email the articles to myself and then send to my contact lists of which are several nurses.
Common Dreams Does not Allow that anymore.
Try copying the article's address (in the very top line on your screen) using your mouse by left clicking on the address to highlight then right-clicking to select "copy." Then go to your own email account. Create a new email to send to your desired friends/contacts, then right click inside your message and select "paste." You should have just set up the link to this Common Dreams article so those to whom you send the message can just click and open the link to read the article.
There are also other ways, but my explanation would make it seem like I was writing a training manual and not doing it very well. Hope the above is at least clear enough to be useful.
Thanks for reading.
Well, I'll be out there that same day, calling on our leaders to protect and repair Elm Street too!
Seriously.
The trees died a century ago, the pot-holes have gotten terrible, and those poor kids had all that strange trouble with Nightmares a few year back.
Save Elm Street! ;)
Why do people always think they need to reinvent the wheel?
The guy wasting time reinventing the wheel typically gets run over by the guy who got one built. ;)
Why a "Wall Street Transaction Tax"?
Can't they see that such a tax would further ensnare the People in the tentacles of that Beast?
Why not just insist on bringing back the Keysian/New Deal policies of the past?
If you are constantly under attack, and you react by constantly changing where you stand, that is called "retreating".
Let's retake our original walls instead, then maybe build out from them.
T'would be far simpler and easier -and more likely to succeed- IMHO.
Matti---
How would a Wall Street Transaction Tax "further ensnare the People in the tentacles of that Beast?"? Promoting such a tax would certainly let us know where many politicians "really" stand when it comes to the concomitant Austerity for Main Street (or Elm Street!).
Meanwhile, I agree that we should be pursuing Keynesian economics instead of the incredibly Regressive Economic Infantilism imposed by the GOP Putsch in the House (and applauded by Sen. Minority head Mitch McConnell). But two questions come to me: How is such a Transaction tax NOT Keynesian (after all, are you not "taxed" to obtain a driver's license, register a car, pay for insurance, do any sort of mortgage transaction, etc.? Why you and not them?) And, even if you think it is not Keynesian, how would it be mutually exclusive in re any Keynesian solutions you and I might seek?
Finally, not to be provocative, but I get the distinct impression that many "liberal economists" have concluded that the problem---not only in the U.S. but globally---is now Beyond Keynesianism. The massive level of global debt in so many forms is utterly Post-Keynesian. Thus the Liberal Economists offer no serious solutions because they know that to do so they would have to abandon the Liberal Paradigm, while probably most of them make a living hoisted on that petard.
The "austerity" people offer a "simple solution": stop spending. Seems sensible enough, eh? They filled in the mystical vacuum left by the Liberal Economic Paradigm (I'm trying to take the high road here!).
Better to read serious economists like Henry CK Liu (ATimes.com), and Michael Hudson, for starters. If you have not already been reading economics this might be a hard slog, but worth it. Often, I read things I do not immediately understand while later it comes to me that something was important there.
You know, like I just have a hard time opposing a national nurses' union that wants to tax the bastards of Wall Street while giving the finger to Washington. I recently spent a couple of days in a hospital. Think of this country as a giant hospital (in many more ways than one)...an exercise in re-objectifying your place in life. I trust the nurses far more than the doctors or the billing administrators. Now, Rise Out of the Bed! You Can Do It! Rise Up! Pull the "drips" out of your elbow and get the hell out. The System loves an insured vegetable.
I may just become a one-man picketer on the public sidewalk at my local hospital. (I don't think they are union...)
One more thing...this transaction tax idea has strong support from other venues. In many writings it also called the Tobin Tax. And the UK has a transaction tax (although I would not be surprised to find that that tax is "tax-deductible" given how the System works, which of course returns to being "ensnared").
We seem to be living in a time of No Solutions. Washington is a three-legged stool trying to sit on half a leg. Leadership? That would require a vision and an ability to project it. (Also would require Rising from the half-legged Stool, which by the way, has a hole in the Middle!) Seen any Leaders lately?
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