We have asked a lot of our online community over the last 10 months. You have been there with us, and for us, every step of the way.

You helped us get the campaign started – donating 20 hours of volunteer time or $20 to the campaign through our 20/20 program.

You helped us put together coffees in every corner of the city so we could meet your friends and neighbors.

You packed the house at our campaign kick-off event in May.

You gathered so many signatures that we were the only campaign to file more than 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot.

You helped us earn the support of the Sierra Club, teachers, the CA Nurses, the SF Labor Council and over 46 other community organizations representing hundreds of thousands of our friends and neighbors.

Over 2,000 of you have donated to our cause.

We are right on the verge of winning this race and creating an independent City Hall for the next four years. We need your help now more than ever.

We have 3 days to go until the campaign fundraising deadline at midnight on Saturday. Our goal is 100 online donations by midnight on Saturday. Will you help us win this race by making a contribution before the deadline?

In the past two weeks, we released our 20-point plans for improving our public schools and continuing San Francisco’s environmental leadership. We have released more public plans with more detail than any other campaign.

We have received the endorsement of the teachers and the San Francisco Labor Council. Our volunteers just finished door knocking their 300th precinct!

You have helped build this campaign from the start.

We have seven weeks to go to change City Hall and take back our city. This is our time.

We have 3 days to go until the campaign fundraising deadline at midnight on Saturday. Our goal is 100 online donations by midnight on Saturday. Will you help us win this race by making a contribution before the deadline?

Thank you for everything that you have done.

Sincerely,

Leland Yee

PS – We are on the verge of winning this campaign and taking back City Hall from the inside power brokers. Please help put us over the top with a donation.

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 realities 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, insist must be rebuilt.

   Join us on September 1st. Find an event near you.

   Watch and share our Sept. 1 promo video

   Sign our petition to Congress on Change.org

   On Twitter? Sign our Twitter petition here

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.

Just a few minutes ago, the California Nurses Association (CNA) endorsed my campaign for Mayor of San Francisco!

The endorsement from CNA, which has over 5,000 members in San Francisco, follows major endorsements in the last few weeks from the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)and Communication Workers of America Local 9410.

I am deeply honored to have their support.

Will you help us build on the momentum by joining our 20/20 advisory group today and donation $20 or volunteering 20 hours of your time to the campaign?  Donate.  Volunteer.

I will continue to work to ensure San Franciscan has affordable health care.  Our city has led the nation with important health reforms.  As insurance companies across California continue to raise rates and limit care – it’s essential that we do more, especially for our children and families.

To make these policy goals a reality, we need your support.

I’m inviting you to join our 20/20 advisory group.  Here’s how it works:

We are asking supporters to volunteer 20 hours of their time or donate $20 to help build a clear vision for San Francisco’s future.  Donate. Volunteer.

You’ll be invited to a small coffee conversation with me to discuss issues we all face as San Franciscans.  How do we improve our schools?  Make it easier for people to raise a family in the city.  What are the best ways to grow our economy?  How do we improve Muni?

Will you help us build on the momentum of the last few weeks and join our 20/20 advisory group?  Donate. Volunteer.

Thanks for your time and support.  I hope to see you on the campaign train for a cup of coffee!

Sincerely,

Leland Yee

Below David Welch, an RN from Chico California, gives his first-person account of traveling to Phoenix for the historic duty of founding the nation’s first union of, by, and for RNs.

You can read a good Reuters overview here and see the release here.

This is obviously a great day for labor, as we have a progressive/rapidly-growing/important new union in a key industry and social issue.  Also a great day for California nurses who will be able to take their efforts national…

On to David…

I’m writing from Phoenix Arizona where I just spent the morning with hundreds of nurses from around the country  finalizing the creation of the new nurses union that will transform health care in America: National Nurses United.  Nurses and leaders from The California Nurses Assn./National Nurses Organizing Committee, the United American Nurses and the Massachusetts Nurses Assn are meeting to create a new union that will stretch from coast to coast and unite 150,000 nurses into a powerful force for our profession and our patients.

At the opening reception last night the excitement was palpable as nurses from many states shared their happiness at the step we were about to take.  Here are just a few quotes:

From Jean Ross of the UAN and now co-president of the new NNU:

This is where we need to be, together as one, moving across the country.  some of us have been waiting our whole careers for this

From Karen Higgins of the Massachusetts Nurses Associaton and another new co-president:

This is a dream come true for all of us.  I believe staff nurses are the voice for patients and nurses across this country.

From Deborah Burger of CNA/NNOC and the third co-president:

We have got our work cut out for us when this convention is over, to make sure we organize evry single direct care RN in this country.  RNs and our patients deserve to have a national nurses movement that can advocate for them.  

We still have a long way to go before we can bring all nurses into a single organization and a single political force, but today we took the first giant step in that direction.  Today we brought 150,000 nurses under one organizational umbrella with a single goal and philosophy: National Nurses United.

The business meeting this morning became more of a festival as the delegates from across the country voted unanimously to establish our constitution, confirm our officers and declare the existence of our new organization.  We had the thrilling experience of hearing from one of the greatest speakers in the American Labor movement: Stewart Acuff of the AFL/CIO.  Stewart’s speaking style comes out of the great tradition of southern church oratory and he outdid himself today.  He had that room full of nurses on our feet over and over, chanting, roaring approval and often with tears in our eyes.  He exhorted us to set our sights high – not only to organizing nurses for collective bargaining, but to pass the Employee Free Choice Act:

The greatest economic stimulus would to be restore to the working men and women of America the right to bargain collectively for their fair share of the fruits of their labor

And to continue to work for real health care reform:

so that access to quality health care is a human right, not an investment opportunity for the rich

After Stewart, our neighbors to the north, in the person of Linda Silas, president of the Canadian Federation of Nurses, also came to show their support and offer their help.  Linda is a great speaker in any normal company, but had the unenviable task of following Stewart.  She rose to the occasion and left us on our feet and dancing.

And tonight, we’ll finish the night with a great party.  Tomorrow, setting the tone for the new organization, we will be demonstrating outside the Arizona Hospital Association.  We’re serving notice to our employers that we are here with new force, new strength, new energy and that we will be spreading out across America in the weeks and months to come, organizing thousands of nurses with the very clear goal of transforming healthcare in America.

We nurses know as well as anyone that whatever is passed in the next few weeks in Washington is not going to be the final answer to America’s healthcare crisis.  At best, it will make some improvements and be a step on the road.  The overriding goal of our new organization is to reach the day when every patient has equal access to quality care, every nurse can advocate for their patients’ needs without fear and American health care is controlled by care givers, not bean counters.

( – promoted by Brian Leubitz)

Does passage of a bill that funnels millions of additional Americans into the private insurance system, and the decision of House leaders to shut down debate on one single payer amendment and scuttle another, mean the end of the years of efforts by single payer activists to win the most comprehensive reform of all?

Does it mean the end of SB 810, even once Governor Schwarzenegger has wandered off the stage?

For the nation’s nurses and the many grassroots activists, the answer is clearly no.  And we’ve got work to do.

In discussions and organizing, now occurring coast to coast, including a strategy conference this weekend in St. Louis hosted by Healthcare-NOW, many are charting a new course that turns next to the U.S. Senate, to the Senate-House Conference Committee, and then to state capitols from Sacramento to Harrisburg where vibrant single payer movements and campaigns continue to grow.

Most single payer advocates acknowledge some important reforms in the House bill, especially the expansion of Medicaid to millions of low income adults, increased regulation of the insurance industry, expanded public health funding for community programs for low income families, and a more progressive tax plan than the onerous tax on middle income health benefits proposed in the Senate.

But those who dismiss the weaknesses, coupled with the overhyped rhetoric comparing the bill to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or passage of Social Security and Medicare, should be wary of the backlash when millions of Americans continue to face health insecurity and potential bankruptcy as their healthcare costs rise largely unabated and continue to experience denials of medical treatment insurance companies don’t want to pay for.  

As California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro has written

Social Security and Medicare were both federal programs guaranteeing respectively pensions and health care for our nation’s seniors, paid for and administered by the federal government with public oversight and public accountability

By contrast, the main provision of the House bill, and its Senate counterpart, is to expand health care coverage by requiring everyone to “have insurance” — mostly buying private insurance (since the public option is open to so few). Ultimately whether some want to admit it or not, a massive bailout worth tens of billions of dollars to the insurance industry.

Further, while Social Security and Medicare were both significant expansions of public protection, the House bill actually reduces public protection for a substantial segment of the population, women, with its unconscionable rollback of reproductive rights in the anti-abortion amendment.

To that end, tempering some of the triumphalism would be advisable. Equally unfathomable is the threat by some liberal groups to target single payer proponents Dennis Kucinich and Eric Massa who voted against the anti-choice amendment as well as the full bill. (Massa, in particular, was elected with active support from the single payer community and took a principled stand in a swing district.)

Those who start down this road would do well to remember the nurses, physicians, and thousands of single payer grassroots activists who have carried the flame of genuine healthcare reform for years, and will certainly continue to make their voices heard, especially as employers continue to shift skyrocketing healthcare costs to workers and out-of-pocket costs eat up, by some accounts, 15 percent to 19 percent of family incomes.  

One of those suggesting that work must continue, even prior to the vote, was House Whip James Clyburn who told the Associated Press November 5:  

“I didn’t want anyone to think that if you don’t get everything you want in this health care bill right now, that’s the end of the game. What we need to do is lay a foundation. Get passed what we can pass that will have a meaningful impact on people’s lives – not put too many of our people in jeopardy – and then build upon it later. It’s a long road.”

For single payer proponents, the construction on that long road begins in the Senate now where Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to introduce single payer language. As he said on Vermont Public Radio this week:

“I believe that a single payer system is the most effective way to provide comprehensive, universal, cost-effective health care. … (Without single payer) that ain’t going to happen. The health insurance industry and the drug companies are too powerful.”

Sanders is also proposing a federal exemption of legal barriers for states that opt to establish single payer systems, similar to the Kucinich amendment that was stripped out of the House bill by House leaders in the hours leading up to its final vote.

The reason for the amendment, Sanders notes:

“So that if states like Vermont or California or Pennsylvania – states that are strong in a single payer movement – want to move in that direction that they will be able to do so. And I think … what you will probably end up seeing is we will move toward a Medicare for all program when one state does it and does it well. And other states say, ‘You know what? That looks like the most cost effective, fairest way to provide quality care to all people.'”

You can help. Contact your Senator, (202) 224-312, and urge them to join Sanders in supporting this important amendment. That’s what a lot of us will be working on next.