Nurses Kick Off New Year With Call to Build on Historic Protests of 2011

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Jan 05, 2012, 08:00 ET

Premiere New Protest Site, Video Ad: 'A Nightmare on Wall Street'

To Help Spur Actions for the 99% and a Wall Street Tax to Heal America

WASHINGTON, Jan. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- After a year in which its members protested on Wall Street, at scores of Congressional field offices, in front of the Chamber of Commerce national HQ, the White House and the Treasury Department in D.C., as well as at the G-20 Summit in France, and as participants in Occupy Wall Street actions – staffing first aid stations across the country – National Nurses United (NNU) today formally launched its Protest In The USA website (www.protestintheusa.org).

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The website, whose mission is to provide protest news, video content and commentary about protest in behalf of the 99%, with information from the U.S. and abroad, is a project of NNU, the largest union and professional association of RNs in the nation, with 170,000 members.

www.ProtestInTheUSA.org also provides information on "Upcoming Protests" and "Why Tax Wall Street" pages, as well as a listing, "Resources of the 99%". Visitors are asked to sign a Petition to Support a robust Financial Transaction Tax on Wall Street, and upload details and videos about protests in which they are involved.

"Everything that sparked the protests – terrible economic inequality, unemployment, turning people out of their homes—the policies and practices of the 1% - are still very much with us," said Karen Higgins, RN, co-president of NNU. "Our new website is an outlet for the Occupy Movement, for all protest for social justice, and provides an alternative to the 'horse-race' reportage of the 2012 election season."

The site premieres a two-minute video ad, A Nightmare on Wall Street, depicting a Wall Street executive's imagined encounter with those who lost jobs, homes, businesses, educational opportunity and retirement accounts as a result of Wall Street's misdeeds and "too-big-to-fail" government policies. The ad was produced for NNU by Northwoods Advertising of Minneapolis, MN.

The nurses have been calling for a tax on Wall Street speculative trading as a starting point in generating revenue for distressed communities. Nurses have observed throughout the year that enduring economic hardship is doing serious harm to their patients and communities. A financial transaction tax, called a "Robin Hood Tax" in Britain, would at the proper level raise as much as $350 billion a year in the U.S.

"The time is now for a meaningful financial transaction tax on Wall Street," said Higgins. "The nurses will not let up in our pursuit of real solutions to heal our economy which must be put back on track and Wall Street is the place to start. This is the critical year."

Nurses point out that compensation pools at the seven biggest U.S. banks totaled $156 billion in 2011 (including salaries, benefits and bonuses), a 3.7% increase over the previous year's record-breaking number.

Visit the new Protest In The USA website

See and share the new video "Nightmare on Wall Street"

SOURCE National Nurses United