National Nurses United

N O V E M B E R | D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 5 W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G N A T I O N A L N U R S E 7 "I leave my shift knowing, as I walk outside, this is the air quality this baby was born in," said Hernandez-Brown. "This is the air quality that this child's lungs will develop into as an adult. This is the air quality that this adult will have to work in day after day. This is the air quality that this elderly person will eventually succumb to and die from, prematurely. This is the air quality that fracking is causing for our community. We need to do something. My community deserves clean air and clean water just like everywhere else. My community needs a climate change now." The public health dimensions of the glob- al climate crisis are extensive and far-reach- ing, nurses know. According to the World Health Organization, more than 8 million deaths worldwide are directly attributable to air pollution, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels and lack of access to clean energy. Infectious and vector-born diseases, such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and Lyme, will spike as temperatures increase. Further global warming and climate change will magnify the already catastrophic health impacts of: fossil fuel pollution, hunger and malnutrition due to desertification, and devastation and displacement from severe weather events and sea level rise. At the Northern California Staff Nurse Assembly, some 800 nurses on Nov. 12 showed solidarity with students across the country protesting the outrageous costs and crippling debts of their college educations by marching and rallying with University of California at Berkeley students as part of the Million Student March. "We are here with students all across the country to protest a growing debt crisis. We are not alone. Debt is a huge problem all across the United States," said Katy Roemer, a registered nurse member who sits on the CNA/NNOC board, to huge cheers from the crowd. She shared a story about how she is happy to have recently, after 20 years, finally paid off her loans for private nursing school, but how disheartened and scared she is to be taking on thousands of dollars of new debt to fund her eldest son's college education. In addition to the spirited actions, regis- tered nurse attendees had the chance to learn in greater depth about the issues they were protesting, and more, through classes and presentations taught by CNA/NNOC educators. One presentation detailed how public higher education in the United States had, up until the early 1970s, not only largely been free but that tuition-free college was viewed as a critical component of a healthy civil society. That all changed with the Powell Memoran- dum, which refers to a document written by Lewis F. Powell, Jr., then a corporate attorney and lobbyist and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, which lays out how corporate America should aggressively push free-market ideolo- gy and capitalism (what we call neoliberalism today). That ideology included undermining the idea that public colleges should be free and accessible to all, and repositioning them as profit centers and "businesses." Today, total student debt in the United States has now reached crisis levels, estimat- ed at $1.3 trillion, and has quadrupled in just the past 10 years. While millions of students are trapped in never-ending student loan payments that often prevent them from saving money, buying a car, purchasing a house, or start- ing a family, Wall Street is making millions off lending money to both students and higher education institutions and stock market trading of debt. Nurses held signs with how much student debt they owed—some as high as $100,000. They struggle under the weight of their own debt while worrying about what their children face when they go to school. "Our colleges and univer- sities should not be profit centers for the 1 percent," said Roemer. "That is not okay and it doesn't have to be this way." —Staff report

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