[Mb-civic] Dr. Arnold's Diet

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Dr. Arnold's Diet Take a Steroid; Kick a Woman

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch
March 2, 2005

Back in the early 1990s, the right-wing taste of the
year was Newt Gingrich. He led the Republican sweep
into Congress in the 1994 mid-term elections. His
"Contract With America" loomed in every headline.
Liberals wailed that Gingrichism was invincible.

The counterattack began right in Gingrich's front yard,
in Georgia. The Atlanta Central Labor Council and Jobs
with Justice staged a noisy sit-in in Gingrich's local
Congressional office and seized the headlines with
stinging descriptions of the Contract as a cruel
assault on the poor and the working class. For months,
groups of union workers dogged the Congressman at his
every stop across the country. This noisy guerrilla
warfare rallied the faint-hearted and threw Gingrich,
then Speaker of the House, off balance. By 1995 a
rattled Gingrich had lost his touch, faltering badly in
the famous budget face-off with Clinton.

In the 2000 Democratic primary campaign the AIDS
coalition ACT UP (involved in the earlier Gingrich
protests) adopted the same tactic against Al Gore,
showing up wherever he made public appearances and
shouting out protests at the rotten AIDS policies he'd
signed on to. There weren't always many protesters, but
they were always there, and they had an effect. Gore
changed his line, and so did the Clinton
Administration.

Now it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn. California's
nurses have got him rattled, and it's already costing
him. A February 23 Field Poll showed his approval
ratings declining ten points since last September, a
significant drop. One might have thought that it's a
no-brainer to realize that kicking Florence
Nightingale's butt is not a sure-fire way to the
public's heart. But the Governor is so used to
browbeating the press that he thought he could do the
same to the California Nurses' Association (CNA), one
of the most militant unions in the country, with 60,000
members and representing registered nurses at 171
health facilities throughout the state. Schwarzenegger
has been trying to roll back the union's gains on
nurse/ patient ratios, safety standards and kindred
issues.

Schwarzenegger's version of Howard Dean's scream came
in December in Long Beach. As the nurses barracked him
during a speech, he denounced them as one of the
"special interests" and said, "I'm always kicking their
butt." This witty response from the breast-grabber got
plenty of play, and did the nurses nothing but good. At
a January Capitol protest in Sacramento the nurses
carried coffins and had a New Orleans jazz group play a
death march. During the Super Bowl they flew a small
plane over the steroid-swollen Governor's party at his
Santa Monica home. When he was in Washington they took
out a full-page ad in Roll Call flaying his record.
During a Schwarzenegger speech in a Sacramento hotel,
nurses held up a banner saying RNs Say Stop the Power
Grab.

On February 15, when Schwarzenegger and his platoons of
body guards and flunkies trooped into a screening of Be
Cool, 300 nurses demonstrated. Kelly DiGiacomo, 46
years old and 5'2", a nurse at a Kaiser hospital near
Sacramento, had a ticket. She ensconced herself in the
fourth row, wearing her nurse's scrubs.

A bodyguard rushed up, and under the pretext of a
possible meeting with the governor, led her to a room
with a California Highway Patrol cop at the door and
began to grill DiGiacomo. A few days later a CHP
investigator called. DiGiacomo asked why she should be
considered a threat. The investigator replied, "Well,
you were wearing a nurse's uniform." "Oh, sure, the
international terrorist uniform," DiGiacomo scoffed.
Californians scoffed with her when they saw the news
stories. At least Bush and Cheney can claim they're
being targeted by hairy men from the dark side of
Mecca. Here's Arnold hiding behind his goons from the
woman who cares for you when you're in the hospital.

Schwarzenegger's strategy has been to project an image-
calculatedly fascistic in style-of irresistible
momentum, aiming to crush all opposition with threats
to go directly to the people with rallies backed by the
mountains of corporate cash he's been raising since he
was elected.

It's no idle threat. Schwarzenegger has a swollen war
chest, albeit one that's also starting to get him bad
press. One of the reasons Gray Davis, his predecessor
in Sacramento, got recalled was his 24/7 addiction to
fundraising. If anything, Schwarzenegger is even more
relentless, with a corporate cash IV permanently stuck
in his arm. Last year he raised $28.8 million, and this
year he plans to raise at least another $50 million to
promote his agenda. Schwarzenegger's agenda is crudely
simple: Attack and if possible destroy social safety
nets in health, pensions, insurance, workers' comp, job
security, education, etc., with a green light for
business to pillage, outsource jobs and not pay taxes.

He's already tripped. Near the end of February
Schwarzenegger was reportedly abandoning his proposal
to abolish the independent Board of Registered Nursing,
along with eighty-eight other regulatory and policy
boards. But he's still planning to roll California into
DeLay-style redestricting and to ramp up the use of
"emergency" diktats to undercut democratic opposition
from the legislature. One such example is in the area
of healthcare: an emergency order by the Governor in
November to roll back patient safety standards in
California hospitals, reversing the intent of a 1999
law. A CNA lawsuit challenging that order will be heard
in Sacramento Superior Court in early March.

You might have thought Schwarzenegger would have some
sympathy for nurses, who incur long-term back trauma
from having to haul patients up in bed, a task
equivalent, on average, to lifting about 1.8 tons a
day. No. The Governor vetoed a bill requiring hospitals
(heavy Schwarzenegger donors) to install safe-lift
policies and equipment. And yes, he vetoed another bill
to educate school coaches about the dangers of steroids
and performance-enhancing diet supplements.

As I said, political momentum is the key to
Schwarzenegger's game. But what happens when you trip
over a 5'2" woman in nurse's scrubs? You lose momentum.
What happens when you start screaming abuse at nurses
and teachers? What happens when you make working women
your enemies? The humbled president of Harvard,
Lawrence Summers, might want to have a word with
Governor Schwarzenegger on that one.

http://www.counterpunch.org/nurses.html 





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