Vidette, et al,

I want to first acknowledge the distress you describe. Many good
people are hurting and often through no fault other than believing
that the people who run the country are good, honest, diligent people.

That said, let me not mince words. While this may sound partisan and
alarmist it is neither. What I am saying is, in my humble opinion, the
same sort of things that Florence Nightingale would be saying if we
were fortunate enough to have the benefit of her intellect, wisdom,
insight, and dedication guiding our profession. The same people who
have been asleep at the switch and who created the circumstances that
led to the current mortgage mess weren't just de-constructing the
mortgage sector. They were also taking the teeth out of pension
regulation and oversight, health insurance regulation and oversight,
healthcare regulation and oversight, defunding the social security
system, and bankrupting Medicare, while ignoring the crying need for
infrastructure repair and rebuilding. In nursing we have had too many
leaders whose focus is on elevating professional identity and status
rather than the needs of our patients. Most nursing care is being
provided in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, adult family
care homes, and a slew of other environments in which nursing
leadership and presence is severely lacking.

The same people who brought us where we are and who are now focused on
money market accounts and banks, are not addressing the fact that our
pension funds and the pension guaranty mechanisms, social security,
medicare, and infrastructure repair are underfunded to the tune of
many, many trillions of dollars. Our nursing leaders tend to be more
concerned with issues such as a DSN or a PhD, while we abandon
patients to care from certified nursing assistants and patient aides.
We have thousands of highways, bridges, roads, electrical grids,
communications systems, subways, commuter rail lines, and buildings
that are crumbling because of decades of neglect. We face no problems
from Al Qaeda that are more difficult than the problems we face from
within.

The thought that the executive branch has concocted a "plan" is
perhaps the most frightening thing on the national scene. The same
people who were asleep at the switch now have a plan to fix things. It
simply reeks of "Brownie, you're doing a helluva job." We can,
unfortunately, be sure that whatever problem their plan is designed to
fix is nothing like the complex array of problems that need to be
fixed. As T. Boone Pickens has said succinctly: "We cannot drill our
way out of this mess".

The fix is not a bailout of people who made risky investments which is
the primary focus of the Executive Branch's "Plan", it is a dedication
to what worked after the depression - rebuilding the country from the
ground up, developing a hydrogen, solar, and wind based, not an oil or
natural gas based, economy, and rewarding good business practices not
short term gains resulting from manipulated financial statements. Lest
it appear that this is a partisan view - let me assure you that the
problem has been decades in developing. The fact that we wound up with
the most incurious president in our nation's history is an effect, not
a cause, of our collective drunken exuberance. As a nation, we clearly
chose to believe that it didn't matter if we elected the village idiot
as president in 2000 and 2004.

That said, my personal assessment is that John McCain has not a clue
about what is happening or how to correct it while Barack Obama has
been talking about this from the start of his presidential campaign.
Add in that Sarah Palin is the least qualified human being for
national office that I have seen in my lifetime and it is clear, to me
at least, that John McCain would be a disaster as a president. Like so
many of his predecessors from both major political parties he seems to
confuse winning an election through deception and distraction - the
same problem with all those fudged financial reports - with winning
because his policies and thinking processes are the most sound.

I do not personally believe that Barack Obama is dramatically better
qualified for the road ahead (my personal choice for that would be
Ralph Nader but he couldn't put together a successful political
campaign to save his life and because of that i think he lacks the
basic skills to make a deal that will be critical as we move forward).
But at least Barack Obama has some measure of curiosity, consults
experts before engaging mouth, and while no less an ideologue than
McCain, he has at least a smidgen of curiosity that might moderate his
ideological biases while McCain and Palin appear to have none.
McCain's entire legislative career has been an anti-government agenda.
I have a simple axiom for this:

"People who do not believe in government ought not run for
governmental office".

Sarah Palin, physically attractive as she clearly is, has all the
intellectual depth of a wisp of smoke, and the notion that mismanaging
the governments of Wasilla and Alaska qualifies her for anything more
than dog catcher in a small town offends my delicate sensibilities to
their core. She reminds me all too much of another, equally inadequate
vice-presidential choice - Dan Quayle.

What most people don't seem to realize is that buying shares of stock
in existing companies is not investment - people who buy and sell
shares in this way are not investing in anything nor are they creating
anything at all - they are simply engaging in the same sort of
investment policies as the people who inflated ENRON - a company that
never produced anything of value.

Investment, to be useful, needs to create new and useful industries,
products and services, and spawn new jobs that have inherent value -
it has been a long time since true investment has occurred in our
country with the possible exception of the personal computer and the
sad reality is that this industry was moved offshore immediately. We
don't produce personal computers at all - the motherboards, hard
drives, cases, power supplies, peripherals, and software are primarily
produced in third world countries.

As I have suggested with increasing confidence the last few years,
even our health care system is going to move offshore - just go back
to my piece on nursing in 2050... The problem with moving all the
productivity out of the country is that we have what we have now - we
continue to borrow to sustain our consumption while contributing very
little. The RV manufacturing industry is a great example - we produce
tens of thousands of RVs a year for leisure life styles we
increasingly cannot afford.

We have rewarded executives and investors who have created nothing at
all for decades while those who have diligently built solid companies
have been ignored because their quarterly reports have had sustainable
returns on investment of 3 - 10%/year while companies like ENRON have
reported unsustainable annual returns in the range of 100 - 1000% per
year.

The problems we face, and nursing and caring are hanging in the
balance, are orders of magnitude greater than the problems that will
be addressed by Congress and the Executive branch in the next weeks
and months.

That said - I am profoundly optimistic that a hydrogen based economy
continues to offer us a way to improve the standard of living around
the world that we have failed to achieve since Norbert Wiener's (1950)
prescient book "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and
Society" Da Capo Press. While we are all looking at that we might also
reflect on the core of John Nash's work which was beautifully
summarized in a single scene from the movie - that cooperation, not
competition, is the way forward - not Adam Smith's formulation of
narrow self-interest. Individual winning does not produce optimal
outcomes - sharing of success does.

Much as we have all enjoyed reading the book and watching the movie -
even Nash's winning of the Nobel Prize has not resulted in a
fundamental change in the way we formulate economic theory and most
certainly has not changed the way economics has been taught in the
decades since his work.

But if we want a caring profession and a caring society we need to
wake up and see what is really going on and address it - not live in a
fantasy land. Florence Nightingale would never have remained silent in
the last three decades as the health care system was being
systematically destroyed by the same sort of short-sighted greed that
brought us the mortgage meltdown, the pension system inadequacies, and
the most abysmal running of government since the crimean war.

just one bear's views of course and i am sure there will be many who
disagree with me and I heartily encourage them to speak their minds
and address how all of this runs parallel to and integrative with
nursing, our much beloved caring profession. This is not the time for
thoughtful, intelligent, and caring people to be unduly polite. We
need to exchange thoughtful perspectives not have abject idiots
running for political office dispense pollyannaish quips engineered to
succeed in the sound bite markets... Our profession and country need
our informed dialogue now more than ever...

For those who will, no doubt, feel that this is not the forum for such
exchanges - I can only say that I respectfully and profoundly disagree.

bear

--- In Martha_E_Rogers@yahoogroups.com, "Vidette Todaro-Franceschi,
RN, PhD" <vtodaro@...> wrote:
>
> It is very sad; my hubby would have jumped out the window this week
if we didn't live in a ranch house and he is already in rehab for an
ACL injury....
> Peace, Love, & Light,
>
> Vidette Todaro-Franceschi RN, PhD.
> Associate Professor & Specialization Coordinator
> Adult Health Advanced Practice Graduate Program
> Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing
> Hunter College, City University of New York
> 425 E 25th St
> New York, NY 10010
> vtodaro@...
>