There is nothing in there that surprises me in the least. DisGUSTS me maybe, but doesn't surprise me...
There is nothing in there that surprises me in the least. DisGUSTS me maybe, but doesn't surprise me...
Tired...
City Council backs James Zadroga bill to help sick 9/11 responders
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008...bill_to-2.html
BY FRANK LOMBARDI
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU
Thursday, February 7th 2008, 4:00 AM
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn pushed Wednesday for speedy passage of a federal bill to help sick 9/11 responders and other victims of its "toxic cloud."
The bill is named for the late James Zadroga, 34, the former NYPD detective who died of lung and brain damage that a New Jersey medical examiner "directly" linked to his more than 450 hours of work at Ground Zero.
City officials dispute that Zadroga's death was caused by inhaling dust at Ground Zero after 9/11. He died in January 2006.
Quinn said the Council was set to pass a resolution calling on Congress to swiftly enact "this lifesaving piece of legislation."
"It isn't just something we want," Quinn said. "It's something we need and it's something we deserve."
Supporters of the resolution include Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan, Brooklyn) and Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan, Queens), chief sponsors of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.
They contended Washington has "a national responsibility" to care for ongoing victims of "a national attack."
The legislation would pay for the monitoring and treatment of anyone - including volunteers, residents, area workers and others - who is ill, or becomes ill, as a result of exposure to the toxins of Ground Zero. It would also reopen the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund.
"I feel that we're getting momentum," Maloney said. "I think we're going to pass this thing."
Tired...
John Feal On 2/16/2008 Money Bomb
Video
Click Here (GooTube)
www.fealgoodfoundation.com
www.1stresponders1st.com
Tired...
Illness-stricken 9/11 workers, families planning protest in Washington
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008...ilies_pla.html
BY ADAM NICHOLS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Friday, February 15th 2008, 4:00 AM
A convoy of heroes - Ground Zero first-responders and their families - will travel later this month to Capitol Hill to demand government not turn its back on them.
Busloads of cancer victims and people crippled by breathing problems and horrific injuries will make the 250-mile trek to Washington to protest a planned slash in health care funding and to demand support from the next President.
"I would think when they see us, they will have to do the right thing," said AnneMarie Baumann, 42, whose husband Chris was an NYPD officer blinded on 9/11.
She, her husband and their two teenage children will join more than 300 people expected at the Feb. 26 rally.
"Morally and ethically, how could they ignore what is happening to these people?" said Baumann.
Buses will pick up the first-responders in Manhattan, Long Island and New Jersey, and drive them to the nation's capital on Feb. 25. The next day they'll rally outside Congress.
Planned meetings with specific representatives are still being arranged.
"We want to implore our new President to make 9/11 health care an issue," said John Feal, a Ground Zero volunteer whose foot was crushed by an 8-ton steel beam.
His FealGood Foundation, set up to draw attention to the health problems of Ground Zero workers, organized the trip after Congress cut health care funding by 77%.
Only $25 million has been budgeted for 2009, down from $108 million this year, he said.
"The bottom line is, human life has taken a backseat to economics," said Feal. "It's an insult.
"Six years ago, the government vowed to help us. Now these heroes have been kicked when they were down and told to go away. A lot of people in Congress are championing our cause, but they need help and they're not getting it. We want to convince the government to help."
Another traveler is Joe Zadroga. His son James, a 13-year NYPD veteran, died of pulmonary fibrosis his family claims was linked to his work at Ground Zero.
"I feel duty-bound to be there because of my son," he said.
"It's emotional to be involved, but it's my main objective. To get health care for these heroes."
Tired...
Fallen 9/11 hero's dad raises funds
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008...ses_funds.html
BY ELAINE RAMIREZ and ADAM NICHOLS
DAILY NEWS WRITERS
Sunday, February 17th 2008, 4:00 AM
It would have been his son's 36th birthday.
The father of Ground Zero hero James Zadroga honored his son's memory Saturday by raising cash for other 9/11 firstresponders crippled by health problems.
"This is what Jimmy would have wanted," said Joseph Zadroga, who blames a toxic cloud for the lung and brain damage that killed his son.
"He wanted us to get help for other people out there," said the father, who joined other campaigners outside the PATH station at Ground Zero.
Former NYPD Detective James Zadroga spent 450 hours inhaling dust in the aftermath of 9/11 and died in January 2006.
Though a New Jersey medical examiner said his sickness was linked "directly" to his work at the site, city officials dispute the findings.
He left behind a daughter, Tylerann, who is now 6 and lives with her grandparents.
"She asks me how come bad people stay alive, but heroes die?" Joseph Zadroga said as he greeted passersby and commuters.
He encouraged them to donate to the FealGood Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports sick first responders.
"What better way to celebrate an American hero?" said Charles Giles, an EMT on 9/11 who is also sick.
The FealGood Foundation is planning to take three busloads of first responders and their families to Washington on Feb. 26 for a rally demanding better medical care.
Tired...
Heroes - or victims?
In an exclusive extract from her analysis of 9/11, The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi looks at the role the firefighters really played
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts...257710,00.html
Monday February 18, 2008
The Guardian
In the end, the character actors who won the 9/11 hero sweepstakes were the New York City firemen. Their uniforms and the direction in which they were heading provided a clear demarcation between them, the heroes, and the office workers, the victims. The secretaries and financial brokers ran down the stairs; the firemen ran up - 343 of them to their deaths. Conveniently for the mythmakers, less than 0.3% of New York's firefighters were women. There would be no need to rewrite the gender roles in this drama. The adulation began at once.
In our "different kind of war", these uniformed men were assigned the role of our new supersoldiers. "These are the men who will fight our wars," President Bush intoned, after posing with the firefighters at the smouldering ruins, as if he were their commanding officer. "These men are fighting the first battle," Mayor Giuliani declared. In fact, he maintained, they had already won it. "Our firefighters helped save more than 25,000 lives that day - the greatest single rescue mission in America's history." That was a claim the surviving firefighters themselves would regard as preposterous. Of the 16,000 to 18,000 occupants of the World Trade Centre that day, 95% of those who died were on the upper floors, beyond reach of rescue, and most of those on the lower floors rescued themselves without uniformed help. The grim truth is that the human toll would have been significantly lower had the firefighters never entered the buildings.
"We were just as much victims as everybody that was in the building," Derek Brogan of Engine Five said in his personal account, one of more than 500 oral histories the fire department amassed. James Murphy put it this way: "We were just victims, too. Basically, the only difference between us and the victims is, we had flashlights."
Flashlights and non-working radios. The firefighters entered the World Trade Centre armed with 15-year-old radios that were well known to malfunction in high-rise buildings. When the South Tower fell, the firefighters in the North Tower had no idea what had happened. When the fire chief radioed a Mayday order to evacuate the North Tower, almost none of the firefighters heard it. In the words of a 2005 National Institute of Standards and Technology study, "the evidence indicates that emergency responders' lives were likely lost [as a result of] lack of timely information and inadequate communication capabilities". Firefighters made the same point in their oral history accounts; they said they were "clueless" and knew "absolutely nothing" of what was going on outside.
These oral histories were repressed for three and a half years; the mayor's office refused to make them public and relented only after an order from the state's highest court. A year before their release, the former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, testifed at a 9/11 commission hearing that plenty of firefighters heard the Mayday order but chose to stay and help civilians. "And the fact that so many of them interpreted it that way, kept a much calmer situation," he started to say, before being cut off by outraged firefighter families in the audience:
Unidentified female: No!
Unidentified female: No!
Unidentified male: Radios!
Giuliani: And these people -
Unidentified male: Talk about the radios!
Giuliani: These people -
Unidentified male: Radios!
Unidentified male: Talk about the radio!
Thomas Kean, 9/11 commission chairman: Would you please ask -
Unidentified female: My son was murdered! Murdered because of incompetence, and the radios didn't work.
The firefighter families' efforts to get at the truth were shunted aside. The myth of effective rescue soon became an unassailable and sacred truth. When Terry Golway, city editor of the New York Observer, published his 368-page homage to the FDNY in 2002, So Others Might Live, he began the prologue with this sentence: "343 members of the Fire Department of New York died on September 11 2001, while taking part in one of the most successful rescue efforts in history."
Tired...
WTC First Responders To Rally In Washington D.C.
http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index...=203&aid=78781
February 25, 2008
World Trade Center first responders and their families are heading to D.C. to continue fighting for health care.
Nearly 200 first responders are heading to Capitol Hill to hold a rally Tuesday protesting major cuts to their health care.
They say the government slashed the budget for 9/11 health care from $108 million to $25 million for the next fiscal year. The workers say they deserve better care after exposing themselves to toxic air.
"We're not going to stand for being cut out of the budget by 77 percent,” said John Feal, founder of the Fealgood Foundation. “It's not adequate and it’s an insult.”
“If I got hurt in Afghanistan, my family and I would be covered, but since I got hurt in Manhattan we're not,” said WTC construction worker Thomas Magee.
Many first responders are also pushing congress to pass the James Zadroga bill which would ensure that everyone exposed to toxins at Ground Zero has proper medical care.
Tired...
Fighting for health care
http://media.www.nyunews.com/media/s...-3234724.shtml
Emma Davis
2/26/2008
With two plastic bags full of medication bottles, a picture of him working at the World Trade Center site just hours after the collapse of the towers and the construction mask that served as his only protection that day, Daniel Moynihan boarded a bus yesterday to go to Washington, D.C.
And today, he hopes to stand in front of Congress and tell them that he - and hundreds of others like him - need help.
"I'm sick and getting sicker," said Moynihan, a first-respondent volunteer firefighter. "Our health care funding needs to be restored."
Six years after the tragedy, many of the first responders at the World Trade Center site on Sept. 11 are now facing respiratory problems and are developing cancers after being exposed to the toxins and rubble at ground zero. So yesterday, dozens of Sept. 11 heroes like Moynihan piled into two buses and traveled from Manhattan to Washington, D.C. to advocate health benefits.
Today they are rallying at Capitol Hill and meeting with congressmen to discuss their health care funding, which Congress cut by 77 percent in the 2009 federal budget proposal.
The trip was co-organized by the FealGood Foundation, established by crippled first respondent John Feal to raise awareness about the health issues faced by the World Trade Center workers. Health advocacy group 9/11 Health Now, based in Babylon, N.Y., also helped plan the lobbying trip.
"It's a crisis," said 9/11 Health Now member Claire Calladine, who helped lead the Manhattan group to Washington, D.C. "We're talking about the decimation of thousands of families that stepped up for their country and are now being ignored."
And the demands are simple: affordable health care.
On board the bus was Minna Barrett, a chief psychologist with the Red Cross 9/11 Workers Project.
"The federal government needs to recognize its responsibility to the health of the respondents," Barrett said. "The anxiety about their long-term health doesn't go away."
But NYU students disagree about whether or not the government should fund the first respondents' care.
"Just because it's been almost seven years doesn't mean their problems have gone away," CAS freshman Christina Ng said. "If anything, an increase is fair for all they did."
However, Stern freshman Sooji Park pointed out that the government cannot fund everything.
"That's what health insurance is for," she said. "It's unfortunate, but the government doesn't have the kind of money to fund so many things."
NYU law professor Martin Guggenheim said the government is not legally bound to continue funding, but he added: "One could make a fair point that the money that would've gone to these victims has instead been given to the war in Iraq."
If all goes well for him today in Washington, D.C., Gabriel Bacino, another first responder, will receive the health care he needs.
"I live day by day," Bacino said. "We're going to try to tell them we need the money to support us, and some to stay alive."
Tired...
Sick 9/11 first responders on trip to Washington
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2008...ip_to_was.html
BY STEPHANIE GASKELL
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Tuesday, February 26th 2008, 4:00 AM
On a bus on I-95 - Dozens of sick 9/11 first responders rumbled down to the nation's capital Monday to do what they shouldn't have to: beg lawmakers to fund crucial programs that help pay their growing medical bills.
"I feel like a charity case," said Charles Giles, 40, who worked as an emergency medical technician for 16 years - including five months at Ground Zero. He got sick in 2002 and, after 13 separate hospitalizations, has had to sell his house to pay medical bills.
"[Sept. 11] has destroyed us," said Giles, of Toms River, N.J. "We gave our heart and souls on 9/11. What this government is doing to us now is a shame."
The bus ride was organized by the FealGood Foundation, a group founded by John Feal, a 9/11 volunteer whose foot was crushed by an 8-ton steel beam.
"This is like show and tell," Feal told the Daily News Monday. "For 6 1/2 years we've been neglected, denied and lied to."
He said New York's congressional delegation hasbeen helpful, but "the national delegation needs to see these people."
The group will hold a protest on Capitol Hill today to ask Congress to restore millions of dollars to programs like Healthcare for Heroes. Only $25 million has been earmarked for 2009 - compared with $108 million in 2008.
"If that closes, all of us are going to have to find other doctors and start all over and for some people, that will be too late," said Keith LeBow, a 44-year-old ironworker from Manhattan.
LeBow, who would have to spend about $2,000 a month on his medications alone without help from the government, said he went to Washington even though he has a hard time getting out of bed.
"They don't want to hear it anymore," he complained.
Joe Picurro, 40, an ironworker who is also from Toms River, walks with a cane now and takes about 35 pills a day.
"I'm ashamed that I have to go down to Congress to beg for money," he said.
The News, in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning editorials, has also fought for proper funding for the city's sick heroes.
Tired...
9/11 responders demand health care funding
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/ny...,4756300.story
BY CARL MACGOWAN | carl.macgowan@newsday.com
2/26/2008
WASHINGTON - Gregory Quibell already suffered from pulmonary fibrosis last October when he was diagnosed with leukemia.
He said yesterday he at first didn't think that the cancer was related to his cleanup work at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. But his doctor said it was, and now Quibell, 53, of North Babylon, wants the federal government to help him.
Quibell, a state correction worker, was one of several dozen 9/11 search and rescue workers who rallied yesterday at the Capitol building, angry that health services meant to help them face what they say are severe budget cuts.
"We stood behind this country," he said. "It's time for the country to stand behind us."
The Bush administration has proposed cutting 9/11-related health care programs by 77 percent in next year's budget, to $25 million from $108 million. The cuts would affect a program at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan designed for 9/11 workers, rally organizers said.
Bush proposed $25 million for the programs last year before Congress increased the spending, and Congress is expected to raise spending again this year, sources said. A spokeswoman for the federal Office of Management and Budget, Christin Baker, said $200 million remains in a fund for 9/11-related health care. The money is expected to last through next year, Baker said.
Amid an intermittent drizzle, 9/11 workers and a few dozen supporters chanted, "$25 million is not enough," and demanded that Congress restore the funding. They received support from four members of Congress, including Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton), who called the proposed cuts "unconscionable."
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) said 9/11 health care programs need $250 million to adequately serve those in need.
"When are we going to start helping the people who dropped what they were doing and went down to help?" Nadler said.
The rally was organized by the Fealgood Foundation and its founder, John Feal, 41, of Nesconset, who said a piece of steel crushed one of his feet when he was working on a demolition crew at the trade center. He said he faced foreclosure on his home after he was denied workers' compensation and Social Security benefits.
"I am one mad American," Feal told the crowd.
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