http://ontransmigration.blogspot.com/2008/02/911-responders-rally-in-dc.htmlTuesday, February 26, 2008
But can anyone tell me why I had to read this in a New Zealand Paper???
WASHINGTON DC - 02.21.08 - Over 200 9/11 First Responders, family members and supporters will be rallying on Capitol Hill this Tuesday, February 26th.
From 10:00am to 12:00pm, First Responders will rally on the West Lawn of Capitol Hill.
Scheduled speakers include Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (NY), Congressman Jerry Nadler (NY), Congressman Tim Bishop (NY) Congressman Dennis Kucinich (OH) and other Congressional leaders. Advocates of several 9/11 health organizations as well as family members and first responders from September 11, 2001 will also be discussing the health issues they currently face.
The rally is aimed to address the following issues:...
9/11 first responders head to Washington rally
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/ny-liwtc265592005feb26,0,591957.storyBY CARL MACGOWAN.carl.macgowan@newsday.com
February 26, 2008
Mike McCormack, of Ridge, was part of a search team that found a battered American flag at the World Trade Center after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks...
But McCormack, 49, says he is getting the cold shoulder from the Bush administration, which has proposed what the group says is a severe cut in health care for 9/11 first responders...
"Handing out money to everyone and not taking care of your own - there's something wrong with that," said McCormack, a major in the Air Force Auxiliary. "It's just vicious."...
"President Bush came down, patted us on the back and said, 'Anything we needed,'" said McNamara, who is on medical leave from the Fire Department of New York. "Now he's taking it away from us. ... What kind of a joke is that?"...
Now Can We Talk About 9/11
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080226/cm_thenation/9172907182 hours, 39 minutes ago
The Nation -- While over its tenure, the Bush administration has increased baseline military spending by 30% to fight a global "war on terror," this month with the release of the President's last budget, Bush delivered a final, parting blow to 9/11 victims of terror at home.
According to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, the cost of treating sick ground zero workers has reached $195 million a year, a cost likely to expand. Nevertheless, Bush's proposed budget cuts 2009 funding for 9/11 healthcare to $25 million--a 77% drop from the previous year's appropriations.
Meanwhile this December, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt eliminated plans for the center that would treat the 10,000-plus First Responders suffering health problems as the result of their service after the attacks.
BETRAYED AGAIN: How Bush betrays the 9/11 first responders once more.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_sherman__080226_betrayed_again_3a_how_.htmby Sherman Yellen Page 1 of 1 page(s)
http://www.opednews.com Tell A Friend
It’s amazing. Just when you think there are no new depths of shamelessness and betrayal of trust to which the Bush administration can sink, they manage to sink deeper into unchartered infamy. Hold on now, I’m not even mad yet. I’m talking about the seventy seven percent cut in the medical assistance for 9/11 first responders in the current federal budget. Gravely ill firemen, police, and other workers who labored at that site, workers who have come down with life threatening cancers and respiratory illnesses linked to their heroic efforts at ground zero are being shafted once again.
In the name of full disclosure, I am not writing this from some disinterested “good citizen” viewpoint. I have a young nephew, John McNamarra, a heroic fireman who worked as a first responder at that site and who later volunteered for rescue work after Katrina in New Orleans. For the past few years he has been suffering from various cancers resulting from that work for which he is currently under treatment at Sloan Kettering. Last weekend he called me to talk about the government’s new betrayal. As the father of a one year old son, Jack, John is fighting the battle of his life, and there is no godly reason why men such as John have to fight the government as well for proper medical care and compensation. One pill – yes one small pill that reduces the agonizing nausea of his chemotherapy costs as much as a thousand dollars. Okay, I can rail about the greedy drug companies and their obscene profits, but my first concern is our government’s ingratitude and cruelty, something which the congress must address and remedy to help all these men and women.
As Representative Carolyn Maloney writes, “It’s shocking that the president would use his final budget to take an axe to 9/11 health care programs.” Ms. Maloney is a wonderful representative but her use of shocking seems naïve. Are you shocked? After Katrina? After Walter Reed? Not me. I recall that first lie told by the federal government about the risk at ground zero to workers, one that came through the Bush mouthpiece, Christie Todd Whitman, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, now a lobbyist for nuclear power. This former New Jersey governor claimed that anyone in the area of ground zero, meaning not only the workers who worked in the rubble trying to rescue the buried and reclaim body parts, but the residents of the apartments in the area, were safe from the toxic fumes that filled the air for days, sometimes weeks. According to a later report of the New York City Department of Health “The collapse of the Twin Towers brought 200,000 tons of steel, 5,000 tons of asbestos, 12,000 miles of electric cables and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete crashing down into lower Manhattan… The combustion produced a toxic cauldron of concrete, dust, glass fibers, and cancer-causing asbestos, as well as particles of lead, chlorine…24 gallons of jet fuel, and burning plastics released carcinogens including dioxins etc.”
As someone who lived more than eighty long city blocks north of ground zero I could smell the bitter, toxic air coming in through my bedroom window for days...
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