On November 5, 2015, Marci Simms became a casualty of 9/11.
Early in her life, Simms decided she wanted to be a policewoman. And after graduating from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, she joined the New York Police Department in 1998. She worked in Manhattan and Brooklyn before joining the 107th Precinct in Queens in 2013.
Eventually she reached the rank of lieutenant–a major achievement in a department that’s still largely a macho man’s club.
Simms was still a rookie when Al Qaeda terrorists slammed two jetliners into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The World Trade Center on September 11, 2001
For the next four months, she joined thousands of other responders at Ground Zero, searching for survivors and human remains and removing tons of hazardous waste produced when the Twin Towers burned and crashed.
Most of those responders didn’t wear respirators or even face masks as protection against the toxic dust they breathed every day. Meanwhile, the Federal Government assured them that the air was safe.
Firefighters rescuing victims at the World Trade Center
During a 2014 interview, she spoke of the conditions she had faced: “It was smoky. You felt like it was just burning your throat.
“I had a back ache. I thought I did something wrong working around the house. But I noticed a lump on my stomach. Even my doctor thought it was nothing but a cyst.”
That cyst turned out to be stage four lung cancer. Just 16 months later, on November 5, 2015, Marci Simms died. She was only 51.
The only positive aspect of her illness: Her medical costs were covered by the Federal Government.
In 2010–nine years after the worst terrorist attack in American history–Congress passed the Democratically-sponsored James Zadroga 9/11 Health And Compensation Act.
The law was named for a New York City detective who died of a respiratory disease in 2006 after his contact with toxic chemicals at Ground Zero.
Previously, the responders had been forced to bear the massive costs of healthcare for diseases like cancer and pulmonary fibrosis.
The law authorized $1.8 billion to be spent over five years to treat injuries of police, firefighters, emergency workers, construction and cleanup crews caused by exposure to toxic dust and debris at the site.
Republicans bitterly opposed the legislation. They argued that providing healthcare for ailing September 11 heroes would bankrupt the nation.
Of course, they hadn’t voiced such concerns when President George W. Bush lied the nation into a $1 trillion war against Iraq in 2003.
For Republicans, the heroes of 9/11 had become “welfare-seeking bums.”
Slandering the Act as an “entitlement program” like Medicare, they demanded that the responders return to Congress every year to make their case–allegedly to prevent fraud and waste.
Republicans forced Democrats to accept an amendment that deliberately cast a slur on the men and women who answered their country’s call in its supreme moment of agony. Only then was the legislation passed.
The amendment read: “No individual who is on the terrorist watch list maintained by the Department of Homeland Security shall qualify as a screening-eligible WTC survivor or a certified-eligible WTC survivor.
“Before determining any individual to be a screening-eligible WTC survivor…or certifying any individual as a certified eligible survivor….the Administrator, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall determine whether the individual is on such list.”
The amendment provoked outrage among non-politicians, Democrats and even some Republicans. Among these:
- Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) whose district encompassed Ground Zero, said it was “absurd” to consider that any of the 9/11 heroes would be terrorists. He added that the screenings were a “waste of money.”
- Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called the exercise “shameful” and “a waste of time,” adding: “It put a cloud over extraordinarily good people for no reason.”
- “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart noted that the federal government didn’t run background checks on any other group of people receiving financial benefits. These included Social Security recipients, Medicare patients and even Wall Street bankers bailed out during the recession.
Specifically, responders seeking help were told that the following would be reported to the FBI to prove they were not terrorists:
- Name
- Birthplace
- Address
- Government ID number
- and other personal data.
By August, 2011, the FBI had screened some 60,000 emergency responders to the attacks on the World Trade Center and had not uncovered any suspected terrorists.
To date, no known terrorist has been found seeking treatment.
Glen Kline, a former NYPD emergency services officer, best summed up the disgrace of these background checks: “This is absurd. It’s silly. It’s stupid. It’s asinine. I mean, who are we even talking about–the undocumented workers who cleaned the office buildings?
“We know who all the cops, firefighters and construction workers were. They’re all documented. Is the idea that a terrorist stayed to help clean up? And then stayed all these years to try and get benefits?”
Unable to prevent the heroes of 9/11 from receiving medical care for their ailments, Congressional Republicans waited for their chance to strike.
In October, they refused to renew the Act, which is set to expire in October, 2015.
Meanwhile, 2,500 Ground Zero workers–so far–have been stricken with cancer.
Thus, self-righteous Right-wing legislators–who never lifted a beam from a trapped 9/11 survivor or inhaled toxic fumes that spewed from the crater that was once the World Trade Center–continue to stand in judgment over those who did.



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A LIE TOLD BY BULLIES
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 14, 2016 at 3:41 pmErnest Hemingway knew his Fascists. He fought against them in 1930s Spain, where Right-wing general Francisco Franco–aided by Adolf Hitler–ultimately overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1939.
And he fought against them in France after American forces landed in Normandy. He was one of the first Americans to reach Paris and help “liberate” the bar of the Ritz Hotel.
In the 1950s, he opposed the growing plague of anti-Red hysteria as represented by Wisconsin U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
Addressing a 1937 Writers Congress in a rare public speech, Hemingway said: “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.”
Ernest Hemingway
It’s thus clear what the Nobel-Prize winning author would think of a Missouri state senator’s efforts at censorship.
Lindsay Ruhr, a graduate student in the School of Social Work at the University of Missouri, chose to write her doctoral dissertation on the effects of the state’s recently imposed 72-hour waiting period for abortions.
Lindsay Ruhr
And this has drawn the ire of Missouri State Senator Kurt Schaefer, a Republican from Columbia, Missouri, who chairs the Missouri state senate’s interim Committee on the Sanctity of Life.
In late October, Schaefer sent a letter to the University of Missouri calling Ruhr’s dissertation “a marketing aid for Planned Parenthood — one that is funded, in part or in whole, by taxpayer dollars.”
Kurt Schaefer
Schaefer demanded that the university hand over documents regarding the project’s approval and said that, because the University of Missouri is a public university, it should not fund research that he said would promote elective abortions.
Missouri law prohibits the use of public funds to promote non-life-saving abortions.
In September, 2014, Missouri enacted a 72-hour wait for abortions. Reproductive rights advocates believed this is an effort to deny women access to legal abortion as established by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
Other Missouri legal restrictions require women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound scan and receive informational material that aims to persuade them from obtaining an abortion.
Lindsay Ruhr wants to find out “how this policy [the 72-hour waiting limit] affects women. Whether this policy is having a harmful or beneficial effect, we don’t know.”
Schaefer claims that Ruhr is biased in favor of abortions because her adviser is affiliated with Planned Parenthood of Kansas.
“This is a concerning revelation considering the University’s recent troubling connections to Planned Parenthood,” wrote Schaefer in a letter to University of Missouri officials.
Schaefer argued that Ruhr is illegally using public funds to conduct her dissertation research.
“It is difficult to understand how a research study approved by the University, conducted by a University student, and overseen by the Director of the School of Social Work at the University can be perceived as anything but an expenditure of public funds to aid Planned Parenthood.”
Under Missouri law, it is illegal for public employees and facilities to use state money towards “encouraging or counseling” a woman to have an abortion not necessary to save her life.
Even though Ruhr is seeking a PhD at the university, she is employed by Planned Parenthood and the university is not paying for her research.
Abortions in Missouri aren’t the only scientific subject that Republicans have made it forbidden to study. Among these:
As Harrison E. Salisbury, former New York Times bureau chief in Moscow, observed: “…The message was always the same: Shut up! Don’t rock the boat. Keep those unpleasant truths to yourself. The truth, I was ultimately to learn, is the most dangerous thing. There are no ends to which men of power will not go to put out its eyes.”
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