Are the 9/11 Files Changing Anything? And Why Not?
By Joe Maniscalco
In the movie Jaws there was only one Mayor Larry Vaughn running around telling the good people of Amity that it was safe to get back into the water.
But as the recently-released 9/11 files show, the City of New York had a whole bunch of money-driven Mayor Larry Vaughns running around town after September 11, 2001 telling everybody it was safe to go back to their Lower Manhattan jobs and classrooms.
As The Broadsheet reports, then-Health Department official James Miller told members of a special joint City task force convened soon after the Twin Towers fell, “We’ve been telling people everything is okay,” but admitted, “we’re just doing this to make people happy.”
The 9/11 files further reveal that less then a month after the World Trade Center was destroyed, REBNY—the Real Estate Board of New York—was telling the City’s Office of Emergency Management “as much as possible, we have to try to convince the residents that things have returned to normal.”
A spokesperson for then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani further flat-out declared, “the air quality is safe and acceptable.”
All that has now reportedly cost the lives of more than 9,000 people—and counting. The WTC Health Program—the federal monitoring and treatment program meant to help 9/11 first-responders and other survivors—has over 145,000 enrollees. Some 49,000 people in the program have been diagnosed with 9/11-related cancers. Still others deal with debilitating respiratory issues, and more.
“I get so sick of hearing ‘Never Forget’ because you know what? They’ve all forgotten,” 9/11 survivor and advocate Ann Marie Principe told Labor and Healthcare Confidential host Marianne Pizzitola in September. “We’re watching our friends and our neighbors die because we’re expensive. They don’t want to pay for us anymore.”
Principe, herself battling numerous 9/11-related illnesses, is blowing the whistle on the 9/11 WTC National Health Provider Network’s failure to actually help first-responders and survivors get the care they need because of the costs involved.
“It’s been 25 years since the attack on the World Trade Center and still to this day, responders and survivors are suffering,” Pizzitola, a former FDNY EMS first-responder and President of the New York City Organizaiton of Public Service Retirees, added. “We are developing cancers, autoimmune disorders, and the World Trade Center national health program, which is supposed to help us, has been failing those of us who were exposed.”
In the movies, fictional Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn worried about all the money businesses would lose over the 4th of July weekend if the beaches were shut down—and he was willing to risk a few beachgoers being eaten alive by a ravenous Great White shark to avoid that from happening.
In 2001, New York City’s business interests and the politicians they controlled also worried about all the money they would lose if people were too afraid to go back to their Lower Manhattan homes and classrooms because the air around Ground Zero had become a toxic time bomb.
Remember George Bush telling everyone to go out and do more shopping?
Today, money still trumps public safety—and if anything, it’s only gotten worse.
And, of course, it’s all about the money. It always is. It’s the reason why virtually every piece of legislation introduced to actually benefit the public at large is either blocked or so badly watered down as to make it meaningless.
Still, elected officials beholden to their deep-pocketed donors—just like the fictional Mayor Larry Vaughn—tell activists and advocates to accept neutered pieces of worthless legislation because then there is at least a chance those empty bills will pass.
But who’s setting the bar for legislative acceptability in New York City? REBNY and the rest of the big money people—that’s who.
That’s why the party affiliation, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion of any City Council Member, Mayor, or department head sold to the public as some kind of virtue or attribute is a scam.
What does it matter to have the first Muslim Mayor or women-led City Council when municipal retirees are still denied the care they were promised; home care workers are forced to accept institutionalized wage theft; public housing tenants are sold out; and EMTs and paramedics are deprived of a living wage?
It means nothing to working people when big money still holds the strings.
That’s why those in elected office deserve zero deference. That’s why Mayor Larry Vaughn should have been run out of town on a rail. Where is the bottom of the barrel when 9/11 first-responders and other working class people who dedicated their working lives to the City of New York can be so casually ignored and intentionally forgotten?
The 9/11 files are providing good information—but if we don’t watch out, information without action can backfire into nothing but a paralyzing pyrrhic victory that demoralizes all who continue to fight for justice.
The 9/11 files are out—but who’s going to jail now that they’ve been released? What institutionalized changes will result? What kind of revolution will we see?