Tag Archives: FEMA

‘Sadistic and Depraved’: Trump Rejects California Request for Federal Disaster Aid to Recover From Catastrophic Wildfires

“That a sitting president—of any party—would deny their own citizens help during their time of greatest need, amid literal hellfire raining down on American cities, is beyond shameful.”

By Jake Johnson, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 10-16-2020

Screenshot: CBS News

After repeatedly downplaying the catastrophic wildfires that have ravaged California in recent months and falsely attributing the blazes to poor “forest management,” the Trump administration this week denied Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for federal disaster assistance needed to recover from the destruction the fires inflicted across the state.

The Los Angeles Times reported late Thursday that the Trump White House “rejected California’s request for disaster relief funds aimed at cleaning up the damage from six recent fires… including Los Angeles County’s Bobcat fire, San Bernardino County’s El Dorado fire, and the Creek fire, one of the largest that continues to burn in Fresno and Madera counties.” Continue reading

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The American West Is Burning But Trump Hasn’t Mentioned Historic Wildfires in ‘Any Way, Shape, or Form’ for Nearly 3 Weeks

“President Trump’s silence and complete disregard for the millions of people at risk is horrifying,” said one climate advocate.

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9/10/2020

Photo: Forest Service NW/Twitter

Climate action advocates and journalists are calling out President Donald Trump’s silence for nearly three weeks, as historic wildfires have torn across the western United States, devastating communities that were already struggling in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and related economic crisis.

Both CNN and the group Climate Power 2020—which works to put the Trump administration on defense for ignoring scientists and serving polluters—pointed out Thursday that the president hasn’t publicly addressed the climate change-fueled fires “in any way, shape, or form” since August, despite attending dozens of events. Continue reading

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The Covid-19 Timeline Trump Does Not Want You To See

In order to understand how the COVID-19 virus has spread so far across the American landscape, one must study the timeline. In science, this is called looking at the model. We’ve heard a lot about looking at models – but this is the one you are not supposed to notice.

You are not supposed to see a clear pattern of first denial, then feigned victory. You are not supposed to see the total lack of leadership, the inability to use resources to solve problems, even lacking the ability to admit the destruction this virus could cause was grossly underestimated.

So here we are, America. Our health care system is failing with health care professionals becoming sick because they are unable to get the personal protective equipment they need that is mandated. Our food supply is at risk as workers are either afraid or too sick to plant, harvest or process our food. Small businesses in rural communities will never reopen, further damaging the farmer and small towns across rural America. And come November, we are supposed to believe “he” alone has saved us from a fate worse than death – not allowing him to have things his way. What makes you sickest? This “model” or COVID-19?

Dec 18th – House Impeaches Trump

Jan 8th – First CDC warning

Jan 9th – Trump campaign rally

Jan 14th – Trump campaign rally

Jan 16h – House sends impeachment articles to Senate

Jan 18th – Trump golfs Jan 19th – Trump golfs

Jan 20th – first case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.

Jan 22nd – “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan 24th – Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion.

Jan 28th – Trump campaign rally

Jan 30th – Trump campaign rally

Feb 1st – Trump golfs

Feb 2nd – “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”

Feb 5th – Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.

Feb. 10th – Trump’s new budget plan is released, including $844 billion in cuts to health care and related research over a decade

Feb 10th – Trump campaign rally

Feb 12th – Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42

Feb 15th – Trump golfs

Feb 19th – Trump campaign rally

Feb 20th – Trump campaign rally

Feb 21st – Trump campaign rally

Feb 24th – “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Feb 25th – “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”

Feb 25th – “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb 26th – “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

Feb 26th – “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” Also “This is a flu. This is like a flu”; “Now, you treat this like a flu”; “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”

February 27th: – “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Feb 28th – “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”

Feb 28th – Trump campaign rally

March 2nd – “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

March 2nd – “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”

March 4th –  “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 5th – “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”

March 5th – “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”

March 6th – “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 6th – “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”

March 6th – “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

March 6th – “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

March 7th – Trump golfs

March 8th – Trump golfs

March 8th – “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

March 9th – “This blindsided the world.”

March 13th – [Declared state of emergency]

March 17th – “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

March 18th – “It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.”

Mar 19th – “We’re not a shipping clerk.” Trump tells governors to step up their efforts to get medical supplies from the open market, while FEMA begins seizing the orders states place.

March 23th- Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93

March 25th – 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.

March 30th – Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16

March 31st – Frank Gabrin becomes the first ER doctor in the US to die from COVID-19

April 1st – Over 4,000+ Americans have died from the corona virus.

April 2nd – 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

April 3rd – Secret Service signs “emergency order” for golf carts at Trump’s Virginia Golf Club location

April 6th – The Trump administration quietly invoked the Defense Production Act to force medical suppliers in Texas and Colorado to sell to it first — ahead of states, hospitals or foreign countries.

April 8th – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, citing a need to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, temporarily halts some efforts to recover hundreds of millions of dollars in overpayments made to Medicare Advantage health plans.

April 9th – Another 6.6 million file for unemployment.

April 13th – White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing devolves into disinformation and defense of Trump’s actions.

April 13th – USA leads the world while testing less than 1% of the population. At press time, the US have tested only 2,935,006 people. Of those, 582,607 are diagnosed with COVID-19. 23,628 Americans are dead. Only 44,261 have recovered.

April 13th – Capt. Brett Crozier is in quarantine after testing positive for the coronavirus. Over 580 of the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s crew of 4,800 tested positive as of Sunday, according to the Navy. Nearly 4,000 of the crew members have since evacuated the ship into Guam, where many of them are under quarantine in hotels. Today, one of the sailors died.

Editor’s Note: In order to best understand the fray between reality and Trump’s view, please read this and this.

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Trump Reportedly Wants to Cut Off Federal Relief Funds to Puerto Rico Despite Post-Maria Devastation

The president claims, with no evidence, that local officials want to use recovery money to pay down the U.S. territory’s sizeable debt

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 11-12-2018

President Donald Trump reportedly wants to cut off federal relief funding to Puerto Rico even though much of the island is still devastated by Hurricane Maria, which hit the isalnd in September of 2017. (Chris Grogan/Air Force Magazine/Flickr)

Although it has been more than a year since Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, in parts of the U.S. territory, “it’s like the hurricane hit yesterday“—yet President Donald Trump wants to cut off recovery money, according to Axios, “because he claims, without evidence, that the island’s government is using federal disaster relief money to pay off debt.”

The unfounded claims about federal funds being misappropriated come from Trump’s misreading of an October Wall Street Journal article, multiple unnamed sources told Axios‘ Jonathan Swan. Continue reading

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Minnesota Police Train at Military Base as Line 3 Pipeline Protests Escalate

Pipeline protests in Standing Rock pitted police against Native Americans and their supporters.

By Andrew Neef. Published 10-25-2018 by Unicorn Riot

Unicorn Riot has uncovered documents showing coordination between state-wide authorities to prepare for anti-pipeline protests. Emails obtained from Minnesota State Patrol under the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act show close cooperation between state and local law enforcement, the Minnesota Department of Public Safet, pipeline company security staff and a private police foundation.

One such email, dated June 18, 2018, shows discussion about a “table top” exercise located at Camp Ripley, a military base operated by the Minnesota National Guard which also hosts trainings for the Minnesota State Patrol. The email states the exercise “relates to MFF [Mobile Field Force] and the Line 3.”  Line 3 is a controversial pipeline project proposed by Canadian oil giant Enbridge, and has been the focus of years of protests by indigenous tribes and environmental activists. Continue reading

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Nuclear Plants, Toxic Waste Sites Under Threat as Florence Readies ‘Mike Tyson Punch to Carolina Coast’

As new pathway of storm predicted, National Hurricane Center calls looming storm “very large and incredibly dangerous”

By Jon Queally, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 9-12-2018

Satellite image of Hurricane Florence swirling in the Atlantic Ocean as it approaches the U.S. coastline in the early hours of Wednesday morning. (Photo: CIRA/RAAMB)

With reports of skyscraper-likes waves out at sea, the potential for historic coastal surges and rainfall, and severe threats to vulnerable nuclear plants and other industrial waste sites—a behemoth Hurricane Florence is fast-approaching the southeastern U.S. coast on Wednesday as weather experts and emergency management officials intensify their warnings about the dangers the “once-in-a-lifetime” storm poses.

With state governments in South Carolina and North Carolina issuing evacuations along the coast and other potential flood zones, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has said that it is mobilizing for a storm that could knock out power for weeks and lead to the displacement of tens if not hundreds of thousands of residents across multiple states. Continue reading

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Instability Mounts in Puerto Rico Amid Privatization Efforts and Power Authority’s Cash Shortfall

“If this is not disaster economics and this is not setting the stage for commercialization of services that are there to promote equality, I don’t know what is.”

By Julia Conley, staff writer for CommonDreams. Published 2-19-2018

Many rural areas in Puerto Rico remain without power, and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz said Monday that privatization has directly resulted in delays to restoration. (Photo: Western Area Power/Flickr/cc)

As nearly 250,000 Puerto Ricans remain without power five months after Hurricane Maria struck the island territory—the longest blackout in U.S. history—the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) said Sunday it will reduce its operating reserve to save money, as the island’s government moves toward privatizing the authority.

A federal judge denied PREPA a $1 billion loan over the weekend, saying the authority could not prove it needed the additional cash injection. The company will now reduce its reserve by 450 megawatts, saving $9 million per month but likely resulting in more power outages. Continue reading

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Ignoring Threat of Rising Seas, Trump Eliminates Flood Risk Standards

“Silly Trump wants to use tax dollars to build on floodplains as sea level rises. Damp!”

By Jessica Corbett, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 8-15-2017

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday that reportedly revoked Obama-era provisions requiring strict standards to reduce flood risks for federally-funded infrastructure projects. (Photo: maxstrz/flickr/cc)

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that reportedly eliminates flood-risk standards for federally funded public infrastructure projects—in a purported effort to expedite the approval process for projects such as highways and bridges, as part of his $1 trillion infrastructure plan that’s been criticized for its reliance on private developers.

Although details of Trump’s order were not immediately made public, at a press conference this afternoon, the president called U.S. infrastructure a “massive self-inflicted wound on our country,” and said there would no longer be “one job-killing delay after another.” Continue reading

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FEMA Contractor: Unrest After 395% Food Price Spike Coming Soon

By Claire Bernish. Published 6-27-2016 by The Anti-Media

Photo: Bill Koplitz (Public Domain) via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo: Bill Koplitz (Public Domain) via Wikimedia Commons.

Preparations by various cogs of the national security complex, including FEMA, indicate a coming worldwide food shortage — and a resulting crisis marked by extreme civil unrest around the globe.

As Motherboard noted of two reports published previously by CNA Corporation, but which largely escaped attention, the world’s food supply could be insufficient to maintain even current populations much further into the future. And the crisis — which several factors indicate may already be underway — may begin to worsen considerably as early as 2020. Continue reading

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Trying (and Trying) to Get Records From the ‘Most Transparent Administration’ Ever

I experienced firsthand the incompetence and neglect behind Obama’s failure to make good on his FOIA promises.

by Justin Elliott ProPublica.  March 11, 2016, 7 a.m.

Photo: Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon (FBI FOIA) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commonshoto

Photo: Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon (FBI FOIA) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commonshoto

Two years ago last month, I filed a public-records request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency as part of my reporting into the flawed response to Hurricane Sandy. Then, I waited.

The Freedom of Information Act requires a response within 20 business days, but agencies routinely blow that deadline. Eight months later, ProPublica and NPR published our investigation into the Sandy response, but it did not include any documents from FEMA. The agency had simply never gotten back to me.

Finally, this Feb. 10 2014 492 business days past the law’s 20-day deadline 2014 I got a curious phone call from FEMA. The agency was starting a “clean search” for the documents I asked for, because the original search “was not done properly.”

Why?

“I wish I had the answer,” the staffer told me. “There are quite a few cases that this happened to.”

Documents are the lifeblood of investigative journalism, but these problems aren’t of interest only to reporters. The Freedom of Information Act is supposed to deliver on the idea of a government “for and by the people,” whose documents are our documents. The ability to get information from the government is essential to holding the people in power accountable. This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of the law, which has been essential in disclosing the torture of detainees after 9/11, decades of misdeeds by the CIA, FBI informants who were allowed to break the law and hundreds of other stories.

President Obama himself waxed poetic about FOIA on his first full day in office in 2009, issuing a statement calling it “the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government.” He promised that his would be “the most transparent administration in history.”

But Obama hasn’t delivered. In fact, FOIA has been a disaster under his watch.

Newly uncovered documents (made public only through a FOIA lawsuit) show the Obama administration aggressively lobbying against reforms proposed in Congress. The Associated Press found last year that the administration had set a record for censoring or denying access to information requested under FOIA, and that the backlog of unanswered requests across the government had risen by 55 percent, to more than 200,000.

The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee looked into the state of the public-records law and in January issued a report with a simple, devastating title: “FOIA Is Broken.”

Incredibly, it took my ProPublica colleague Michael Grabell more than seven years to get records about air marshal misconduct from the Transportation Security Administration. As he pointed out, his latest contact in the FOIA office was still in high school when Grabell filed his initial request.

After a reporter at NBC4 in Washington sought files related to the 2013 Navy Yard shooting, Navy officials actively strategized about how to thwart the request. The Navy only apologized after it mistakenly forwarded its internal email traffic to the reporter.

When a Mexican journalist asked the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2014 for files related to its role in the capture of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the agency sent a letter back demanding $1.4 million in fees to search its records.

“There’s a leadership void that has gotten worse,” veteran FOIA lawyer Scott Hodes told me. “It’s not treated as an important thing within the administration.”

Why is the law failing so badly after all the promises about transparency? My experience and the experience of other journalists suggests the reason is twofold: incompetence and neglect.

When I probed a bit more into what had gone wrong at FEMA, the agency’s entire FOIA apparatus started to look like a Potemkin village of open government. The FOIA staff was never trained properly, a FEMA spokesman told me. Of 16 positions in the office, eight have long been vacant for reasons that are not entirely clear. The backlog of requests at FEMA has ballooned to 1,500. That’s more than double what it was less than two years ago.

Spokesman Rafael Lemaitre promised that the backlog was “frankly unacceptable to senior leadership here at FEMA, who have been aware of the problems and are taking actions to correct it.”

“Obviously the Freedom of Information Act is a very vital resource for taxpayers,” Lemaitre said. “Frankly, we haven’t done a very good job of fulfilling that promise.”

Over the past two years, whenever I periodically called or emailed for updates, agency staffers either ignored me, said their systems weren’t working or told me they didn’t have any new information.

My request outlasted the tenure of my original contact in the FOIA office. When I called 14 months into the process, I was told she had left the agency 2014 fair enough, as people change jobs all the time. But my request had apparently not been handed off to anyone else. No one seemed to know what was going on.

Last year, the federal FOIA ombudsman found that FEMA took an average of 214 days to process complex FOIA requests, the third-worst in the Department of Homeland Security. (That compares to an average processing time for complex requests of 119 days across the rest of the government.) “A lack of responsiveness prompted lawsuits that cost the agency a bunch of money,” said James Holzer, the head of the ombudsman’s office, who praised FEMA officials for at least recognizing the problem.

A hiring freeze at the agency after sequestration didn’t help matters. But officials told Holzer’s investigators last year that the eight long-vacant positions in the public records office would be filled as early as last fall. Today, those jobs remain empty. The FEMA spokesman didn’t have an explanation for what’s taking so long.

When I tried to find out whether anyone had been held responsible for the fiasco, I didn’t find much more transparency. “I cannot discuss any personnel issues, unfortunately,” the spokesman told me.

Has the agency at least set a specific goal for when it will get through its backlog? “Our target is to get these cleared as quickly as possible 2014 I don’t have a date for you.”

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