Bloomberg Upset at Ruling Against Decades of FDNY Racial Hiring Bias

A federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, today, Wednesday, October 5, 2011, ruled that improved recruitment will not be sufficient to overcome decades of racial bias for white men and against black and Latino job candidates. U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled that there will be court monitoring to ensure that hiring is more diverse.

From Reuters, , "Court to keep tabs on New York City fire department hiring":

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who last week identified "areas of concern and room for improvement" in how the city recruits minority candidates for its fire department, followed up Wednesday with a broad but open-ended draft remedial order that calls on New York City to make a top-to-bottom reassessment of how it handles racial issues in how it recruits, hires and employs black and Hispanic firefighters.

The judge faulted New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg's leadership on the issue of Fire Department of New York diversity, ( from the New York Daily News:

While issuing the order, Brooklyn Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis slammed Mayor Bloomberg and his team for ignoring a mountain of evidence showing discriminatory hiring practices for years.

"Though the city's use of discriminatory hiring practices has persisted through numerous changes in city leadership, the evidence adduced in this case gives the court little hope that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg or any of his senior leadership has any intention of stepping up to the task of ending discrimination in the FDNY," Garaufis wrote.

Mayor Bloomberg, always the grumpy contrarian curmudgeon, expressed his displeasure with the federal court ruling, from the Daily News, "Mayor Bloomberg slammed by judge for ignoring years of discrimination in FDNY hiring practices"

"The judge was not elected to run the city, and you can rest assured that we'll be in court for a long time," Bloomberg shot back.

The city's and Mayor Bloomberg's contemptuousness about the issue of racial diversity parallels the pattern of the disappearing black and Latino teacher (in the NYC Department of Education) that Sean Ahern has written about.

On 9/11 Anniversary: Never Forget: Giuliani, Whitman, Bloomberg, Other GOP Betrayed First Responders' Health

As some may have noticed earlier this month, the British journal, "The Lancet," released a study, reporting that Fire Department of New York (FDNY) firefighters that served duty at "the pit" or Ground Zero of the footprint of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers developed cancer at a rate of 19 percent greater than the rate for the population of New York firefighters who did not work at Ground Zero.
Duh!



With the fires and dust clouds that remained at the pit for months and at streets in a one-quarter mile radius from the site for days, the air was sickening to encounter for a few minutes.

On the fifth-year anniversary of the airplanes's terror attacks collision into the Twin Towers, the New York Times reported on what was in the air after the buildings collapsed ("the film" refers to "Dust to Dust," a documentary on the health problems that the air posed to workers in the Ground Zero area):

In addition to more than 400 tons of asbestos, this film counts 90,000 tons of jet fuel containing benzene; mercury from more than a half-million fluorescent lights; 200,000 pounds of lead and cadmium from computers; crystalline silica from 420,000 tons of concrete, plasterboard and glass; and perhaps as much as two million pounds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from the diesel-fueled fires. Some of those substances are carcinogens; others can cause kidney, liver, heart and nervous-system damage.

It doesn't take a graduate degree in any field of science to realize that this stuff would be dangerous to breathe and that health problems would create fatalities beyond the original roughly 3,000 to die on the original September 11.

MSNBC ran a story, also on the 2006 anniversary, “Most 9/11 recovery workers suffered lung ills: 70 percent of WTC responders developed symptoms, major study shows“ which is still available in video online.

(Will the James Zadroga Fund administrators now include cancer coverage to Ground Zero workers, after their denial this summer? --"Anger voiced at NYC meeting on 9/11 victim fund")

GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS LIED TO OR OTHERWISE BETRAYED THE FIRST RESPONDERS
*Then Mayor Rudy Giuliani told New Yorkers that "The air is safe as far as we can tell, with respect to chemical and biological agents."
*Then Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd-Whitman said that
the air was safe to breathe and that people in the area were not "exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances."
*Never forget the opposition of Congressional Republicans to the James Zadroga bill to give health expense aid to Ground Zero workers.
*Then there's current mayor Michael Bloomberg, who banned religious leaders and organized prayer at the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
*And he banned firefighters from the 9/11/11 commemoration ceremony. Read CNN report, "First responders decry exclusion from 9/11 ceremony" on the same.

Bloomberg had sought to limit local monies for the sickly first responders. From Jan. 21, 2007 reporting on mayor Bloomberg's legal struggles to limit city payouts to those sickened at Ground Zero:

Mayor Bloomberg is calling for an emergency halt to a judge's orders that the city start paying sick World Trade Center workers, The Post has learned.

Lawyers for the city have asked an appellate court to stop Manhattan federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein from forging ahead with settlements and trials for 9/11 responders seeking compensation for respiratory illness, cancer and other diseases ....

Hellerstein has refused to delay the case while the Bloomberg administration appeals his earlier ruling that the city does not enjoy blanket immunity from such suits under a state disaster act.