Michael Loewinger
speaker
1,796 appearances
17 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 4d ago
Michael Loewinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 9.
Appearances
This is on the media.
I'm Michael Loinger, and you're listening to the first episode of our series, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA.
In my reporting, I learned that FEMA's Cold War mission to save America from nuclear war was met with a lot of suspicion, and understandably so.
Case in point, when I was digging around in the National Archives, something that caught my eye was a tape curiously labeled FEMA Blues.
It turned out to be a comedy special from a guy named Mark Russell, which aired in nineteen eighty two.
He starts with this hokey bit about Luis Jafrida's nuclear evacuation plans.
In an apparent effort to coax Seattle officials into participating, FEMA had offered to subsidize the city's mass relocation, which the city refused.
After a bit of vamping, Russell calls up his band, The Buzzards.
To perform a song that I think captures the zeitgeist in the 80s.
Pit it fellas!
According to its critics, FEMA's leaders were either mounting a comically pitiful defense against the nation's most pressing threat, or they were burning resources that would be better spent on responding to Mother Nature.
Leo Bosner, that OG FEMA employee, was in the latter camp.
As the eighties went on, he was busy trying to warn the press.
I was kind of in my whistleblower mode, letting them know.
That FEMA was spending all of its time doing nuclear stuff and not doing anything for these natural disasters.
If Ronald Reagan's FEMA was too active, too conniving, George Bush Sr.'s FEMA had the opposite problem.
It was out to lunch.
Daddy Bush left the agency leaderless for over a year, and he was punished for it in 1989 when a Category 5 storm came barreling off the Atlantic.
FEMA did a terrible job.
Leo Bosner.
Showing 1161–1180 of 1,796 · page 59 of 90
← Previous
Next →