Tag: 9/11

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For What it’s Worth

Though a large majority of Americans thought it was right and good and natural for the government to pay off the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, it was not. This was a completely original application of government resources that had never been done before, and it was at the behest of the airline industry which convinced the government– and the makers of this movie–“Worth”– that the nation would suffer immense economic harm if existing law was permitted to prevail and the airlines were sued, like they should have been in a capitalist free enterprise economy.

Have the airlines ever sued somebody?  Have any of the executives or large shareholders of the airlines ever sued somebody?  Did they think, before 9/11, that unlimited jury awards in tort cases might be a bad idea (actually, Republicans generally do)?  Why were gun manufacturers specifically exempted from tort law in 2005?   (As the link clarifies, gun makers could still be liable for “defects” in their product, if a product designed to kill and maim people can ever be said to have defects– does it not kill and maim?  Take it back to the store!)

Remember all that blather you heard about government hand-outs leading to toxic dependency? Yeah, that’s only for immigrants and black people.  In a capitalist system, as we claim to have, and as we say justifies letting poor people fend for themselves instead of helping them, the courts provide a system by which a good citizen can address compensation for deficiencies in a product or service that causes personal loss and suffering.

So the U.S. government broke all of it’s own rules and principles and decided that it would pay off the families of victims so the airlines could continue to pay off its shareholders and executives.

Next problem: how to decide who gets what?

We are the government: we have trillions. Line up and put your hands out everyone. And remember, repeat after me, “it’s not about the money”. Let’s work on the euphemisms for it: to bring closure; to ensure dignity; to make sure this never happens again; to bless the children and the kittens and the apple pie.

Meet Ken Feinberg, who, you should know, has been repeatedly hired (subsequent to 9/11) by large, powerful corporations like BP and Boeing to handle massive claims distributions after great big disasters. (Most recently, he has managed the 737 Max victim fund). Feinberg is asked by John Ashcroft to be the master of the compensation fund for victims of 9/11 and to the credit of “Worth” he is shown to be, at first, pretty clueless about managing the delicate feelings of the victim’s families.  (Except that he does refuse a salary– but then, we know how that works: somewhere down the road he will receive another appointment, maybe to a board or government post, that does pay, very, very well).  But the film does want it both ways: the families cannot be seen to be a mob of greedy materialists salivating at huge financial rewards. It’s not about the money, right? But it is always about the money and even the supposedly “pure” Donato family that sneers at the idea of taking compensation eventually joins the suit. Possibly the gravest hypocrisy in the U.S. right now is this absolute bullshit that people get away with when suing someone for a grievous loss. It is always about the money. “Worth” is far more honest than I expected about that, and presents some interesting dialogue about how the “worth” of a human life is determined. Should a janitor’s family get the same payout as a rich executive? (The initial plan, which rightly offended so many of the litigants, said: the CEO should get more since more potential earnings were lost.) And what about the children of a fireman by a woman with whom he was having a secret affair? Even more delicate: the gay partner of one man who lived in Virginia which did not allow for gay spouses. “Worth” is above average in it’s handling of these subjects, and relatively self-effacing– for a time– about Feinberg himself. Perhaps that is because it was critical to present him credibly while soft-pedalling the fact that this was all, all, really about sparing the airlines’ shareholders from shouldering the cost of their liability for 9/11, and for allowing juries to award scads and scads of millions of dollars for “pain and suffering” to family members who can cry on cue on the stand during a trial. We are also shielded from detailed discussion about the percentage of a settlement sucked up by the lawyers in cases like this.  The most depressing thing about this entire episode is how the government continues to resist any serious discussion about compensating the families of victims of slavery, or racial violence, in any form whatsoever. I’m not saying there is no argument against it– there is. I’m just noting how obvious the difference is between these two constituencies, and how quickly we can disregard and make exceptions to policy whenever we feel like it.

Astonishingly, Feinberg’s entry in Wikipedia contains no personal information about the man.  That is wondrous, for someone who was pivotal to some of the biggest and most controversial disasters in recent memory.

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We Shall not Speak of the Badly Managed Disaster

12 years ago people in the North Tower were repeatedly told to stay at their desks and wait for rescue. Some people didn’t listen. They left the building and lived.

You don’t hear much discussion about how badly managed the disaster really was. The firemen and police could not communicate with each other. The sprinkler system failed. There was no plan in place to rescue people in the upper floors in case there was a large fire on any of the lower floors, let alone a plane crash. The firemen were sent into the building carrying 30 kilograms of equipment and asked to climb up to the 80th floor (or higher) by the stairs. This was courageous and selfless of them, but it was also an idiotic plan, given the gravity of the situation. They were heroes who probably died needlessly and in vain.

Did no one involved in building the World Trade Center ever sit down at a meeting and lead a discussion of what would happen if a massive fire broke out on one of the lower floors? How would people be rescued? I can only assume they believed that the fire suppression equipment would work flawlessly. Why was the World Trade Center exempted from some city fire regulations?

There was a door to the roof: it was locked by an electronic device and no one was able to open it. It probably would not have helped: the top of the tower is covered with guy wires and antennae making it impossible to land a helicopter.

An employee tried to put out some of the fires with an extinguisher: the extinguisher failed to operate.

Some people descended stairways only to find a dead-end and locked doors. In some cases, another stairway was clear and passable: they had no way of finding out, or in locating it. No one knows how many people died because they didn’t know where the exits were.

World Trade Center security staff repeatedly advised people to stay their desks. They even advised some people who had left the building to go back to their desks.

Were they not receiving instructions from anyone sane?

Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg initially refused to release more than 12,000 pages of “oral history” of the fire fighters activities on 9/11.  The reason is obvious: the management of the disaster was a disaster.  Radios failed, leadership was deficient, planning was inadequate, lives were wasted.

Watching the towers collapse, and people jumping from the 100th floor to their deaths, I often thought that if I ever ended up working in a tower like that I would buy myself a hang-glider and keep it near my desk.

It probably wouldn’t work. There may be reasons why– air currents, smoke, sealed windows– but, hell, most of the people who died in the upper floors obviously had no hope of any other escape. Whatever the odds of safely landing a hang-glider in an urban area, they would have been infinitely better the odds of surviving jumping off the building. They probably would also have been better than the odds of being rescued by a fireman climbing the stairs up 100 floors carrying 30-45 kilograms of firefighting equipment on his back.

Does that sound unbelievable?  It does to me so I checked:

By then, the north tower firefighters had been on the move for more than an hour. Each carrying about 100 pounds of gear, only a few had climbed much higher than the 30th floor. Some recalled hearing radio messages from individual firefighters who had made it as far as the 40’s.  NY Times

So why not have a parachute or glider or something of the sort available for every employee in the tower? Because it’s all mad and unthinkable, of course. Because it would seem preposterous.

But it would have been very cool, in the midst of that apocalyptic scene, to see someone jump from a broken window and hang-glide down, in slow, concentric loops, to the street.

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The Un-War

I have said before that there is no “war” on terror. It’s not a war. It’s a series of random skirmishes. But, as I have also observed before, the Republicans would prefer to keep America in a perpetual state of war and they have now succeeded. The Republicans love to say, “sure, in normal times we could respect the constitution, but this is a time of war” or “sure, normally we don’t torture, but this is a time of war…” or ” sure, normally we try to have a fair tax system, but in a time of war, the rich should not have to pay taxes”.  Or how about, normally we don’t steal a nation’s oil reserves, but Iraq wasn’t using them for anything anyway.

There’s a brilliant mind at work here. If you can justify otherwise outrageous policies on the basis of war, why not have a perpetual war. But wouldn’t that be a bad thing? Only if it was a real war. But then how do you get people to believe we are war when we’re not? Simple. There are always terrorists and always criminals. Simply redefine “war” so it looks like something that is always going on. Bingo.

How does it serve their interests? Fear is the Republicans’ best friend. It is through fear that they can abrogate your civil rights, examine your book-borrowing records, scan you naked at airports. It is through fear that they can channel billions of dollars to their friends in the military and the defense industries. It is through fear that they can hide: our enemies cannot be permitted to know how much we spend on security– as if it would make any difference to them– and so, neither can you.

This “war” is not going to end. Obama can’t end it because the Republicans will roast him for being “soft” on terror if he does, and he doesn’t have the guts to take a chance on that. It will not end because there has never not been terrorists and there probably will never not be terrorists, and the Republicans know that perfectly well. They have their dream position. They know that they are sonsofbitches and as long as they can keep America afraid they are confident that Americans will trust them to wield the big stick and do to our enemies what we consider monstrous when they do it to us.

This war is forever. Patriotism, flag-waving, bigotry prevails for now. Trillions will be spent on fighting the phantom menace, ineffectually in the end, because the very definition of terrorism is random violence.

I don’t when or if Americans will ever realize how they have been conned.

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Extraordinarily Lavish Survivor Benefits: Why?

The average family of a victim of the 9/11 terrorist attacks received about $3 million from insurance companies and the federal government of the United States. Altogether, the governments kicked in about $16 billion in compensation. (Insurance Companies kicked in about the same amount.) The government enacted legislation limiting the liability of governments, airports, airlines, and other agencies or companies, in exchange for the settlements produced by the 9/11 fund.

[2011-09-26 I just reread that and I couldn’t believe it. So I double-checked. Yes, $16 billion. And I’m sure lots of people watching it all unfold on TV thought to themselves, boy, they can’t pay them enough.

Yes they can.

You just want the theatrical moment in your mind when you well up with tears and awesomeness at how

As the Rand Corporation pointed out, the government’s actions here establish some precedents for compensation for the victims of a terrorist attack. Politically, it was impossible to stand up to the families of the victims of 9/11: all they had to do was go on TV and complain about “unfair” treatment and politicians of all stripes would fall over themselves to grant their every wish. They even demanded the right to censor any entertainments eventually provided in facilities at the new World Trade Center.

There were concerns that litigation would go on forever, would cost far more than the roughly $30 billion offered by the government, and make everybody feel really, really bad.

The lawsuits would have been a grave thing– what jury could resist giving a huge award to someone who lost a loved one because the airlines and the airports didn’t check for box-cutters? But no one, of course, was going to be able to sue the people actually responsible for the disaster: Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.. Instead, you sue whoever happens to be nearby, with large wallets. The government is always handy, even if we say we don’t want them intruding on our lives. Then, when the Bush Administration couldn’t get Bin Laden, they followed a similar strategy of diffusion: let’s kill Saddam. You sue or kill the most convenient target or the target with deep pockets.

The victims of Hurricane Katrina, of course, were not so lavishly compensated for their losses. Of course, you couldn’t sue Katrina herself either. And for some reason, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and the remarkably inept government response, didn’t have nearly the political sway the victims of 9/11 had.

Does that have anything to with the economic status or colour of the victims?  You decide.

There was something about the hatred and bitterness and vindictiveness of the 9/11 Families that seemed to have nothing or little to do with perceived or real injustice. It was not pleasant to watch. It caused me personally to begin to lose sympathy for them thought they had suffered real losses.

It’s a lot of money. I think you should only be able to sue for that kind of money if you could clearly demonstrate that there was reckless disregard for the safety of the individuals working in the towers. How reckless were they, compared to all the other towers in Manhattan, most of which are equally vulnerable to this kind of attack?

Not the Empire State Building: it was designed differently. A plane did crash into it once — it met an immovable object. The Empire State Building is far, far safer than the World Trade Center because the builders spent enough money to make sure it was safe. That’s all there is to it.

It is a known fact that no fire above the 37th floor of building in New York City can be fought by fire-fighters.  Nobody cares– not when a billion dollars of office space is just sitting there to be cashed in on.  Buildings are required to have a water tank on the top floor: the World Trade Centre safety equipment did not work.  The door to the roof was locked and could not be opened.

It probably would have cost a lot less than $30 billion to have built the World Trace Center to the standards.

On the 9/11 compensation fund.

9/11 was a genuine act of savagery and a genuine tragedy. One is tempted to forget that, in the face of the relentless, incessant, over-bearing monumentalism going on in the U.S. right now.

U.S. payback was overwhelming, disproportionate, and wildly misguided. And it was payback. Will there be a moment at which the U.S. finally announces that they are even?

On 3/20 will the Iraqis hold a memorial to the 100,000 innocent people who died in the American invasion? (We’re talking about women and children and non-combatants here). Will they solemnly read off the names of the 100,000 at the site of the one of the bombed out neighborhoods? Will the families of the 100,000 sue whoever is nearby with a fat wallet for “compensation”?

We know they won’t get a penny. They just happened to be in the way.

About $3 billion was given to the 9/11 fund from charities.

 

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How to Attend to an Emergency, Mr. President

In the tenth episode of Season 1, “In Excelsis Deo”, of West Wing, President Bartlet is entertaining a group of school children in the White House at a Christmas Celebration when urgent news arrives concerning the health of a gay youth who had been beaten nearly to death (obviously based on the Matthew Shepherd murder).

An aide approaches Bartlet as he is speaking to the children and whispers in his ear. Bartlet, cool as could be, tells the children that one of the parts of his job is to attend to emergencies from time to time. He leaves them for a moment and goes off with the aide who fills him in. He makes a few comments and then returns to the children.

This episode was filmed in 1999, two years before 9/11.

I have heard people defend President Bush’s performance on 9/11 by saying it was quite reasonable for him to continue sitting there, looking painfully at a loss, for seven minutes after an aide had informed him about the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It’s odd that Aaron Sorkin, merely creating a fictional situation for his tv series, thought the President would do what Bartlet did, so smoothly and confidently, in that episode. At the time I saw it, of course, I barely noticed it. It was only after viewing Season 1 again, years later, that I was struck by the uncanny resemblance of the fictional scene to what happened in real two years later, and the contrast between what Aaron Sorkin thought the President would do and what Bush actually did. I believe that had Bartlet been a conservative Republican, Sorkin would have had him do the same thing: it’s so simple, so logical, so becoming of the President of the United States.

Just noted.

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Canadian Tire and 9/11

I never knew this before, but during the 9/11 crisis, when thousands of airlines passengers were stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, the local Canadian Tire Store, with approval from head office, instructed their clerks to ask if any customer was one of the “airplane people”. If they were, the clerks were instructed to allow them to take whatever they needed without cost.

We drove past that Canadian Tire on our way to Trinity Bay from Twillingate. Across the road is a Walmart. Most of the “airplane people” were American, but the Walmart charged their usual prices for everything– they actually had more of what the passengers needed because all of the luggage was sealed in the planes and inaccessible.

Canadian Tire, when it ran out of sleeping bags and such, bought $10,000 worth of goods from Walmart and gave it away to the passengers.

Let’s not be tacky and notice how the grateful Americans have repaid us by slandering our health care system.

Well, probably not the ones who stayed in Gander, Newfoundland.

About that Canadian Health Care System– if you are an American and you have heard the ridiculous attacks, you should consider this one thing alone: there has not been a single federal politician in any recent election in Canada who has dared to advocate dismantling it. Not a single one. If Canadians were even remotely unhappy with our system, would you not expect at least a few daring rogues to run on a platform of making our system more like America’s?

Then consider this: Canadians, inundated with American media, have a deep familiarity with both systems. Most Americans have virtually no familiarity with the Canadian, or British, or French systems . I am eternally impressed with those citizens standing up at those town hall meetings with remarkable confidence in their own experiences and knowledge, of which there seems to us, very little, to let all Americans know just what should be done with the health care system, and don’t you dare require us to support anything we didn’t choose, even though they expect Americans to support every war– and there’s been a pile of them– whether they chose it or not.

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Revenge is an Empty Motive

I had a choice of staying with these feelings or sort of nurturing them,” Bane said. “I tried to think of ways I could learn more. I felt the need for bridges of understanding with people who could do this kind of thing.” Bane eventually organized a Muslim-Christian dialogue in Delaware, where he now lives. Washington Post, April 20, 2006

Donald Bane is the father of Michael Andrew Bane, who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. He spoke at the sentencing phase of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. He spoke as a witness for the defense.

In America, such testimony is not permitted if it overtly asserts that the defendant should not be killed. I don’t fully grasp this concept. Now that I think about it, I suppose that the relatives of victims of 9/11 who testified for the prosecution couldn’t actually say, “we’d like to see Moussaoui die”. They could only say, look at how my life has been destroyed by this man. Draw your own conclusion. Why should this man be alive? So I suppose the witnesses called for the defense could say… well, what they did say?

The defense called Bane and a handful of other relatives of 9/11 victims to give quiet, dignified testimony to the effect that there are alternatives to vengeance, and alternatives to declaring that your life has been destroyed by a tragedy and is no longer worth living because the only thing that can give you satisfaction is to see someone– maybe anyone– die in retribution.

Bane said his life was worth living. He has even initiated some projects that he hopes will promote understanding and peace between Moslems and Christians.

A large number of family members of 9/11 are still angry, and they want to see someone die for the sins of Mohammed Atta and his co-conspirators. Since Atta and his friends are all already dead, Zacarias Moussaoui is the only prospective candidate.

But an execution doesn’t give any real satisfaction, and it doesn’t bring closure, and it doesn’t bring your loved one back. It just creates more people who wish their loved one could come back from the dead. Yes, even Zacarias Moussaoui has a mother. And even she knows he is a lunatic and that no civilized society would execute a lunatic, especially when he hasn’t actually committed any crimes.

Does that sound strange to you? It’s true: Zacarias Moussaoui has not committed any crimes– other than not registering his visa properly. Moussaoui has proclaimed that he wanted to be a 9/11 conspirator and even insists that he would like to be one in the future. We should wish that all our enemies could be so forthright. But if we hanged everyone who claimed to be responsible for sensational crimes, we’d have a busy hangman indeed.

So, when you consider George W. Bush and the military and the tendencies of conservatives to accuse liberals of being soft and weak and indecisive, and you consider that the school of vengeance sits weeping in the courtroom, confessing to everyone (in the mistaken belief that there is a point to it) that he or she is incapable of finding something in this world worth living for, other than revenge…. when you consider that Donald Bane seems like a perfectly decent human being…

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Sinful Pat Robertson

You may have noticed that little storm God sent to Louisiana and Mississippi. The message is clear. God is angry. He wants to punish someone for the grievous sin of blaspheming his holy name. That someone is Pat Robertson.

Just a few weeks ago, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. Then he lied about calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and accused the mainstream media of taking him out of context and misquoting him.

But now it’s clear that Pat Robertson was the one who sinned. He advocated murder, which, according to the bible, is the same as actually committing the murder himself. Then he accused others of sin to cover up his own sin. So God sent Katrina to teach him a lesson.

Now, you may have noticed that Katrina didn’t actually do any harm to Pat Robertson but it did do a great deal of harm to a lot of innocent people in New Orleans and Biloxi and Mobile, and so on.

But that’s the way it is with God’s wrath. As Jerry Falwell pointed out, 9/11 was punishment for America’s acceptance and tolerance of homosexuals. It didn’t matter if none of the people in those buildings were actual homosexuals, just as it didn’t matter that none of the people in New Orleans waiting in their attics in water up to their collar-bones was actually Pat Robertson.

If you believe that sort of thing.

You are not sure if God really sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson? How would you know if I was wrong? You would pray about it, right, and God would tell you?

What if God told you that Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ tradition of drunkenness and debauchery? What if God told me that it was punishment for Pat Robertson’s militancy? How do we know which is the real message from the real God?

Actually, maybe it’s not as hard as it looks. Just read the bible, especially the gospels. Then try to imagine that God would get more angry at a lot of poor black people who have been beat up and abused most of their lives than he would at a rich and powerful white preacher who, confronted with the problem of dwindling supplies of oil for America’s lavish lifestyle, advocates political assassination over conservation.  And confronted with the problems of racism and poverty and inequality, he would advocate reduced taxes for the rich?

Try to imagine Christ saying, “blessed are those who give tax deductions to investors and shareholders, and who reduce the liability of manufacturers for defects in their products, and whosoever provideth grants and incentives to profitable companies that they might exploit disasters for their own gain…”

You see?  God sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson.  I prayed about it and it’s true.