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.

 

How Dare You Not Stop Everything When I Tell You Too

When construction crews at the site of the World Trade Centre found some human remains in an abandoned manhole last week, some of the families of the victims were “outraged”. They demanded a stop to all construction. They demanded that the world stop turning and the winds stop blowing, until their grief has been adequately recognized by a monument 1150 miles high, made of pure titanium, and costing more than a billion, trillion, zillion dollars.

And all of the other suffering people in the world– your suffering is not important or significant or worthy of memorials or cash awards because, you are not me.

Nobody will publicly take on the families of victims of 9/11 because their shrieking outrage will be deafening and the media is terrified of displeasing them in any way, so they get to make demands like this with impunity, without blowback, without anybody calling them out.

And one thing the media would not dare to do is raise the question of why other victims of government malfeasance or neglect, like black families living in poor neighborhoods because of red-lining,  polluted by lead factories or dumps of asphalt shingles or leaky refineries, suffering outrageously increased rates of cancer and lung disease, — why do these families never receive even a penny of compensation for their suffering?

Yes, we do know.  And it is an outrage.

 

Monuments to Victim Vanity

The strange, strange sacred and immutable right of families of 9/11 victims to spend an unlimited amount of public money on an obscenely tasteless monument: does anybody have the guts to say, enough is enough? They are now discussing a $1 billion dollar monument to the victims of 9/11, at the site of the former World Trade Centre. Did you know that the monument to all 55,000 dead soldiers from the Viet Nam War cost a “mere” $7 million? For that $7 million, those families received one of the most graceful, respectful, and amazing monuments ever built.

(Then the veterans jumped in and erected a more traditional monument right next to it to spoil the effect. Damn you– we are not ashamed of our war!)

Where will all this money go? Probably to middle-men, agents, lawyers, and contractors. Oh– there will be about $500 for a “vehicle security” gadget. I can’t imagine what that will be. Is it because they think more 9/11 hijackers are going to come over and destroy the memorial?

Will families of dead soldiers from Viet Nam please organize themselves? It’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon and demand your share. You should probably get a $10 billion dollar monument, and it should be right in front of the White House and it should be at least 2000 feet tall.

I’m sorry, but as sympathetic as I am to the families of the victims, it’s hard to not see this all as an insult to their memories.

But not all of them. I’m sure some of the families believe, as I do, that this entire exercise has turned into a tawdry, tacky joke and someone should stick a fork in it.

Now here’s my insanely great solution to the entire debacle: they should build a quiet, humble, small memorial at the base of the towers, and then donate the $990 million left over to fund “freedom schools” in Arabic countries that teach, for free, science, geography, music, literature, and math to earnest young Arab boys and girls.

Some of the families of the victims will say: such a small memorial would be an insult to the memories of our loved ones. Well, think about that. The memorial is not about them– it’s about you.

Monument to Conformity: The WTC Memorial and REAL Political Correctness

Was there ever a better illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the Republican Party than this: they are building a monument to “freedom”– upon which they lavish their tearful adoration– that will exclude anybody they don’t like.

The museum, the “International Freedom Centre”, is out of the new World Trade Center. Gone. Excluded. Rejected. Dismissed. Because in spite of the efforts of “patriotic” Americans like George Bush, because it was being built in a tax-payer funded government owned building, it would and could not guarantee that it would only ever pander to and praise those patriotic values espoused by the paragons of virtue, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and his fellow Republicans.

The law is clear: it would have to actually allow for freedom of speech.

Yes, Governor Pataki put the fix in, not only for the museum, but for every occupant of the new building, who must now pass a litmus test of political Republican orthodoxy before being allowed in. Naturally, some of the tenants have declined to give enlightened people like Bill Frist or Donald Rumsveld a veto over what sort of speech should be permitted there. The Republicans, you see, identify mindless obedient conformity with true “patriotism”.

A patriot does not stand for freedom of speech.

Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles, a pilot of one of the 9/11 planes, had screeched that she must be the one who decides what may or may not go into the new World Trade Centre because anyone who disagrees with her shrill views on the meaning of 9/11 just isn’t American like her, even if they too lost relatives in 9/11.

This is so ridiculous, and repulsive, and absurd that it strains credulity, as they say. The monument to American freedom must be unfree, and cowards who cannot abide the slightest dissidence must control the design of a monument to courage, and puritanical Republican harpies must control the expression of democracy.

Don’t let conservatives bullshit you: this is real political correctness.

 


Here is what Debra Burlingame and Governor Pataki and Anne Coulter would deny you: freedom to consider both sides of the issue– a link to a website with eloquent discussion of the issue.

Bush – WTC II

So what exactly is George Bush Jr. going to do?

He’s already made a couple of major mistakes here. He declared that an act of criminal terrorism was actually an act of war. He has vowed to eradicate terrorism from the face of the earth. He has promised the American people that he will destroy evil in the world.

We’re all getting carried away here. It sounds ridiculous, considering the scale of the disaster, the World Trade Centre attack, but we are getting carried away.

First of all, it was not an act of war. You have to have two parties for an act of war and both parties have to be nations in some form or another. So far, what we have, is a tightly bound group of conspirators. We have about 20 men against the entire military and industrial might of the United States of America. If this was a war, it would have been over before it started.

Bush has yet to show the world any evidence of complicity of any sovereign nation.

By calling it an “act of war”, Bush actually diminishes the horror of what the fanatics did. If it’s an act of war, it falls into the category of Dresden and London during World War II, or Hiroshima, or My Lai, or any of dozens of other wartime atrocities that history tends to excuse because it regards them as examples of excess, not criminality.

On this issue, I consider myself harsher than Bush: it was an act of criminal terror. It was mass murder.

By calling it an “act of war”, Bush probably hoped to justify a vigorous and powerful U.S. response. The next question, of course, is what is that response going to be?

It seems to me that there are three major options.

  1. He can blame a particular nation and launch a full-scale attack and invasion of that nation.
  2. He can blame a particular person or group and launch a limited attack with the aim of killing or apprehending that person or group. Or…
  3. He can blame a network of organizations and political entities and launch numerous limited attacks on their bases and hideouts.

Is there some other viable option I missed? I can’t think of it. I tried to think of it because these three options aren’t really very good.

With his grandiose rhetoric, Bush has created high expectations. Americans are waiting to see a big development. Can he deliver?

Option 1 is hopeless. There are good reasons why the U.S. would not want to invade or occupy Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen or whoever. It would take a long time, and there would be an enormous cost in lives. It would likely introduce instability into a potentially volatile region. It would create a large pool of new, future terrorists. It would create alarm and concern in China and Russia and Pakistan. If the U.S. occupied the nation, it would have to constantly contend with terrorists and insurrectionists.

It would result in disaster.  [2022-04-27: Looks like I was right about that.]

The Soviets couldn’t take Afghanistan. It is a nation of mountains and deserts, with no infrastructure left, after the Soviet Occupation, to destroy. An invasion would unite the fractious forces that are currently at each other’s throats, as well as recruit tens of thousands of Islamic volunteers from other nations, some of whom will try to bring the war home to America. Most importantly, it would destabilize Pakistan.

Pakistan has a bomb.

I can’t believe the U.S. will adopt this insane strategy.  [They did.]

Option 2 is a more attractive, viable option, but won’t be effective. It’s too easy for the targets to move and hide and avoid interdiction. If it is the option Bush chooses, expect a ton of spin on the results. We got them. We got most of them. We got a lot of them. But nobody is going to be able to pretend we got all of them, and the ones we miss will strike back with a vengeance. Two, three years down the road, someone is going to ask an embarrassing question: do you feel safer today than you did in 2000?

Option 3 will look the most impressive with a new CNN logo and theme music. Lots of maps and diagrams, showing a combination of missiles, bombs, and paratroops, taking out numerous targets, and making a mighty impression on the global reach of the all-powerful U.S. military.

Once again, I doubt it will be particularly effective, but it will look effective, and when terrorists continue to strike back, it can be made to look more like the results of having intractable enemies than foolish foreign policy. American allies in the region– Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt– can breathe a big sigh of relief as the Americans pack up their carriers and rush home.

What should they do?

They should launch a new era of activism abroad with a concerted effort to broker peace in Israel, and to promote economic development in democratic third world nations. The U.S. should sign the Kyoto accord and law of the sea treaties, and ease up on it’s demands in the areas of trade and intellectual property rights.

It should forgive huge amounts of global debt.

That last item would cost it a lot less than most of the military options.

JFK WTC I

I keep thinking about the Kennedy assassination. It’s the only other event I can remember that parallels, in my mind, the impact of this catastrophe. At the time, people compared Kennedy’s violent death to Pearl Harbor, and the death of Roosevelt, so I guess that makes the lineage clear: Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s death, Kennedy’s Assassination, the World Trade Centre. In a league of their own.

Only four men died, initially, in the Kennedy Assassination– if you don’t count all those “mysterious” deaths of witnesses– but one was the youngest, brightest, and most forward-looking President in the history of the U.S. The others included one of the most baffling figures in American history: Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald allegedly also killed Officer J.D. Tippit (one of the most puzzling peripheral characters in this drama) and was killed, in turn, by Jack Ruby, who, in turn, died of cancer in prison.

It is to the eternal shame of the Warren Commission that it did not create a sensation with a detailed biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, who joined the Marines, helped service U-2 spy planes in Japan, spoke fluent Russian, defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian, defected back to the U.S., wandered around Dallas and Irving, Texas, and New Orleans, in the company of CIA agents and provocateurs, anti-Castro Cubans, and gay gun-runners and erstwhile assassins, and whose best friend in Dallas was a strange ex-Nazi CIA informant George De Mohrenschildt. Lone nut? Are you kidding? He had the craziest social life in Texas.

I just played back a speech Kennedy made in Houston on November 22, 1963. Someone converted it to an MP3 and put it up for file-sharing. (I love the internet.) He talks about 1990– I’m not kidding. In 1990, we will need three times as many spaces at our colleges and universities. In 1990, we will have long since landed on the moon and will have embarked on a new phase of the space program (the shuttle?). He talked about big government programs that would benefit all citizens. He talked about human progress and development.

Shameless, wasn’t it? One of the hallmarks of this age is that most of us would heap scorn and ridicule on big government programs even though those programs included civil rights, our highways, the internet, our defense systems, NASA, and the near destruction of organized crime.

There was a lot of innocence and optimism. The government of the United States can set it’s mind to a seemingly impossible task– landing a man on the moon — Johnson followed with a war on poverty– and accomplish miracles. It is amazing to me that Kennedy succeeded is his most grandiose project– though he never lived to see a man on the moon. He even succeeded within his schedule, before the end of the decade.

Kennedy’s charisma and wit were extraordinary. He describes a new booster rocket used in the space program and mispronounces “payload” into “payroll”. He pauses a second and then says, “it will be the largest payroll too… who should know that better than Houston?” and the audience roars with laughter. It’s not just the wittiness of the remark, but his timing, his utter confidence and charm, and total command of the facts and detailed information– correct names, numbers, statistics, (which, like it or not, was also a remarkable ability of Bill Clinton.) You had the extraordinary sense that he was probably smarter than his advisers.

This was a man so confident in his own abilities that he allowed film-makers to follow him around the White House recording every moment of the day. Nothing was staged or phony– these were real meetings and phone-calls. There was an extremely circumspect, tense phone call to a segregationist governor. There were discussions about how to deal with the crowds of segregationists blocking school entrances. It was extraordinary. I have not seen footage like this of any president since.

Kennedy wasn’t remotely perfect, of course, and it’s hard to tell where he was going since his administration was cut short. But he made a number of “helluva” good decisions and judgments under enormous pressure (the Cuban missile crisis, dispatching the National Guard to Mississippi), and he was arguably moving towards withdrawal from Viet Nam because he believed that the government of South Viet Nam did not have the support of it’s own people (it didn’t). And while Hoover’s FBI, terrified or indifferent, had made no progress against organized crime in 20 years, Bobby Kennedy turned the crime families upside down. By the way– the wonders of the Internet age– you can download a lot of Kennedy’s speeches through Morpheus or other file-sharing programs (along with the Zapruder film)– quite amazing. Listen for yourself. Has anyone sounded that articulate, and that visionary, in a million years?

By 1972, Nixon was talking about how best to withdraw, and that was probably the greatest difference between Kennedy and those who followed him: he thought ahead. He didn’t want to allow himself to be put into the position of having to “withdraw”. He wanted the nation to be somewhere farther along in science and education and culture 20 years down the road. He knew that new technologies would remake industrial America if the education system provided the talent and skills needed.

He was talking about 1990. He was thinking about quagmire. He reluctantly accepted the Bay of Pigs invasion, planned during the Eisenhower Administration, but when it failed he fired the people who planned it and had assured him it would succeed (one of these was the brother of Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas in 1963). He initially did not think America was ready to step ahead on civil rights but when Martin Luther King forced the issue, he realized there was only one path to follow, because there was a future and you had to think about that.

I think most people intuitively understood that the Warren Commission was a sham. The Zapruder film was withheld from the public for ten years because it was bought by Time-Life which was managed by C.D. Jackson who was a friend to the CIA and who kept it away from the public, possibly because it didn’t show what the Warren Commission claimed it showed. Dan Rather, the fatuous old ass, did see the film and publicly claimed that it showed Kennedy’s head jerking “forward” with the last shattering bullet. Then he assured America that all was well and that the constitution had worked and the peaceful transition of power had occurred. I have a feeling that a Chilean Dan Rather spoke similar words in 1973 in Santiago, with kind words for Pinochet.

In spite of this tacit complicity with the coup, media coverage of the assassination was genuine and stunningly compelling, probably because they didn’t know how to do it yet. There was no “The JFK Assassination” logo, no theme music, no pimped-up collagen-faced newsreaders with their best-rehearsed tragic faces, as there was in September 2001. Reporters didn’t habitually encourage people to cry on camera. News organizations routinely waited for confirmation before releasing new details.

There was Cronkite with a catch in his voice as he announced the death, sitting at a makeshift studio, reading the news on paper as it was handed to him, removing his glasses. The difference was that Cronkite was a newsman, a real reporter, who understood the significance of the story. And those men behind him at the teletype: real people, not props. And there was the incredible KBOX radio broadcast, live from the route ” something has gone terribly wrong with the motorcade…”. It was a reporter who was not yet trained on how to “package” a tragedy.

Anyone who is old enough probably remembers that the impact of the Kennedy assassination on the world was as great, if not greater, than this WTC attack. People stood on street corners in stunned disbelief. They crowded around stores watching television. Complete strangers began talking intimately. Men bit their lips and wept and young girls wailed in grief.

And it was a similar loss of innocence. This young, vibrant, popular president who was almost certainly headed for a second term, was suddenly replaced with the master of the back-room deal (not that Kennedy wasn’t), the sly old Lyndon Johnson. Nothing against Johnson– I think he was a better president than people give him credit for though his decision to escalate the American commitment in Viet Nam was was his undoing– but he didn’t have nearly the vision of Kennedy, or acute sense of what could or could not be accomplished, and at what cost. Johnson was old-style party politics, with cigar-chomping brokers, party favors, and big campaign contributions from vested interests.

[2022-04-27: I amend this: Johnson actually passed several visionary, milestone pieces of legislation.  But he was absolutely underestimated on domestic policy, and disastrously wrong about Viet Nam.]

Most people probably felt they didn’t fully understand what had happened or who was responsible. But the idea that they would choose a man to be their leader and that their sacred right to do this was unabridged and incorruptible was skewered.

Johnson was defeated by Viet Nam, and Nixon by Watergate, and Carter by the “debacle in the desert” (anyone remember Ken Taylor). What is it with the U.S. and the Middle East?

I don’t know if it was Oswald alone or if Oswald even fired a shot. The paraffin test failed to pick up gunpowder on his fingers, and it seems a stretch to believe he was able to fire three shots, hide the rifle and remove his fingerprints, descend to the second floor and buy a coke before building manager Roy Truly and police officer Marion Baker ran into him in the lunch room.

I know the Warren Commission was totally concerned with convincing America that all was well and didn’t have the slightest interest in actually analyzing the crime. I know the autopsy was performed by a forensic pathologist named Humes who had no experience with gunshot wounds and couldn’t draw the correct conclusion until he was told what it was. But there are so many crack-pot conspiracy theorists out there that it’s hard to sort out the truth anymore. Most Americans seem to have come to the conclusion that there probably was a conspiracy. Someone changed the direction of history. Someone led us to Johnson and Nixon and Ford (who was on the Warren Commission) and Carter.

It wasn’t until Reagan came along that I think America realized it had finally emerged from it’s own quagmire, the nightmare of assassinations and wars and hijackings and oil crises, that seemed to have enveloped the 60’s and 70’s. They turned to Reagan after four smart presidents (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter) and the world, by coincidence, changed dramatically at the same time. The cold war was over. The internet age had begun. A new era of unparalleled peace and prosperity emerged.

The Kennedy assassination followed a decade of relative peace and prosperity, as did the WTC. Kennedy won the narrowest of victories over Nixon. We all know about George Bush Jr.’s margin. Kennedy seemed to be entrusted with a new decade of progress and technological marvels. Bush inherited the first surplus since… Kennedy.

Kennedy’s assassination, like the WTC, was captured on video (film) and live on radio. The world watched in stunned disbelief. America was relatively isolationist under Eisenhower, but Kennedy launched the Peace Corps and a new era of activism abroad (Ich bin Ein Berliner). Bush seems to have started his administration with a return to isolationism, rejecting international treaties and choosing to “go it alone” on several international issues.

And now, the U.S. embarks on a declared war on terrorism, which, for me, bears an awful echo of Viet Nam. I don’t know if the results will be the same or not. There is an impressive tone of optimism out there about America’s ability to defeat terrorism, and just because America was equally optimistic, in 1965, about it’s ability to save Viet Nam doesn’t mean the results will be the same this time. But I think any thoughtful person would consider the question.