Politics – Page 50 – The Wrongologist

The Big Picture – An Editorial

“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom” – Bertrand Russell

Today, we are going to take a short course in The Big Picture. For starters, here is a quote from Digby:

…we are a primitive country. We’ve got idiots on TV screaming about a religion of 1.6 billion people being the toxic cause of violence even as our All American, non-religious school-kids are taking the deadly weapons their parents give them as presents to shoot their schoolmates and themselves. And we have the most sophisticated city on earth acting like a bunch of authoritarian creeps toward people who are doing serious work to stop the spread of an outbreak of a deadly disease — for PR purposes.

Since the Great Recession in 2008-9, we have seen the Federal Reserve move the economy slowly forward while leaving most people behind. Yet, few complain about growing income inequality. People know it and feel it, but don’t vote, or try to do anything else to change things.

• Why doesn’t income inequality upset the average American?
• Why are we more aware of how plastic surgery has changed the looks of an actress than we are about Gen. John Allen’s crazy ideas about winning the war against ISIS?
• How can more Americans be afraid of contracting Ebola than being killed in a car wreck?

What are we afraid will happen if we really dig deeply into an idea or a strategy that is proposed as a “solution” for some problem or other? Why can’t we resist re-tweeting some piece of snark that is the short version of something we believe, or thought we believed?

One visible trend is our increasing distrust of public institutions. We have seen how government, corporations, “charitable” organizations, media, and law-enforcement and the Justice system, all seem to exist for the benefit of those who manage them and not for the public.

This capturing of our institutions is a scary thing, but it is true everywhere in America. You might think that realizing this would spur interest in reform, but in fact, it has just increased our denial. People say in spite of it all, we’ll just soldier on as best as we can, making sure that we and our kids learn to navigate this rigged system.

This is why there is very little interest in politics by young voters.

Another trend is that America’s young know there is no possibility for real growth in personal income. They know that there are policies to promote and stimulate the economy, policies that might work. But, they have no faith in the ability of public officials to implement such policies, so they hang back, hoping somebody comes forward with a better answer. This, from the most connected, most media-savvy, most sophisticated generation in our history.

Voters show no interest in the 2014 mid-term elections. The media asks the same questions of the same Sabbath pundits each week: “Who will win the Senate?” But people don’t care. They watch the media whip up class warfare, cultural warfare and real warfare together into a big stew of propaganda that becomes mind-numbing. So they Facebook, and Tweet.

Most people are both stuck and scared–wanting things to change, but not knowing how. People might get upset, but big change requires commitment and action, and it is hard to get Millennials to change their minds, or to do much.

Political activism succeeds with a clear vision and a solid game plan. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a list of good ideas about what will work to move us forward. It is possible to attribute political apathy to this lack of ideas, but the destruction of public trust in government is also a big problem.

Changing the future requires getting hold of the levers of government and then using them to do good. That is much more difficult when people don’t vote, and have no faith in their government. Trust in an institution takes a long time to build, but not to destroy. The first step is to take back our captured government.

A basic principle of martial arts is that you use your opponent’s strengths against them. In typical political contests, both sides work to out-raise and out-spend the other. And third parties try to get in the game using the same strategies as the legacy parties.

Today, each candidate is challenging the other’s strength using their own similar strength: It becomes a Sumo-style shoving match.

Conventional wisdom says that it’s expensive to run a campaign (even for local elections, much less national) and so everyone starts their campaign with a fundraising strategy and continues it incessantly even after Election Day. Conventional wisdom says you win with a charismatic candidate, so each party tries to find the best actor they can come up with. Conventional wisdom says candidates should “triangulate” their political views so that they are neither left nor right, just as Democrats are trying to do without success, in Red States this fall.

Instead, insurgent campaigns could be run on social media and the Internet, on as little money as possible—crowdsourcing both dollars and ideas from supporters. They should build constituencies for ideas and for a common future. They should select candidates who can tell the story of a united, desirable future, not some Ken or Barbie cypher for the moneyed interests who run our politics today.

The Big Picture is that we react more strongly to fear than to rationality. We used to fear Hitler. We feared the Communists. We feared al-Qaeda. We fear ISIS. We fear Ebola. We fear for our kids walking to school. We fear that America will let too many brown people across our borders. But we don’t fear climate change, or obesity, or a Congress that can’t enact an agenda to move the country forward.

There should be no mystery about how much corporate power and money drives the culture of fear. Think of it as a 4-step program:

1. Mass media hammers on events that builds general concern and possibly, panic from a few isolated incidents
2. Anecdotal evidence takes the place of hard scientific proof
3. Experts that the media trots out to make comments really don’t have the credentials to be considered experts
4. Entire categories of people (Muslims, West Africans) are labeled as “innately dangerous”

Can a cohesive group with a better way of dealing with the rest of us, gain traction in today’s connected world? Can they help America conquer the long laundry list of fears that constrict and in some cases, stop us from acting on much of anything?

It would take brains, ideas, commitment and energy.

Where are the leaders who have those qualities? How can we support them?

Monday Wake Up Call – October 27, 2014

Welcome to the working week. This week brings Halloween and the end of daylight savings time. Next Sunday, time “falls back”, and sadly, so will Democrats on the 4th of November.

But right now, it is time to get up and get going. Remember Disco? Get down with “Stomp” by the Brothers Johnson from their 1980 Platinum album, “Light up the Night”:

Quincy Jones worked with the Brothers Johnson on several of their albums for A&M. Michael Jackson does background vocals on another song on this album, “This Had to Be”. “Stomp” went to #1 on the R&B charts, #1 on the Dance singles chart and #7 on Billboard in 1980.

Here are a few hot links for your Monday breakfast buffet:

The Federal government’s 2014 fiscal year ended on September 30th. Here are 10 facts you may not know about the federal budget.

The Sunshine Act, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, requires doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers to disclose their financial relationships. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has released the first set of data. It includes $3.5 billion paid by Big Pharma to over half a million doctors and teaching hospitals in the last five months of 2013.

For 18 years, thousands of students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill had “no show” classes with no assigned readings, and no responsible faculty member. These classes had just one requirement: a final paper that no one ever read. In the most crucial finding, no player was paid for an autograph, so it’s just a minor scandal.

More about the Dallas Ebola screening fail and likely cover up. It appears that the hospital and the software firm retrofitted the data to the story. Once again, we may never know the truth about what happened in Dallas.

My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord. Commander Pigeon is a woman who kills men, and is known to everyone in Kabul, but we are just hearing about her.

Al-Qaeda has a new English magazine called “Resurgence.” It is 117 pages of glossy graphics and articles about jihad and the war against America, all in understandable English.

The Social Security office that hears appeals for disability benefits is 990,399 cases behind. This Washington backlog is bigger even than the backups at Veterans Affairs, where 526,000 people are waiting in line, and the patent office, where 606,000 applications are pending.

Politics never change. Here is a 1796 editorial by Alexander Hamilton that accuses Thomas Jefferson of an affair with a slave.

Bonus Monday Music: You probably have heard that Jack Bruce died on the 25th. As Bob Lefsetz says:

Clapton might be God, but there was no Cream without Jack Bruce. He was the one who sang most of the songs.

He wrote the riff that we all know from “Sunshine of Your Love”. Here is Cream doing “I Feel Free”. That’s Jack Bruce on the left, Ginger Baker on drums and Eric Clapton on the right:

Feel free all week, my friends.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 26, 2014

It’s that time of year, scary monsters in your email and on your TV. That means it’s the mad combo of the election season and Halloween. Be very afraid.

Some celebrate Halloween all year:

Fear is in the air around Halloween:

Really, Fox? Ben Bradlee must be turning over in his grave:

The reason Democrats will lose the Senate, Part I:

The reason Democrats will lose the Senate, Part II:

The House of Fear is open 24 hours a day:

Should a Controversial Opera Be Seen?

On Monday night, hundreds of people protested outside New York’s Metropolitan Opera that the presentation of “The Death of Klinghoffer” is anti-Semitic, and should not have been offered by the Met.

A summary: In 1985, Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish-American disabled man, and his wife, Marilyn, were passengers on an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. The ship was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists, who shot Klinghoffer in the head and threw him overboard in his wheelchair.

First produced in 1991, “Klinghoffer” contains a running debate between the killers—who voice a number of anti-Semitic slurs in the course of justifying their conduct—and Klinghoffer as their victim.

John Adams also wrote “Nixon in China”, another “docu-opera. With “Klinghoffer”, he has a much more provocative topic and aims to show both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was among the protestors, wrote a not completely unreasonable op-ed in his opposition to the Met’s staging of the John Adams opera. He says while the Met had a First Amendment right to present the opera:

Equally, all of us have as strong a First Amendment right to…warn people that this work is both a distortion of history and helped, in some ways, to foster a three decade long feckless policy of creating a moral equivalency between the Palestinian Authority and the state of Israel…this opera didn’t create but certainly contributed to a romanticized version of the Palestinian cause which led to the American administration giving them hundreds of millions of dollars meant for the Palestinian people but mostly taken by Arafat and his band of terrorist crooks.

So, Giuliani complains that Adams’s 23-year-old opera has contributed directly to the collapse of the Middle East peace process and to hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled to terrorists. What’s in that NYC water?

What has happened is that the protestors have brought the Israeli/Palestinian differences to New York. They are busy recapitulating the division, spin, shouting and reiteration of the talking points of both sides, this time through the medium of the Metropolitan Opera. Protesters are demanding that the opera be canceled; defenders of the opera couch their position in terms of artistic freedom or, as a two-sides presentation, giving a voice to the grievances of the Palestinians.

Some people say works like “Klinghoffer” encourage people to emulate the bad behaviors they see on stage. It is doubtful that anyone has engaged in sibling incest after watching “Die Walküre”. Let’s remember that “The Marriage of Figaro” is about a libidinous noble’s invocation of the historical “droit de seigneur.” That “Macbeth” is about regicide. That Broadway’s “Sweeney Todd” about a maniacal serial killer. That the opera “The Rake’s Progress” about someone selling his soul to the devil.

Let’s also remember Mr. Giuliani in 1999, as Mayor of all the people of New York, tried to shut down the Brooklyn Museum because he viewed an exhibition as “sick,” “disgusting” and sacrilegious. At the time, Giuliani argued that the Brooklyn Museum had no First Amendment right to show a British exhibition that featured a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung. He then threatened to terminate the Museum’s lease with the city and possibly even seize control of the Museum. The exhibit went forward.

The issue is what to do about provocative art that offends the sensibilities of some fraction of the population. The opera and the protests taken together, confront us with something we see all too often: Conflicts between, and often within populations, who have been traumatized by history.

You cannot reason with people when hyper-vigilance and condemnation are what drives any discussion with them.

Let the protestors protest. Let the show go on. Let the debate about the opera go forward. One can argue passionately about the Middle East, Israel or Palestinians. None of that makes the Klinghoffer murder morally acceptable. Or “Klinghoffer” great art.

If we want to bridge our differences, we have to start small, take a few risks, confess some offenses, forgive them and move to reconciliation. Then build on that.

It is the only solution. It does not begin in crowds.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 19, 2014

Your thought for the weekend is from the movie, The Birdcage:

Senator Kevin Keeley: Louise, people in this country aren’t interested in details. They don’t even trust details. The only thing they trust is headlines.

Well, CNN headline writing is as bad as their broadcast. Is that Helvetica?

Since it is Nobel Prize time, here is an anecdote by Walter Gilbert (1980 winner in Chemistry) about what happens when you travel with your medal:

When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I…decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. It was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.

“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate that the universe was accelerating at.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and then their question was: ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”

How corporatists fight Ebola in Texas:

The truth is, everyone is infected by the headlines:

And the headlines gripped Wall Street:

Monday Wake-up Call – October 13, 2014

Happy Columbus Day! We start a new weekly feature today, the Monday Wake-up Call, with a music video to get your body and mind up and going on Monday, along with links to a few of last week’s articles that you probably missed, and the Wrongologist found interesting.

Here we go: The Monday Wake-up video is “Life in Wartime” by the Talking Heads. This version is from their movie, “Stop Making Sense”. Get up and dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obAtn6I5rbY

Now, a breakfast buffet of links to underreported news:

There have been a tsunami of TV ads for the Senate campaigns. Candidates, political parties and outside advocacy groups have aired 991,835 Senate campaign spots from January through October 6th 2014.

Got Drones? Here is a list of everyone authorized to fly drones in the US.

It costs the US $500,000 to take out an ISIS Toyota truck. War has always been about inflicting greater costs on the enemy than the costs that you take, but the new business model is way more efficient. The US Military-Industrial Complex (USMIC) now controls the entire deal. They supply the arms to the insurgents, and to the allies, some of whom give them to the insurgents. Then we destroy them. The costs may be higher, but the USMIC makes way more profit.

There is a huge methane hotspot in the 4 Corners: Satellite imagery has revealed a methane hotspot that is leaking methane (a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide but not as long lasting) into the atmosphere near the “Four Corners” area where the borders of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico meet.

Why the Ebola fight can’t be won in Africa. Ian Welsh links Western efforts to fund/finance development in Africa over the past 50 years to the current public health crisis.

Research shows the Ebola virus can be found in survivors’ semen for months after recovery. So, it’s not enough to survive the disease, men can be infectious for up to 90 days after their symptoms are gone. Not Typhoid Mary, its Ebola Eddie…Yikes!

Edward Snowden’s girlfriend is living with him in Moscow. Apparently, she moved in with him in July, but the US media didn’t think you needed to know, since we were told that his life in Russia was grim, and that was the price he paid for being a whistle-blowing turncoat. The joke is that Snowden has not only profoundly changed how the world thinks about government spying on its citizens, as well as its allies and enemies, he has built a happy life for himself.

An idea to frame your week:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process, he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you

(Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”)

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 12, 2014

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.” In 20 letters, it’s the platform and program of the GOP:

Complete version: Be afraid of Africans, Hispanics, Democrats, Liberals, Muslims, Atheists, Foreigners, Gays, etc. If fact, be afraid of just about everyone except the GOP. Because those OTHERS will take your money, take your job, take your gun, infect you with diseases, break into you house, rape your women folk, strengthen and enlarge your government, spend your taxes, use your resources, raise your prices, insult your God, hurt your feelings (saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’), corrupt your children, impoverish your descendants, enlarge your government, make life in your suburb or your condo no better than that of a slave on a plantation… and did we say enlarge your government?

If the above makes sense to you, then vote the Republican ticket in November. The GOP won’t accomplish anything, but they will validate your paranoia, and that will feel so good!

Stock Market gives back all of the year’s gain in one week:

The Supremes non-decision causes a wedding:

Malala winning the Nobel makes many parents jealous:

ISIS recruiting steals American Slogan, “E Pluribus Unum”:

Is Secession From the USA a Possibility?

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sept. 19th, 23.9% of Americans polled from Aug. 23 through Sept. 16 said they strongly supported or tended to support the idea of their state breaking away from the country. The poll had 8,952 respondents. About 53% of them strongly opposed or tended to oppose secession, slightly less than the percentage that kept Scotland in the UK.

The exact wording of the question asked was: “Do you support or oppose the idea of your state peacefully withdrawing from the United States of America and the federal government?”

The LA Times reported the results by region:

You can see the interactive results here. They can be filtered by age, region, income, party affiliation, etc. Any way you slice it, the data are startlingly clear: Almost a quarter of those surveyed said they were strongly or provisionally inclined to leave the US, and take their states with them. Given the size of the polling sample, the online survey’s credibility interval (digital for “margin of error”) was only 1.2%, so the poll seems to be an accurate representation of where the country stands.

Politically, conservatives and Republicans seem to like the idea of leaving more than Democrats. Among people who said they identified with the Tea Party, supporters of secession were in the majority, with 53%.

Secession got more support from Republicans than Democrats, more from right-than left-leaning independents, more from younger than older people, more from lower- than higher-income brackets, more from high school than college grads. In general, men were slightly more predisposed to secession than women. Those making $25,000 a year were 11 points more favorably disposed to rebellion than those making more than $150,000 a year. But there was a marginally higher level of support in every group, especially the Rocky Mountain States, the Southwest and the old Confederacy.

Fifty years ago, most Americans would have laughed at the idea of any state or region seceding, calling it the talk of a radical or a crackpot out of touch with reality. But, with Americans becoming increasingly frustrated by the protracted economic recovery, and by big government, they seem to be expressing an interest in returning to smaller jurisdictions. In the last year or so, we’ve seen:
• Actual secession votes in California and Colorado
• More than 125,700 Texans signed a secession petition
• Secession petitions were circulated in Maryland, Arizona, and Michigan
• Wisconsin Republicans came close to voting on a secession plan this spring

Had the poll first presented lists of “This is what you will no longer have from the Feds, and have to get along without, or pay for them yourself”, the vote might have been different. Consider, for example: the FAA, all those little City, County, State “Grants”, Court Systems, Law/Medical, and various Copyright, Food inspections, education grants/research etc. Who will pay for these things?

As in Scotland, the vote might have been different if the estimated increase in taxes and other payments to fund secession were included in the discussion.

For example, earlier this year the personal finance website WalletHub.com conducted a study of the amounts individual states are paying in federal taxes compared to the amounts they are receiving. WalletHub analyzed data from the IRS, the US Census Bureau, the US Commerce Department and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As it turns out, it is red states that are overwhelmingly the Welfare Queen States, with Mississippi scoring the first (worst) position with 45.8% of its funding coming from the federal government. Yes, that’s right. Red States — the ones governed by folks who think government is too big and spending needs to be cut — take in more federal spending than they pay out in federal taxes.

They talk a good game, but are sticking the Blue States with the bill. WalletHub’s research demonstrates that, as a rule, the states that are the most likely to rail against “big government” are the most likely to be benefiting from it.

Secession is not illegal, unilateral secession is. A state can secede with the approval of the Federal Government by means of Constitutional amendment. A state that wants to secede legally and peacefully has to convince not only their own population but the rest of the country as well.

Think about Arizona seceding. It would be surrounded by the country it had just left and the country it seemingly hates most (Mexico) with little hope of defending itself, educating itself or paying its own way. Plus, a large number of their citizens are on Social Security and Medicare from (gasp) the United States of America. Decidedly not smart.

The question is, what do these results mean for the country?

The US hardly seems on the verge of a successful secession movement. But the poll results scale up to represent 60 million unhappy people in America, who are willing to consider secession.

This should scream out to our leaders that we are susceptible to the sophistry of a demagogue, or to a serious political reform movement.

Do Demonstrations Matter Anymore?

Newsweek reported that The People’s Climate March on Sunday in New York was perhaps the largest climate change protest in history. Between 300,000 and 400,000 people took to the streets. Celebrities and high-profile politicians were among the marchers. The protest was big on social media, but it was largely ignored by the TV talking heads. HuffPo reported:

All in all, it was a perfect opportunity for some of America’s biggest news organizations to cover the topic of climate change, something that usually gets either ignored or badly handled. For Sunday talk show hosts, there was even a nice political hook, since the march was pegged to a UN summit that President Obama will be attending.

But HuffPo said that no Sunday morning show except MSNBC’s “Up” so much as mentioned climate change, or the march. There was one reference on “This Week” by The Nation’s Katrina van den Heuvel, who pointed out that the march was actually gathering right outside the ABC studios in Lincoln Center where the show is taped. The fact that more people actually showed up for climate change than an iPhone 6 sale in New York City is big news and it should have been covered!

Why no coverage? And more important, do demonstrations matter anymore? From Juan Cole:

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for demonstrating and admire everyone who came out in New York City on Sunday (some 400,000 according to Time magazine) to demand that world leaders deal urgently with climate change.

Cole makes the point that in the current political climate, holding large rallies rarely results in any political change. But, there have been exceptions. Consider the 1963 March on Washington. That was a case where succinct demands were associated with ground-up mass actions across America. It did not bring about immediate results, but the demonstrations combined with months, and sometimes years of base-level organizing, delivered energy and momentum to that same cohesive set of demands.

But the 21st century is not the 1960’s. Now, people just send a tweet and think they’ve accomplished something. The failure of demonstrations today is symptomatic of the failure of our democracy, which refuses to separate corporate money from elections, or from influencing the mass media. Pew Research reports that only 40% of Americans think that it is important for Congress and the White House to tackle the issue of climate change. The public already knows about climate change and sees it as a problem, yet nothing is done by either party, because it would inconvenience their corporate patrons, and anger the Koch brothers.

A 2010 Stanford University poll showed that voters are unpersuaded by the usual arguments against taking action on global warming:

Only 18% believe that slowing climate change would cause unemployment, and only 14% think the US should wait for other countries to go first.

What climate change activists must first realize that the obstacle is oligarchy, not public awareness of the issue.

Large demonstrations can help build local organizations, can bring together a broad range of activists who would not otherwise have face-to-face contact and can show like-minded people that they are not alone, that there are large numbers of people who share their views. These things are all valuable to any movement for social justice.

The writers of the US Constitution believed it important enough to explicitly provide for ‘the right of the people peaceably to assemble’, although recent efforts in cities across America to abridge that right in the name of public safety have been growing. Assembly should still be seen as a form of pressure that requires many other steps to move the needle on the status quo.

The movement also needs a charismatic leader, a compelling story and a skilled group to coordinate all activities.

The next stage has to be competing for mind-share of our Congresspersons and Senators, against the entrenched and very wealthy hydrocarbon industries.
Gerrymandering that has produced a structural Republican majority in the House means that climate activists need to find GOP challengers who are deeply concerned about global warming and who are willing to primary the incumbent.

In the end, a single-issue Climate PAC, if very well-funded, could make a difference. Much of the climate change action will have to be done or coordinated by politicians, and at the moment most of those in Washington are owned by Big Oil, including by the Koch brothers.

Finally, it is clear that in addressing climate change, we address multiple ills in our society, including the tremendous waste of resources caused by the pursuit of war. We have long needed a political movement that ties together the various threads of what is wrong with our society and shows how they are interrelated.

Climate change activism has the potential to do that.

Thinking About the Slurry Wall on 9/11

It’s 13 years since that beautiful sky-blue September day when our world changed.

Consider the parallelism. Today, as we remember the terrorist attack 13 years ago, we begin another “war” against yet other group of Sunni terrorists. Mr. Obama, who was elected in 2008 to get us out of wars in the Middle East, has us on track to lead another “coalition of the willing” into the ME. The purpose of this crusade sounds depressingly familiar: To blunt the threat of another attack on the Homeland, despite little evidence that an attack is possible or imminent. And we do this because the people who face a direct ISIS threat can’t (or won’t) handle it for themselves.

The rise of ISIS is in part a consequence of US policy in the ME. Our war in Iraq and the subsequent 8 years of Iraqi internal political squabble have left many Sunnis in Iraq willing to support any challenge to the Shia central government. And now, 13 years after 9/11, we’re again strapping on our weapons and heading into war.

So today, let’s talk about the slurry wall at the World Trade Center. The Wrongologist took this photo in July, 2014 of the portion of the slurry wall that remains exposed in the Foundation Hall of the National September 11 Memorial Museum:

The slurry wall is the outer wall of what WTC engineers called the “Bathtub” in the 1960’s:

The bathtub is the 9-block area of the World Trade Center site that is excavated down to bedrock…and ringed by the slurry wall. The bathtub was created to enable the building of the Twin Towers’ foundations, and was ultimately filled with seven stories of basements housing the parking garage, mall, and building services.

Except that this bathtub kept water out of the 70’ deep basement. The ground water level at the WTC site is just a few feet below the surface, while bedrock is about 70 feet below the surface. Creating the bathtub required first building a 7-story dam below the water level of the adjacent Hudson River – that was the slurry wall.

After the 9/11 attack, the concern was that the slurry wall would fail. A breach in the wall and a flooding of the bathtub might have also flooded other adjacent below-grade structures, such as the PATH tunnels that passed through the bathtub. The NY subway, built below the PATH tubes could also have flooded with a breach of the wall.

On 9/11, most of the central portion of the wall’s south side (bordering Liberty Street) had moved inward by more than 10 inches. But, it held. According to the New York Times, George Tamaro, a former staff engineer at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who was closely involved with the construction of the trade center, believes: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The slurry wall construction]…may have helped prevent the Hudson River from flooding parts of Lower Manhattan

According to Tamaro’s report on the aftermath of the attack, the PATH tunnels in Jersey City, New Jersey, at the Exchange Place Station, were 5 feet lower in elevation than at the WTC PATH Station. Exchange Place became a sump for fire water, river water, and broken water mains discharging into the bathtub. But the slurry wall held.

Looking up at the exposed portion of the slurry wall in Foundation Hall, one can’t help but be thankful for the work of engineers and construction workers back in the sixties who built the bathtub, and the engineers and firefighters who stabilized the walls after 9/11. Since the attack, that unseen wall is now a symbol of the resilience of both New Yorkers and America.

But the world has spun off its normal axis since September 11, 2001. Isn’t it interesting that 9/11 was supposed to be about America striking back against a foreign enemy of freedom. Yet in the process of attempting to win the “War on Terror”, American citizens have given up a significant part of their personal freedoms. And just this month, we are starting to have a national discussion about how, since 9/11, the US Department of Homeland Security has transformed our local police into a paramilitary force. For example, the Los Angles School District Police got a MRAP (mine resistant vehicle) and 3 grenade launchers.

Schools need grenade launchers now? James Madison said in 1787:

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home…

Today, Americans own enormous numbers of weapons. Pew Research reports that the number of guns in the US is between 270 and 310 million, or roughly one for each of us. But, estimates are that about 37% of us actually own all the weapons.

So, today on the 13th anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask each other: What are we to make of a country in which:
• Local police are militarizing
• Citizens continue to arm themselves
• The federal government tramples on our Bill of Rights

Let’s think about what has been won and lost so far in the War on Terror. And let’s think about what remains of our social fabric. Is it as strong as that slurry wall? Will it hold when attacked? Do we still have that same problem-solving genius that built a slurry wall that was strong enough to survive attack?

Is America still built to last?

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Politics