THEN:

Notice ownership and design — 7 buildings not just two were involved.

The World Trade Center
Height: 1,368 and 1,362 feet (417 and 415 meters)
Owners: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Architect: Minoru Yamasaki, Emery Roth and Sons consulting
Engineer: John Skilling and Leslie Robertson of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson
Ground Breaking: August 5, 1966
Opened: 1970-73; April 4, 1973 ribbon cutting
Destroyed: September 11, 2001

The World Trade Center was more than its signature twin towers: it was a complex of seven buildings on 16-acres, constructed and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ). The towers, One and Two World Trade Center, rose at the heart of the complex, each climbing more than 100 feet higher than the silver mast of the Empire State Building.

Construction of a world trade facility had been under consideration since the end of WWII. In the late 1950s the Port Authority took interest in the project and in 1962 fixed its site on the west side of Lower Manhattan on a superblock bounded by Vesey, Liberty, Church and West Streets. Architect Minoru Yamasaki was selected to design the project; architects Emery Roth & Sons handled production work, and, at the request of Yamasaki, the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson served as engineers.

The Port Authority envisioned a project with a total of 10 million square feet of office space. To achieve this, Yamasaki considered more than a hundred different building configurations before settling on the concept of twin towers and three lower-rise structures. Designed to be very tall to maximize the area of the plaza, the towers were initially to rise to only 80-90 stories. Only later was it decided to construct them as the world’s tallest buildings, following a suggestion said to have originated with the Port Authority’s public relations staff.

Yamasaki and engineers John Skilling and Les Robertson worked closely, and the relationship between the towers’ design and structure was clear. Faced with the difficulties of building to unprecedented heights, the engineers employed an innovative structural model: a rigid “hollow tube” of closely spaced steel columns with floor trusses extended across to a central core. The columns, finished with a silver-colored aluminum alloy, were 18 3/4″ wide and set only 22″ apart, making the towers appear from afar to have no windows at all.

Also unique to the engineering design were its core and elevator system. The twin towers were the first supertall buildings designed without any masonry.

Explosion(s): Demolitions?

A 26-minute Youtube by onlookers (500 yards away from the North Tower) released on 9/11/2006.  It was filmed from their home and is disturbing to watch.

But it should be watched

Is it sacreligious to bring up this point of view/theory, today?  I have not researched this — and why, below:

from st911.org, 13 reasons for controlled demolition; I’m only posting the first 4 here; these are simple science reasons:

 

As the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth (st911.org), I would observe that
our members have established more than a dozen disproofs of the official
government account, the truth of any one of which is enough to show that
the government’s account cannot possibly be correct. Here is an overview:

(1) the impact of the planes cannot have caused enough damage to bring the
buildings down, since the buildings were designed to withstand them (as Frank
DeMartini, the project manager, has observed), the planes that hit were very
similar to those they were designed to withstand, they continued to stand after
the impact with negligible effects;

(2) the melting point of steel at 2,800*F is about 1,000*F higher than the
maximum burning temperature of jet-fuel-based fires, which do not exceed 1,800*F
under optimal conditions, so the fires cannot have caused the steel to melt,
which means that melting steel did not bring the buildings down;

(3) UL certified the steel in the buildings up to 2,000*F for at least six hours
before it would even significantly weaken, where these fires burned too low and
too briefly–about one hour in the South Tower and one and a half in the
North–to have even caused the steel to weaken, much less melt;

(4) if the steel had melted or weakened, the buildings would have displayed
completely different behavior, with some asymmetrical sagging and tilting, which
would have been gradual and slow, not the complete, abrupt, and total demolition
that was observed;

James H. Fetzer, Ph.D.  Founder and Co-Chair
Scholars for 9/11 Truth

jfetzer@d.umn.edu
http://www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer/

Also summarized as:   “Firefighters know that you can’t melt a steel-structured skyscraper in 47 unless Muslims (can) Suspend Physics”

Dovetailing of US Patriot Act/ HR 3162(Democrat opposition) with October 2001 Anthrax attacks to get a Democrat-Controlled Congress to pass it.

The “Patriot Act” was rushed through Congress in just six weeks. It was given a helping hand by the anthrax attacks. Following hard on the heels of the September atrocities, these attacks “brushed up” the horror and were neatly dovetailed with the stages in the passage of the bill. (See Richard J Ochs,  Government By Anthrax, for the “dovetailing”.) The Democrat-controlled Senate, whose leading Democratic Senators were “attacked” with anthrax letters, passed the bill with a 98-1 majority. That’s how well they stood up for liberty! That’s how easily they were manipulated and convinced to enact this authoritarian legislation. The Act was signed into law by President Bush on 29 Oct. 2001.  It is [now, “was”] valid for four years, i.e. until autumn 2005.  The Act’s provisions include detention without trial for non-citizen terror suspects, surveillance of mobile phone messages and email, and internet tracking. It also empowers the CIA to extend its intelligence-gathering operations from the foreign to the domestic field for the first time. About one thousand non-citizens of Islamic origin were initially imprisoned under the Act. They were often held incommunicado, and had difficulty accessing legal representation. On 7 December 2001, the FBI said they believed none was linked either to the September 11 attacks in particular nor to al-Qaeda in general. Not a single one! (The FBI tried to save face by saying that the attacks were planned in Europe and had little help in the US.) (Reported by USA Today.) Some still remain in detention.

Interesting Interventions (politechbot.com a site to blogroll)

About Anthrax in re: passage of Patriot Act: A little timeline

Anthrax Attacks

1) The anthrax attacks targeted the US Democrat Senators who opposed Ashcroft’s Patriot Act:

October 2, 2001 (B): The “anti-terrorism” Patriot Act is introduced in Congress, but is not well received by all. [ Patriot Act, 10/2/01] One day later, Senate Majority Leader and future anthrax target Tom Daschle (D) says he doubts the Senate will take up this bill in the one week timetable the administration wants. As head of the Senate, Daschle has great power to block or slow passage of the bill. Attorney General Ashcroft accuses Senate Democrats of dragging their feet. [Washington Post, 10/3/01] On October 4, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman and future anthrax target Patrick Leahy (D) accuses the Bush administration of reneging on an agreement on the anti-terrorist bill. Leahy is in a key position to block or slow the bill. Some warn that “lawmakers are overlooking constitutional flaws in their rush to meet the administration’s timetable.” Two days later, Ashcroft complains about “the rather slow pace ‘over his request for law enforcement powers’ Hard feelings remain.” [Washington Post, 10/4/01] The anthrax letters to Daschle and Leahy are sent out on October 9 and difficulties in passing the Actcontinue (see October 9, 2001).

2) The anthrax was from a US Army or defense contractor site, and the killer a trained scientist from the US (illegal) bioweapons program.

“This suggests that the anthrax was already in hand, and the attack largely planned, before Sept 11.”
Federation of American Scientists

3) The anthrax disruption of Congress allowed the US Patriot Act to pass without it even being read!

“It’s my understanding the bill wasn’t printed before the vote – at least I couldn’t get it. They played all kinds of games,
kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it,
but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote.”

Los Angeles, Alta California – 2/26/2002 – (ACN) Jewish microbiologist Dr. Philip M. Zack may be behind the deadly anthrax contaminated letters that were mailed to NBC’s Tom Brokaw, Senator Tom Daschle and others, according to FBI sources. In a rapidly unravelling investigation by the FBI, it appears that the “Arab-hating-Jew” was behind a vile conspiracy to frame a colleague who was born in Egypt and who worked, along with Dr. Zack, at the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md.

La Voz de Aztlan has maintained from the beginning that the anthrax-laced letters seemed contrived and were purposely written to make them appear that they were coming from someone in the Islamic World. New information just released by the FBI confirms our suspicions. On October 9, 2001 we published “Anthrax Terrorists may be Zionists”

More to the point, here is a nice financial motives (in addition to, I still say, the US Patriot Act passage motives):    Look at the  leases!  (above:  It was a joint public project, between Port Authority of New York and New Jersey:  PANYNJ.

From Wikipedia, Larry Silverstein:

World Trade Center

During the 1990s, New York was suffering from the effects of the 1987 stock market crash, which led to high vacancy rates at the World Trade Center. George Pataki becameGovernor of New York in 1995 on a campaign of cutting costs, including privatizing the World Trade Center. A sale of the property was considered too complex, so it was decided by the Port Authority to open a 99-year lease to competitive bidding.^[13]

In January 2001, Silverstein, via Silverstein Properties and Westfield America, made a $3.2 billion bid for the lease to the World Trade Center. Silverstein was outbid by $50 million byVornado Realty, with Boston Properties and Brookfield Properties also competing for the lease. However, Vornado withdrew and Silverstein’s bid for the lease to the World Trade Center was accepted on July 24, 2001.^[14] This was the first time in the building’s 31-year history that the complex had changed management.

The lease agreement applied to One, Two, Four, and Five World Trade Center, and about 425,000 square feet (39,500 m²) of retail space. Silverstein put up $14 million of his own money to secure the deal.^[15] The terms of the lease gave Silverstein, as leaseholder, the right and the obligation to rebuild the structures if destroyed.^[16]

Who is Larry Silverstein? A Brooklyn-born American businessman and real estate investor and developer.  Now, I’m blogging family law, this is the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and I’m talking real estate.  Well, one reason is, as to investors, it’s a huge source of wealth; everyone has to live somewhere and corporations do business somewhere.   If tenancy is full, the rents are usually at a profit compared to the mortgages, resulting in income, i.e., assets putting off wealth.  (meanwhile Obama is talking in terms of creating jobs — not income-producing assets, resulting in wealth — to the public at large).  Real estate is almost always relevant because it’s a source of money.  Period.

Larry A. Silverstein (born May 30, 1931) is an American businessman, and real estate investor and developer in New York City.

Silverstein was born in Brooklyn, and became involved in real estate, together with his father, establishing Silverstein Properties. Silverstein separated from his business partner, Bernard Mendik, in 1977, and bought a number of large office buildings in Midtownand Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s.

Sounds like he was a successful real estate investor and developer, too.

In 1980, Silverstein won a bid from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to construct 7 World Trade Center, to the north of the World Trade Center. Silverstein was interested in acquiring the entire World Trade Center complex, and put in a bid when the Port Authority put it up for lease in 2000. Silverstein won the bid when a deal between the initial winner and the Port Authority fell through, and he signed the lease on July 24, 2001.

July 24, August 24, September 11th — 9/11 was less than two months after the lease transfer, with said lease allowing reconstruction if the buildings were destroyed (why would buildings be destroyed — was this earthquake & fire country, tornado country?)

Soon after the September 11 attacks, Silverstein declared his intent to rebuild, though ran into dispute with his insurers over whether the attacks constituted one or two occurrences. A settlement was reached in 2007, with insurers agreeing to pay out $4.55 billion,^[1]which was not as much as Silverstein sought. Silverstein also ran into multiple disputes with other parties in the rebuilding effort, including with the Port Authority. In an agreement reached in April 2006, Silverstein retained rights to build three office towers (150 Greenwich Street, 175 Greenwich Street, and 200 Greenwich Street), while One World Trade Center (previously referred to as the “Freedom Tower”) will be owned by the Port Authority as well as Tower Five which may be leased out to another private developer and redesigned as a residential building.^[2]

Mr. Silverstein might have died in the attacks on the North Tower, except  his wife persuaded him to keep a doctor’s appointment, per 2011 comments from Silverstein Properties:

9/11 A Decade Later:  [WTC] Leaseholder Discusses Rebuilding Effort

Bobby Cuza | 09.02.2011 | NY1

Most New Yorkers know Larry Silverstein as the leaseholder on the World Trade Center. What they may not know is that he signed that lease in July 2001, just eight weeks before it was destroyed.

“The decision to acquire the trade center was, as it turns out, a terrible one. My timing was awful,” says Silverstein.   But Silverstein’s timing on 9/11 could not have luckier. Rather than attend a breakfast meeting at Windows on the World atop the north tower, his wife convinced him to keep a doctor’s appointment, saving his life.

One of his first decisions after the attacks was to move aggressively to rebuild 7 World Trade, which had also collapsed.

“We needed to do something quickly, because everybody was fleeing Lower Manhattan. Residents, residential tenants were leaving. Commercial tenants were leaving en masse,” says Silverstein.

The new 7 World Trade reopened in 2006, the first and, to this day, only part of the complex to be rebuilt.

You can go back and forth on this one, and many people do:

(at a Los Angeles 2007 demonstration)

The “Jersey Girls” and establishment of the 9/11 Commission  (section in olive font)

{{These are four widows of men who died on 9/11.}}

The Jersey Girls or Jersey Widows refers to four American women who lost their husbands in the September 11 attacks. All four, Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken, and Mindy Kleinberg, were residents of New Jersey, and helped lobby the U.S. government to carry out an investigation into the terrorist attacks, resulting in the formation of the 9/11 Commission and the subsequent report released by the Commission.

Survivors and family members of the victims were the most vocal and persistent in the call for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks. The leaders of several 9/11 family groups began to work together to lobby political leaders. The Jersey Girls were part of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, whose members were instrumental in the creation of the 9/11 Commission and in pressing the commission to oversee a thorough and credible investigation. According to Matthew Purdy of The New York Times: “The commission grew largely out of pressure from families of victims, including four New Jersey widows who call themselves ‘the Jersey Girls.’ It’s no mistake that the White House put New Jersey’s most popular politician [Tom Kean] in charge.”^[1]

Kean became the Commission’s Chairman after Henry Kissinger resigned the position; according to Peter Lance, “The Jersey Girls could take some of the credit for his hasty departure.” Van Auken ((one of the “jersey girls”) told Lance:

We were shocked. Kissinger had huge conflicts of interest — major dealings with the Saudis… The day before he resigned, we had a meeting with him in his office in Manhattan. Kristen [Breitweiser] had done impeccable research. She’d looked up all of his companies. So I asked him, ‘Mr. Kissinger, do you have any Saudi clients?’ He mumbled something. And then he asked if someone would pour him some coffee. So then I said, ‘Do you happen to have any clients by the name of bin Laden? He almost fell off the couch.^[2]

A few months before the Commission released its report, Kean said that the Jersey Girls “call me all the time. They monitor us, they follow our progress, they’ve provided us with some of the best questions we’ve asked. I doubt very much if we would be in existence without them.”^[3]

Appointment of Philip D. Zelikow

The eventual appointment of Philip D. Zelikow to the position of Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission was also troubling to the Jersey Girls who demanded his resignation. They cited close personal ties with the Bush family and the National Security Advisor as conflicts of interest.

I too would be concerned — in light of the Patriot Act — of close ties to any Bush family member being in charge of investigating 9/11!

Mindy Kleinberg said, “As executive director, he has pretty much the most important job on the commission. He hires the staff, he sets the direction and focus, he chooses witnesses at the hearings.” Joe Conason wrote that the widows “fear that even with the best of intentions, Zelikow’s connections to the Bush White House will ‘taint the validity’ of the commission’s final report. Their demand that he resign or be fired has been rejected by the commission’s co-chairmen, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton. ‘We respectfully disagree with them,’ replied Al Felzenberg, the commission’s press spokesman, who said Zelikow was chosen ‘for his scholarly credentials and his knowledge of national security issues.’ He hastened to praise the widows for doing ‘a very positive thing,’ adding that while he understood their concerns, he expected that “they’re not going to be satisfied with everything we do.”^[4]

Criticism of the Commission

Main article: Criticism of the 9/11 Commission

As part of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee they helped form, the Jersey Girls monitored and often criticized the 9/11 Commission after they lobbied successfully for its creation. The Jersey Girls pressured the U.S. government for months to have National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testify in front of the Commission; when she refused to testify under oath in March 2004, “they walked out in silent protest.” The White House, in a “dramatic about-face,” gave in and Rice testified.^[5]

When it became clear that the Commission had omitted crucial information from its report, the widows called for a new independent panel. “I’m very disturbed, and I want to get some answers,” said Breitweiser. “I want to know what the truth is.” She called the 2004 findings “an utterly hollow report.”^[6]

Congressional testimony

The Jersey Widows testified for hearing led by congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on July 22, 2005^[7] In Lorie Van Auken’s statement she said this of the 9/11 CommissionReport:

And finally, without compromising our national security, it would have reported all of its findings, with its redactions blacked out and submitted to the American people. In essence, the Commission could have produced a final product where the resulting conclusions and recommendations could be trusted. Instead, at the end of the day, what we got were some statements that truly insulted the intelligence of the American people. Violated our loved ones’ memories, and might end up hurting us, one day soon.

Organized women, particularly (I bet) some of these were mothers — with a moral imperative are a force to be reckoned with.  Case in point, me, I hope!

NOW

NOW:

The Winning memorial site proposal, and accompanying Text:

“reflecting absence”  Michael Arad, New York, NY and Peter Walker, Berkeley, CA

This memorial proposes a space that resonates with the feelings of loss and absence that were generated by the destruction of the World Trade Center and the taking of thousands of lives on September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993. It is located in a field of trees that is interrupted by two large voids containing recessed pools. The pools and the ramps that surround them encompass the footprints of the twin towers. A cascade of water that describes the perimeter of each square feeds the pools with a continuous stream. They are large voids, open and visible reminders of the absence.

THE SECTION BELOW IS A LITTLE MORE PERSONAL.  I FELT IT IMPERATIVE TO BRING UP THE 9/11 SCHOLARS AND THE US PATRIOT ACT, AND THE REAL ESTATE RAMIFICATIONS, TODAY.  I believe the TV and mainstream media will adequately cover the emotional and commemorative aspects of this event.

NOW, let’s talk finances.  It was the World Trade Towers that came down, signifying a financial center.  We are also witnessing the (I believe) imminent destruction of the US $$ as the international reserve currency, not to mention its inflation here.  That’s been coming a long time.  It also means that population who has NOTHING to protect them in the future, either assets putting off some income, or anything not in $$, or a way to get to a more affordable and less oppressive land than the USA has proved to be.

And I’m going to tell you how I experience/d these events and things while belonging to a sub-culture, hidden in open, in a blue state, the Golden State.   I know I do not fully appreciate how different and privileged this is as opposed to other countries and cultures I could’ve been born into; for example, I was not born in a country with an OPEN war zone.  Nevertheless, wrong is wrong, and when a country is and has been accelerating in that downwards direction, it’s time to speak up.  My voice is not going to have the appropriate “tone” for today.  Too bad.  Here it is:

In essence, “Be Prepared” versus “We will Create Jobs.”  ( HuffPost, May 2011)

Be Prepared.

 

That’s the motto of the Boy Scouts.

“Be prepared for what?” someone once asked Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting,

“Why, for any old thing.” said Baden-Powell.

September, 2011

“Obama’s jobs bill might cause a recession”  9/9/2011, CNBC

The plan is to have the government spend more and tax less, adding around $450 billion into the economy. On paper, this seems like a pretty good idea.

But then you have to write the word “reflexivity” across the top of your paper and start figuring out how people and businesses will react to the new spending.

If people believe that the spending will result in higher taxes, they’ll save more in anticipation of the taxes. They may save more than the government spends, which is why the jobs plan could lead to economic contraction.

This over-saving is not entirely irrational. People are used to government programs costing more than expected. So when told the price tag for a bill is $450 billion, the expect the actual price tag to be well above $500 billion. If they save in anticipation of the higher price tag—while spending doesn’t actually exceed projections—you get a drop in aggregate demand.

The only way a plan like this could work well would be for people to believe that the government will not act “responsibly” and raise taxes to meet its obligations. If they thought that the government would inflate the debt away, they’d spend more now to avoid holding dollars that were about to lose purchasing power. This would actually create a multiplier effect.

 

January, 2011

Obama’s Bailout Boys

In which the New Yorker’s John Cassidy points out that three recent Obama appointees just so happened to have (previously) belonged to firms that received major bailouts or perks:

about Obama’s revamped economic team: to be admitted to a senior post, is it essential to have worked for a big financial firm that received a taxpayer bailout?

Let’s consider three recent appointees:

William Daley, the new White House chief of staff. Until December, Daley, who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, was the top man in Washington for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion from the TARP program. (In the summer of 2009, it repaid the money.) . . .

Gene Sperling, the new head of the National Economic Council. Before joining the Administration in 2009, Sperling was a consultant to Goldman Sachs, which paid him almost $900,000 for advising it on a philanthropic project in developing countries. Goldman received $10 billion from the TARP program, which it paid back in 2009. Like JPMorgan, it benefitted from a government guarantee of its debt, and, in late 2008, it was hastily granted a commercial-banking license, which made it eligible for the Fed’s extensive lending facilities. Goldman has publicly denied that it would have collapsed without government assistance, but most people on Wall Street don’t believe it.

Jeffrey Immelt. G.E. is usually thought of as an industrial corporation, but it is also a big bank in disguise. In recent years, its G.E. Finance arm has provided more than half of its revenues. In November, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation [FDIC] agreed to guarantee bonds issued by G.E. Capital, and in the following seven months the firm issued almost $90 billion worth of debt that was backed by U.S. taxpayers. Without this taxpayer guarantee, which wasn’t highly publicized at the time, G.E. would have struggled to roll over its debts and could even have gone under.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/01/volcker-immelt.html#ixzz1XgYbwaAR

To flesh that out a little bit, and name of few of the councils, advisory boards, etc.”

January 21, 2011 (Huffington Post)

Early Friday morning, Obama announced a significant shift for the White House economic team: the war against Wall Street greed has lost a major player, and corporate America has gained an advocate.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt will be the new head of a Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. This panel will replace Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, formerly headed by Paul Volcker.**

For Immediate Release                   February 6, 2009

Obama Announces Economic Advisory Board

Washington (February 6, 2009) – President Barack Obama today signed an executive order establishing the new Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower the Board will provide an independent voice on economic issues and will be charged with offering independent advice to the President as he formulates and implements his plans for economic recovery.

The two men have significantly different backgrounds. Immelt is a lifelong Republican and, asBloomberg put it, “a corporate heavyweight who can help burnish Obama’s pro-business credentials.”

Volcker, a Democrat, was the creator of the eponymous rule in last year’s financial regulation bill which was designed to limit banks’ ability to use taxpayer-backed funds to make investments on their own behalf. In John Cassidy’s excellent New Yorkerprofile, he describes Volcker’s tenure in the White House as “a campaign to curb greed and speculation on Wall Street.

August, 2010

Obama: Auto bailout saved 1 million jobs

Touring a Ford Motor Co. plant in his hometown of Chicago, PresidentObama on Thursday said his administration’s $60 billion bailout of the auto industry may not have been popular but saved some 1 million jobs in the midst of a deep recession.

Unlike General Motors and Chrysler, Ford did not accept money in the government’s bailout program. But Mr. Obama said his administration’s intervention still saved the company from indirect harm.

“If your competitors had gone down, they would have taken down a whole bunch of the suppliers you depend on; the brand of American autos would have diminished. That would have had severe consequences for Ford, and that’s the challenge we faced when I took office,” Mr. Obama told a friendly audience of about 1,700 people, mostly employees at the company’s Chicago assembly plant.

Earlier this year, Ford accepted a nearly $6 billion grant from the Energy Department to develop fuel-efficient vehicles. On Thursday, Mr. Obamaannounced a $250 million government loan guarantee under which the Export-Import Bank of the United States will help the company fund exports of about 200,000 vehicles to Canada and Mexico.

Mr. Obama said the loan guarantee will help the United States achieve his goals of growing the economy and doubling the nation’s exports over five years.

2009

Back up a few years, and the language is similar:  moneycentral, 2009:

The bank rescue plan (.pdf file) finally unveiled by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is the last major piece of a vast bailout strategy that’s been evolving since September, when Lehman Bros. (LEHMQ, news, msgs) failed and American International Group (AIG, news, msgs) and Merrill Lynch almost did.

Having a full plan in place doesn’t mean it will work. But officials at the White House, Treasury and Federal Reserve can now transition from designing the biggest financial bailout in 70 years — which could ultimately cost more than $2 trillion — to executing it.

If you’ve lost track of what the government is actually doing, you get a pass. The bailout efforts have developed in fits and starts, from TARP to TALF to a bunch of other arcane-sounding programs. (See the Treasury’s official list.) Some have been scrapped before they’ve started. Others have been rolled out quietly, then expanded to become major parts of the relief effort. And the bailouts don’t include stimulus spending, tax cuts or monetary-policy maneuvers by the Federal Reserve.

 

Why is this beginning to sound like jumpstarting a car whose battery is truly dead?  Or like repeatedly giving the juice to a patient’s heart which would be flatlining, but never gets ticking on its own?    When does one simply declare time of death?   The US Economy is on artificial respiration, and the question is, who is controlling the equipment, and who gets taken off it when continuing to “inject” things fails to stimulate real life?

The language alone is a clue:  BAILING out.  Bailing includes cleaning out excess bilge and water in a boat — but in this case, the administration is taking money from the populace, investing it (badly, in many cases), calling the accumulations “help,” and then prophesying less help / more help, emotionally jerking around the masses.  Then (under-reported) there are still the columns and ranks of personnel throughout the land simply TRAINING the masses not to be too rebellious, whether in schools ,or courts, or jails, or medically if necessary in various institutions.

9/11 + DECADE AFTER — PERSONAL

I am 2nd or 3rd generation US born, depending on which parent’s background you look at.    In this great land of the free, I freely engaged in a marriage to a man that, while Christian, I believe would’ve been quite a home in a sharia-style setting.    Finally, I got out with some feminist help.  Then I was attacked by my own family for being single, although while married, their basic form of help was as onlookers.  Throughout this time, I gave birth more than once, breastfed children, changed the majority of their diapers, taught them to read and quite a few other good academic skills, worked (whether FT days, FT nights, or something inbetween) and functioned in a household which rarely had all its appliances and/or utilities working at the same time, or even 50% of them.  While I cannot freely (yet) give all details, among other things, my new spouse did not approve of my:

• driving a car, or having one
• having access to credit
• having access to a bank account at all, let alone a joint one.
• engaging in my former profession,*
• engaging in volunteer activities outside the home even remotely resembling the former profession.
• taking classes to switch professions . . . although I finally did get these I was punished for doing so, as well as access to get to classes was sabotaged many times, or helped other times.
• similar obsessions and jealousies applied also to the children, who were daughters, who were not to be too highly educated (which I since have gathered to mean, more than himself)
• resented birth control and refused to use it, for the most part, himself.
• engaged in multiple forms of sleep deprivation, including when I worked nights
• mocked and ridiculed my married relative’s marriage for being too egalitarian
• escalated in violence when I protested the initial violence or other forms of abuse
• seemed to delight in letting me start an activity, building up hope and/or connections with others, only to sabotage or stop it suddenly without justification.
• preached at me endlessly that all this was because of God and the Bible, not that I caught him actually reading the book much
• had multiple methods of what Evan Stark would call “coercive control,”
• eventually got thrown out of our home when escalations included serious physical injury and weapons obsessions, combined with suicidal talk.

*which I was doing when we met and had a degree and work experience in.  No particular reason was given for this, I was just gradually forced out, even though it was an income-producing one.

Before you judge to harshly about why I didn’t just up and leave, picture doing this pregnant with a toddler, unaware of any legal rights, and having repeatedly talked to associates (neighbors, parents of children’s friends, employers, classmates when I got to a class, religious leaders, and my own family) about these matters, including the physical assaults — and not one person mentioned the VAWA, or any legal rights or remedies to domestic violence, let alone the phrase.

I am embarrassed, almost, to say that on 9/11/2001, the elimination of the World Trade Towers, although by then I was a single mother without assault and battery in the home, was nearly a backdrop to focusing on independence from this ONE person and sheer delight to be working, and have moved slightly further away from the scene of those crimes and their very bad associations/ memories.  I had a fresh start, which was still at risk as that fresh start was clearly upsetting my ex, and more talk of suicide.

In the interim, again, in the USA, having plumbing, cars, electricity, cell phones (on a good day), and all the accoutrements of “developed” society, there are too many women, myself included, that are still in a prolonged fight for survival when the Family- Based Court System gets its teeth into our determination not to live with personal assaults, abuse, and abusive control over our lives.  When the right to work to support ourselves when work exists and we were at it, except for ongoing court hearings, ongoing contact with the father, and increasing financial assaults on our ability to do this — continues to pre-empt and curtail consistent participation in activities outside of this Family Court Fight” to retain personal integrity under continuing psychological, verbal, economic and emotional degrading requirements of the system.

I think that the late 1990s – now are actually a Jim Crow era in freeing women from abuse based on gender.   The 1994-1995-1996 fatherhood type-legislation was absolutely fear-based and a backlash against feminism, whereas I see feminism as simply (1970s ff) simply insisting that we are human beings every bit as much as any man.   As the domestic violence advocacy groups became more mainstreamed and consolidated / funded, they were attacked verbally in the press, but diluted economically in the grants system, and with it, the clear principles of understanding that I believe the original feminists brought to it.

The Boy Scout Motto is quite simply, BE PREPARED.  This includes to be stranded alone in the woods, or elsewhere.

This means a middle-class or working class white-collar/blue collar / soccer Mom mentality is not going to help your family.  NOr can you realistically ask Big Brother (figuratively) to do it, because Big Brother is more interested in his own expansion and the next elections and how to tell you what to think or not think about, next.

As I’ve Said Before:  from US Army Survival Manual — Attitude and Habits count!

S = Size Up The Situation.

U = Use All Your Senses, Undue Haste Makes Waste

R = Remember Where You Are  (application here:   historically, financially, physically, etc.)

V = Vanquish Fear and Panic (Fear and Panic is commonly used to manipulate and direct crowds…)

I = Improvise

V = Value Living!

A = Act Like the Natives

L = Live By your wits, but FOR NOW learn basic skills.

There are basic skills to a custody case (I didn’t have them til too late, because I 911’d).  There are also basic skills for surviving times of rapid change, aka “liquidity”

Contrast this with (as I’ve posted before) the Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher (still in use upon adults) from John Taylor Gatto, long ago:

It’s important to do what’s required to UNlearn these which, most likely (if you grew up in the US, and attended a public school in particular — whether you were failing or successful therein — these lessons were absorbed, I’ll bet).  I’m including some of the text (not all) under each “lesson.”

The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher – By John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, (i.e., starting in 1965) having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English, I teach school — and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

1. CONFUSION

What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the biggest idea I think they need is that what they are learning isn’t idiosyncratic — that there is some system to it all and it’s not just raining down on them as they helplessly absorb. That’s the task, to understand, to make coherent.”

Kathy has it wrong. The first lesson I teach is confusion. Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages, parents’ nights, staff-development days, pull-out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the outside world….What do any of these things have to do with each other?

Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education. The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an expertise they do not possess.

Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts into meaning.
…

2. CLASS POSITION

The second lesson I teach is class position. I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong. I don’t know who decides my kids belong there but that’s not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered by schools has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human beings plainly under the weight of numbers they carry. Numbering children is a big and very profitable undertaking, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is elusive. I don’t even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids.    ….

In any case, again, that’s not my business. My job is to make them like it, being locked in together with children who bear numbers like their own. Or at the least to endure it like good sports. If I do my job well, the kids can’t even imagine themselves somewhere else, because I’ve shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes. Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself into good marching order. That’s the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.

3. INDIFFERENCE

The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach children not to care about anything too much, even though they want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. It’s heartwarming when they do that; it impresses everyone, even me. When I’m at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist that they stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete experience except on the installment plan.

Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.

4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY

The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal, because rights do not exist inside a school — not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled — unless school authorities say they do . . .

As a schoolteacher, {{judge? Mediator?  Child SUpport Professional? }} I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, so my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.

Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels, or they steal a private instant in the hallway on the grounds they need water. I know they don’t, but I allow them to deceive me because this conditions them to depend on my favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or happy about things outside my ken; rights in such matters cannot be recognized by schoolteachers, only privileges that can be withdrawn, hostages to good behavior.

NOTE:  Family Court absolutely is — do not kid yourself — the extension of this schoolroom situation.  think “Parenting Coordinator” I think you’ll get it:

5. INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY

The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The expert makes all the important choices; only I, the teacher, can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I then enforce. . .

6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM

The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self-esteem. If you’ve ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have convinced him to believe they’ll love him in spite of anything, you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform. Our world wouldn’t survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that your self-respect should depend on expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.

A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into students’ homes to signal approval or to mark exactly, down to a single percentage point, how dissatisfied with their children parents should be…

7. ONE CAN’T HIDE

The seventh lesson I teach is that one can’t hide. I teach children they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by myself and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts three hundred seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other or even to tattle on their own parents. Of course, I encourage parents to file their own child’s waywardness too. A family trained to snitch on itself isn’t likely to conceal any dangerous secrets.

I assign a type of extended schooling called “homework,” so that the effect of surveillance, if not that surveillance itself, travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.

The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient imperative, espoused by certain influential thinkers, a central prescription set down in The Republic, in The City of God, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in Leviathan, and in a host of other places. All these childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can’t get them into a uniformed marching band.

It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things. “The kids have to know how to read and write, don’t they?” “They have to know how to add and subtract, don’t they?” “They have to learn to follow orders if they ever expect to keep a job.”

This was written BEFORE the Patriot Act (and facebook)…..

After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son’s or daughter’s education. All the pathologies we’ve considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love — and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.

Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.

Suggestion:  Unlearn every single one of those lessons you may have unintentionally absorbed, take the heat, and do something for society here.  Now!  it is NOT all about “hierarchy” and if it is, that’s time to change.   

By the way — this is what I also was taught in my marriage and resisted learning, which appears to be where some of the physical violence came in — to discourage resistance, as adults are often harder to intimidate than kids.

S U R V I V E and Unlearn Lessons 1 through 7, point it out when someone is trying to drum lesson 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 into your head, or your neighbors.

And remember the Jersey Girls who at least helped get a 9/11 Commission underway (however helpful or not helpful it was)

HHS Justification of Estimates (Budget Year 2012), with opening letter from (Fatherhood Advocate in Public Position) Acting Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, David Hansell.   Notice intensity of requests for Early Childhood Education and assertions that the Child SUpport Enforcement program is cost-effective.

(I don’t have a date on this one).

The budget also seeks to ensure that programs are responsive to the needs of America’s most vulnerable families by: (1) supporting a comprehensive approach to early learning and school readiness by providing new investments in quality and heightened program standards across child care settings; (2) proposing a package of child support enforcement investments that support family self-sufficiency and responsible fatherhood, and that recognize the essential role of both parents in providing financial and emotional support for children; (3) proposing child welfare reform that builds on evidence-informed practices by incentivizing states to improve outcomes for children in foster care and others who are receiving child welfare services; and (4) providing a range of strategic, targeted investments to improve services for vulnerable children and families, including funding to increase the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations** and enhance their ability to provide social services to those most in need.

**Whether or not any documentation that they’ve been doing so consistently exists . . ..  The assumption always seems to be that whatever needs doing, an HHS-connected nonprofit could probably do it better, certainly after we prop them up with “technical assistance” and teach them how to apply for grants from US (= the public).

ANYHOW . . . .

I am trying to fulfil all remaining civic obligations (in light of how much public money was wasted in our particular court case — as it is in most cases — keeping it going for years, in order to delay final distribution of child support (among other reasons), soaking out the most possible $$ to come to the local counties through various grants-oriented (or Title IV) programs possible.

My civic obligation in part is this blog (also for my offspring and a track record) — and the next step is to collate the state by state links so YOU can more easily look up organizations you will encounter in any divorce or custody action, and recognize when you see them in action locally.  I cannot do this all, but figured out a link will help at least many people (male & female) track their local spending a little better, after which they can go visit a state legislator and ask, whassup?

However, my sense of civic responsibility is not on autopilot nor do I really wish to reformat and SELL this information, spoonfeeding it to people who like predigested factoids.  I figure over 2 years of consistent blogging is enough to get the general picture, and when it ceases becoming personally fruitful (as to skills development on my part) or simply fun, I’m quitting.  which means certain parties I’ve been blogging on can breathe a sigh of relief, assuming it was so much prose that no other savvy and highly motivated parents are going to catch this ball and run it down the field a little further, like I did with (originally) nafcj.net, begun in 1993.

To Be Continued….