On the same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin” (ibid).

But there was no “second attack” by North Vietnam — no “renewed attacks against American destroyers.” By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War and the  over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties that followed.

The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an “unprovoked attack” against a U.S. destroyer on “routine patrol” in the Tonkin Gulf on August 2 — and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a “deliberate attack” on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.

The truth was very different.

Rather than being on a routine patrol, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers — in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force in “retaliation” for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.

One of the Navy pilots flying overhead on the night of the alleged North Vietnamese attack was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot’s vice presidential candidate. “I had the best seat in the house to watch that event,” recalled Stockdale, “and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats there…. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power” (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/coldwar/interviews/episode-11/stockdale1.html).

On the night of 26 March, 2010, 40 years or so later, the South Korean navy ship Cheonan split in half and sank while patrolling not far from the North Korean coast. Although the definitive cause is still unclear, the South Korean and US governments are keen to convince the world that North Korea was responsible.

On 20 May, South Korea announced it had “overwhelming evidence” that a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine sank one of its warships, the Cheonan, in March with the loss of 46 sailors (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/27/nk).

The Korea Times reported the “overwhelming evidence” to be a propeller that “had been corroding at least for several months,” In April, the director of South Korea’s national intelligence, Won Se-hoon, told a parliamentary committee that there was no evidence linking the sinking of the Cheonan to North Korea. The defence minister agreed. And the head of South Korea’s military marine operations said, “No North Korean warships have been detected [in] the waters where the accident took place.” The reference to an “accident” suggests the warship struck a reef and broke in two (http://watchingthewarmakers.org.uk/).

US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, urged Pyongyang to halt its “policy of belligerence.” She went on to say that this amounted to “unacceptable provocation by North Korea” and urged China to back the international community and chastise North Korea for its actions (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/27/nk).

Meanwhile, the world’s media have been virtually silent about the fact that the US and South Korea were holding a joint naval exercise around 60 miles to the south of where the alleged incident occured, and that Hillary Clinton has been backing the regime of South Korean president Lee Myung-bak who has been ratcheting up tensions on the peninsula (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21402).

This is the same language that was used when the US accused the North of unprovoked aggression when the Korean War started sixty years ago. Then, as now, tensions are being ratcheted-up to the extent that, according to historian Bruce Cumings, a second Korean War is a possiblity (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/27/nk).

One possible explanation of the North’s alleged attack, not apparently being considered by the US government and the media, is that the North Korean’s had fired on the Cheonanin in response to having initially been fired on themselves. A second outcome not being considered, is North Korea’s denial that it was involved in the sinking, and the parallel with the lies used to justify the occupation of Iraq (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6581TW20100609?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews).

What is certain is that US government had failed to point out the background to the tragedy which has a bearing on what happened. For instance, in 1999, a North Korean ship went down with thirty sailors lost and maybe seventy wounded. And last November, a North Korean ship went down in flames. Both happened in a no man’s land, or waters, off the west coast of Korea that both North and South claim and where the US and South Korea demarcated a so-called Northern limit line unilaterally.

The North has never accepted this demarcation line which it claims is under the joint jurisdiction of the North and South Korean militaries. Moreover, US intelligence is aware that North Korean and South Korean fishermen continually fight over the issue of who is entitled to the fishing rights in this area.

The Cheonan ship was sailing in these disputed waters when it was allegedly hit by the North Korean’s.

Furthermore, the US recently completed Operation Full Eagle, an annual joint military exercise with the South Koreans, including naval exercises south of this particular region involving 26,000 soldiers. According to historian Bruce Cumings, these exercises are regarded by the North Koreans as a prelude to a possible attack (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/27/nk).

These contextual issues have rarely, if at all, been reported in the corporate mainstream media.

The greatest of all the “elephants in the room” however, is the fact that US imperialism lies behind the 1945 division of the Korean peninsula and the ongoing conflict between the two Koreas described above. Using its huge military bases in Japan and South Korea, the US wants to maintain its increasingly precarious dominance in East Asia and keep China hemmed in (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21402).

But North Korea has remained a thorn in America’s side, continuing to “defy the international community” over its nuclear testing and maintain its independence despite its economic collapse (http://www.onebigdog.net/north-korea-defies-international-community/).

Essentially, the US is using its ally South Korea in a dangerous game of  ”imperial chess” in the region. The South is one of the world’s biggest military spenders and second only to Israel as a buyer of US arms. Under these circumstances, the South is aware that it is able to flex its political and military muscle in the region with impunity.

But the South is also caught in a vortex of power relations between other powerful players – Japan, Russia and China. Hillary Clinton is aware that the latter is a veto-wielding member of the Security Council and a North Korean ally. Hence, as the New York Times reported, the US would be unlikely to impose new sanctions on the North (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/world/asia/27diplo.html).

Nevertheless, South Korea and the US are using this latest incident to put pressure on the North whether the North was involved or not. After flying to Seoul on the 26 May, where she demanded that the “international community must respond” to “North Korea’s outrage”, Clinton flew on to Japan. Here the new “threat” from North Korea conveniently eclipsed the briefly independent foreign policy of Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, elected last year with popular opposition to America’s permanent military occupation of Japan (http://www.newstatesman.com/middle-east/2010/06/north-korea-vietnam-pilger).

To the American media, North Korea’s guilt is beyond doubt, just as North Vietnam’s guilt was beyond doubt, just as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, just as Israel can terrorise with impunity. However, unlike Vietnam and Iraq, both North Korea and South Korea have nuclear weapons. This is why, the US games are dangerous and the consequences of  a war therefore unimaginable for all of the 70 million Koreans caught in the crosshairs.

Copyright: Daniel Margrain.

At least 15 people were killed and dozens injured when Israeli troops attacked the lead ship in the convoy–the Turkish “Mavi Marmara”. The attack happened in international waters, 75 miles off the coast of Israel and Gaza.

The media were quick to depict the atrocity as one that was of the activists making by repeating various official Israeli government statements suggesting that the Israeli military – the IDF – after having descended on the lead ship, reacted in self-defence to the violent actions of those on board. The media aligned these official pronouncements with Israeli edited video footage that purported to show activists repeatedly striking members of the IDF with rods and batons.

But as the dust has begun to settle, a different reality has slowly started to emerge. Witnesses on board have stated that it was the IDF who initiated the violence firing live bullets prior to embarking the vessel and then continuing with what is described as “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” acts of violence against unarmed activists.

“The ship turned into a lake of blood,” Turkish activist Nilufer Cetin told reporters in Istanbul. She had been seized after the attack on the convoy, held in Israel and then returned to Turkey because she had a child with her. She said Israelis attacked at around 4am on Monday, using “smoke bombs followed by gas canisters. They started to descend onto the ship with helicopters” (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21412).

More detailed eye-witness accounts can be accessed here: (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/conte…0/s2916676.htm) and here:(http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/06/20106193546785656.html).

The supposed cache of weapons - grenades, pistols and rifles which the Israeli’s accused the activists of hiding - did not in fact exist. The Turkish authorities confirmed as much prior to the ship setting sail after they undertook routine checks (http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=who-the-hell-does-israel-think-she-is-2010-06-01).

Needless to say, the ludicrous Israeli claims and the related accusations of guilt by association went unchallenged by the media.

More importantly, journalists failed to mention the ‘elephant in the room’ – the significant question as to why it was that a ship containing humanitarian supplies intended for starving and impoverished people, was attacked in international waters.

Israel justified this illegal attack by claiming that “terrorists” were aboard the vessel. But if this was indeed the case, why was it that the Israeli’s had in the past given permission for similar vessels to dock in Gaza unhindered? And why if the Israeli’s believed “terrorists” were aboard as they claimed, did they not wait until the time the boat either reached Israeli territorial waters or alternatively wait until it arrived at its destination before apprehending it?

In addition, the Israeli government has rejected requests for an international investigation of its conduct (www.focus.de/politik/ausland/…id_515363.html) and its army has been criticised by the Foreign Press Association for what it called “a selective use of videos confiscated from journalists on the ships to justify its deadly raid at sea” (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100603/…tleWhvbm9ycw–).

All this strongly points to Israel’s guilt, and suggests that the official Israeli line is a smokescreen.

So what were the real reasons for the attack? And why, given the near universal international condemnation of Israel, did US president, Barack Obama, remain silent - particularly as the rest of the permanent members of the Security Council not only condemned the attack, but explicitly called for Israel’s three-year blockade of the Gaza Strip to be lifted?

For the answers we need to examine what is widely considered to be a “special relationship” between the two countries. It is a relationship that can be characterized as one in which Israel acts as a ”bulldog” and proxy for the US as a means to cement the latters geopolitical and economic strategic interests throughout the middle east. This is a situation, in other words, where the US dog wags the Israeli tail as a method of divide and control (http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/War/Why%20Politicians.htm).

The current situation—not only but especially in the Middle East—is defined by the imperialist offensive mounted by the United States and its closest allies (notably Israel and Britain) since 11 September 2001. Carried out under the slogan of the “war on terrorism”, the real aim of this offensive is to perpetuate the global domination of US capitalism (hence the title of the neocon ‘Project for the New American Century’) (http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=241).

Domination in this way requires the control of the world’s land, air, maritime and space – a military concept known as “Full-Spectrum dominance” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-spectrum_dominance). In return, Israel by virtue of its strategic importance, receives favoured nation status by way of preferential ”aid” amounting to 3 billion dollars annually, effectively allowing Washington de facto control.

What began with Ben-Gurion’s Plan D – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian’s – is now in its final stages, termed “Operation Cast Lead”. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza during December 2008, which killed 1,4oo Palestinian’s, is part of the wider grand US imperial control of countries’ resources in the region.

Lord Curzon, viceroy of India in 1898 likened this imperial coming together as “pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world” (http://revcom.us/a/089/iran-en.html).

Brzezinski, adviser to several presidents, has written virtually those same words. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, he writes that the key to dominating the world is central Asia, with its strategic position between competing powers and immense oil and gas wealth (http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119973.pdf).

In 2001, the authoratitive Janes Weekly revealed that Israel needed a “trigger” of a suicide bombing to attack the West Bank with the aim of adhering to this strategic game (http://www.iags.org/n0124051.htm). On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their “trigger”; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened seven years later on 5 November 2008 when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger”. A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators - was shattered by the Israeli attack and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed”.

On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier (http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1146).

The seven years to 2008 have resulted in the deaths of 14 Israeli’s by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks (www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/dec/30/israel-and-the-palestinians-middle-east).

Washington was fully aware of the nature, as well as the likely consequences of the IDF naval operation in international waters, including the killings of civilians (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19447).

There are indications that the decision was taken in consultation with Washington. Indeed the Obama administration had given the green light to the deadly raids in international waters (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19447).

As with the previous examples highlighted above, this current Israeli atrocity will likely provide the catalyst for the “trigger” for further Israeli incursions into Gaza.

The killing of unarmed civilians was part of the mandate of the Israeli naval commando. It was an integral part of the logic of  Dagan’s “Operation Justified Vengeance”, which presents Israel as the victim rather than the perpetrator and uses civilian deaths “on both sides” to justify a process of military escalation.  

Operation “Cast Lead” was part of a broader military-intelligence operation initiated at the outset of the Ariel Sharon government in 2001. But it was under Sharon’s “Operation Justified Vengeance” that F-16 fighter planes were initially used to bomb Palestinian cities.

The strike on the Freedom Flotilla is part of the logic of transforming Gaza into an urban concentration camp. “Operation Justified Vengeance” was also referred to as the “Dagan Plan”, named after General (ret.) Meir Dagan, who currently heads Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1868).  

It should be understood that the raid on the Flotilla also coincided with NATO-Israel war games directed against Iran. According to the Sunday Times “three German-built Israeli submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles are to be deployed in the Gulf near the Iranian coastline” (http://www.zerohedge.com/article/israel-deploys-three-nuclear-cruise-missile-armed-subs-along-iranian-coastline).  

Meir Dagan, in coordination with his US counterparts, had been put in charge of various military-intelligence operations. It is worth noting that Meir Dagan as a young Colonel had worked closely with then defense minister Ariel Sharon in the raids on Palestinian settlements in Beirut in 1982.

The 2009 ground invasion of Gaza, in many regards, bear a canny resemblance to the 1982 military operation led by Sharon and Dagan.

Dagan as head of Israeli intelligence, no doubt also took part in the decision to launch the strike on the Freedom Flotilla. Moreover, it seems inconceivable that Obama did not personally authorize the strike also(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1868).  

Copyright: Daniel Margrain

April 21, 2010 is also a day now embedded in Greek history. It was on this day that a delegation from the IMF, European Union (EU) and the European Central Bank (ECB) arrived in Athens to implement what they term as planned economic ’stabilization’ measures, characterized by cuts to public services and reductions in living standards.  The Greeks hatred of this modern form of imperialism that stem from the events of April 21 1967, is manifested on the streets of Athens in the form of mass protests against the austerity measures imposed by the bankers. As one Greek activist contrasting the events of 1967 with the present put it: “We suffered from the military then. We suffer from the bankers now” (http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11258).

As I illustrated in my last article, the debt crisis presently sweeping Greece and throughout the globe has its roots in the credit boom period in the US a decade ago, the ideological justifications of which have been legitimized as a result of the capitalist logic that underpins it. But one would be hard pressed to arrive at this conclusion by reading the mainstream media, the vast majority of whom have characterized the crisis essentially as a trajedy that is specific to Greece and where the public response to the crisis is unjustifiably deemed to be negative rather than positive. It is hardly surprising then, that Greece is presented not as a beacon for democracy, but as a ”junk country” getting its comeuppance for its alleged ”bloated public sector” and “culture of cutting corners” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/09/greece-debt-crisis-euro-imf). 

The reason why the media are attempting to tarnish Greece in this way is because the Greek people have mobilized on mass against the bankers’ attempts to insist the people pay for the so-called “rescue” of their country by way of massive austerity programmes, without a fight. The memories of 1967 allied to the accompanying acts of popular resistance, remain a feature of the collective Greek consciousness in a way that is for example, absent in a country like Britain. Such resistance is anathema to Europe’s central bankers and regarded as an obstruction to German capital’s need to capture markets in the aftermath of Germany’s troubled reunification. In this sense, the Greece of today is a microcosm of a modern class war that is rarely reported as such and is waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union (http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=576).

The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis, which preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou, was described by sociologist Jean Ziegler as “a machine for systematic pillaging the country’s resources” (http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/24/the-modern-class-war).

This “machine” whose functionaries included Goldman Sachs and other US hedge fund operators, are currently being investigated by the US Federal reserve Board for their alleged speculating of public asset stripping by the Greek government and the resulting haemorrhaging of capital by way of capital flight which the ECB facilitates. This has prompted some mainstream commentators to question the apparent hitherto God-given logic which insists upon cuts as a means to appease financial markets as an unaviodable feature of system where such markets, instead of being our servants, are our masters (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/02/greece-default-debt-choice).

The reason why financial markets are perceived as masters in this way is due to the structural weaknesses of monetary union. All countries have the same access to the money markets, but they do not have the same access to credit, which is obtained at a different price by each country (http://researchonmoneyandfinance.org/media/reports/eurocrisis/fullreport.pdf).

The main problem highlighted by the Greek crisis is that the EU is at most a monetary union not a fiscal union. Fiscal policy—dependent on the power to tax and spend—remains, for reasons of self-interest, firmly in the hands of the nation-states. Governments’ only means of saving the capitalist system from itself was to bail out the financial institutions from which they could then borrow as a means to enact the fiscal measures necessary to rescue the market (Callinicos, Alex, 2010, Bonfire of Illusions, Polity).

Governments’ obsession with appeasing the market means that weaker capitalist states like Greece are not given the luxury of being able to choose the timing of their austerity programmes. Greece has been targeted by the financial markets and their facilitators – the unelected and unaccountable ECB - for reasons of speculative profilagcy to the extent that the country has become threatened with bankruptcy. As a response, the financial markets didn’t just force up the interest rates on the bonds of the weaker eurozone economies, they also pushed down the euro. This made the Greek crisis a problem for the entire eurozone (http://www.allbusiness.com/economy-economic-indicators/economic-conditions-deflation/14489907-1.html).

The dominant continental states, France and Germany, were divided over how to respond: France supporting a coordinated loan to keep Greece afloat, Germany resisting. Greece threatened to humiliate the EU by going to the International Monetary Fund for help, a bluff that was called by Germany. A few weeks ago, European leaders signed up to an unprecedented 750 billion euro ($920 billion) joint rescue package for the euro which has been proven to be inadequate to stabilize it. Instead, the European single currency has continued its dramatic fall, recently hitting a four-year low against the dollar (http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,697098,00.html).

The eventual agreement on the joint IMF-eurozone rescue reflected the fact that a Greek default would not be in the interest of the German banks, which have lent heavily to Greece and the other weaker eurozone economies. But the debate within Angela Merkel’s chronically weak conservative-liberal coalition in Berlin (which was accompanied by ferocious nationalist exchanges between the German and Greek media) tilted towards the hard line taken by Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36981501/ns/business/).

He proposed setting up a European Monetary Fund that could come to the rescue of eurozone members in Greece’s plight, in exchange for a tightening up of the Growth and Stability Pact, under which EU states are not supposed to run budget deficits greater than 3 percent of national income. Greece’s budget deficit is currently running at 13 per cent which is close to that of the UK and the US. But ministers want to reduce Greece’s deficit to 3 per cent within the next three years. Moreover, penalty clauses are to be inserted allowing states that broke the rules to be deprived of access to EU cohesion funds or even to have their voting rights temporarily suspended (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c36bf126-2d41-11df-9c5b-00144feabdc0.html).

The message is clear. If Greece fails to implement the required austerity programmes, it will be ditched. The so-called rescue of the country is essentially an effort to rescue the French and German banks. If Greece defaults, it would deal a blow to the banks that are already weakened by the broader crisis (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21313).

This explains the nature of the anti-Greek propaganda that is pumped out by the media. This is the same media which claims that the Greek people have artificially high standards of living that must be brought down. But research by investigative journalists expose these lies and distortions. For example, figures show that the cost of living in Greece is one of the highest in Europe with the average shopping basket of food costing 66 per cent more than in Germany. Around 1 in 5 Greeks live on or below the poverty line of 6,648 euros per year. Unemployment stands at around 11 per cent. Public expenditure is equal to 40 per cent of gross domestic product. In Britain it accounts for 45 per cent. There is no “bloated public sector” (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=21241).

Despite what the media portray, the crisis in Greece is connected to the broader crisis which will lead to increasing pressures on the euro. This will worsen the problems in Portugal, Ireland and Spain – the countries that along with Greece make up the so-called PIGS. According to leading Greek activist Panos Garganos, the intervention of the IMF and EU will not calm this crisis – it will make it worse because the example of Greece shows they have failed there, so they will fail to save Ireland, Portugal and Spain. The markets know this and will move quickly (http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11258).

What all this indicates is that the Greek people are clear that it is the system which is responsible for the crisis and are standing up to fight back against the bankers and politicians who insist that they, along with other ordinary folks in countries like the US and UK, repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred them. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers in charge. For the European Union and the IMF, the opportunity presents to “change the culture” and dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have “structurally adjusted” (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world (http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=576).

As the illusionary Tweedledee and Tweedledum versions of parliamentary democracy throughout much of the world play to the fiscal tune of ruling class interests, the inspiration for the rest of us are the ordinary folk in Greece.

Copyright: Daniel Margrain

The mainstream corporate media acted as a kind of echo chamber for this propaganda by reporting ad-nauseum the politicians’ belief that the failure of the people to assign an overall majority to any one particular party would effectively undermine “the national interest”. But when politician after politician speaks about “the national interest”, they mean the interests of those who own and control industry and those who move trillions around the money markets.

What the British people have been witnessing since the election, in the full glare of publicity, is the three main parties jostling and manoeuvring over how this notion of the national interest can be best accommodated in the interests of corporate power.

Sir Martin Sorell, chief executive of the advertising empire WPP, voiced the view of the major capitalists when he said that a hung parliament was the “worst possible” result:

http://blogs.news.sky.com/kleinman/Post:40de91a6-b227-432e-90c5-fe5869ab1a1d

Alan Clarke of BNP Paribas commented that “the UK could lose its top triple A credit status because of its failure to deliver a majority government with the authority to tackle the country’s public finances with immediete effect.”:

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=495612&in_page_id=2

This is code for the insistence that ordinary people bear the brunt for the economic crisis by way of a series of austerity programmes and savage cuts to public services, while the rich get off scot free.

Sub-prime and the credit crunch

Let’s remind ourselves how we got here. The roots of the current crisis go some way back. After the 9/11 attack in New York, instability and fear pervaded financial markets. In order to steer the US and world economy out of a tight corner there was a reduction in interest rates and loosening of credit, encouraging people to borrow to sustain demand.

Banks took advantage of this and started to push mortgages. Initially the banks were lending on fairly good terms but then competition set in and those with money found they could expand their wealth by borrowing at low interest rates in order to lend to those prepared to pay higher interest rates. One of the main groups prepared to pay these higher rates were poorer sections of the population desperate to get somewhere to live and those who were previously regarded as uncreditworthy. As long as house prices continued rising, they seemed a safe group to lend to, since there was always a profit to be made by repossessing their homes if they failed to pay up on time. This lending became known as the “subprime mortgage market”.

Although on the surface this appeared to be a form of secure lending, in reality it was risky. Why? Because by 2006 the US economy began slowing down and profits in the US started to fall. As profits declined, firms got rid of workers and poor American’s could no longer keep up with their rising mortgage payments. Borrowing at one end of the chain could not be repaid. Repossessions led to falling house prices, and the “collateral” that supposedly guaranteed (provided security) against the loans, fell in value as well. An enormous 400 billion US dollars in lending was suddenly not repayable. 

A whole host of new institutions emerged that began specialising in the same manner as the banks. They would obtain cheap credit in the environment of low interest rates after 2001, use it to make loans, and then ‘securitise’ them. Other financial institutions would also use cheap credit to buy the new securities. Still other financial institutions would combine several of these securities to create even more complex, “synthetic” Collateralised Debt Obligations, which give their holders the right to interest accruing on the earlier securities, and so on.

In this baroque and opaque world, fuelled by cheap credit, it did not take long before just about all the major financial institutions across the world found themselves holding securities that contained bits of subprime mortgages. What was originally a small sickness within the US economy grew enormously because of the way capitalist credit works. In the end, governments’ were forced to intervene by bailing out vast swathes of the capitalist system as a precursor to saving it:

http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=395

In spring 2008, Bear Sterns became an early high profile casualty of the crisis on Wall Street which was followed by the next big Wall Street bank to collapse – Lehman Brothers. The meltdown in Greece followed shortly after. Speculators are already looking for the next domino set to topple after Greece. It might be one of the other weak eurozone countries, with Portugal tipped as the most likely, but it might well be Ireland, Britain or even the US, all of whom in 2010 have a higher projected budget deficit than Greece:

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/05/uk-budget-deficit-to-surpass-greeces-as-worst-in-eu/

All this is happening despite the fact that the major economies are technically out of recession. The recovery can be characterised in three words: “weak”, “fragile” and “uncertain”. The recovery is weak because the crisis, in spite of its severity, has not resolved the underlying problems the global economy faces. These problems were created by three decades of sustained low profitability. A recent column in the UK’s Financial Times pointed out that after the Second World War profit rates held up at about 15 per cent in the US. By the 19080s it was 10 per cent, and today it is just 5 per cent:

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/2976

This would appear to indicate that the underlying problems of the global economy are systemic.

Marx’s explanation

Marx’s basic line of argument was simple. Individual capitalists can increase their own competitiveness by increasing the productivity of their workforce. The way to do this is by using a greater quantity of the “means of production”—tools, machinery and so on—for each worker. There is a growth in the ratio of the physical extent of the means of production to the amount of labour power employed, a ratio that Marx called the “technical composition of capital”.

But a growth in the physical extent of the means of production will also be a growth in the investment needed to buy them. So this too will grow faster than the investment in the workforce. To use Marx’s terminology, “constant capital” grows faster than “variable capital”. The growth of this ratio, which he calls the “organic composition of capital”, is a logical corollary of capital accumulation.

Yet the only source of value for the system as a whole is labour. If investment grows more rapidly than the labour force, it must also grow more rapidly than the value created by the workers, which is where profit comes from. In short, capital investment grows more rapidly than the source of profit. As a consequence, there will be a downward pressure on the ratio of profit to investment—the rate of profit.

Each capitalist has to push for greater productivity in order to stay ahead of competitors. But what seems beneficial to the individual capitalist is disastrous for the capitalist class as a whole. Each time productivity rises there is a fall in the average amount of labour in the economy as a whole needed to produce a commodity (what Marx called “socially necessary labour”), and it is this which determines what other people will eventually be prepared to pay for that commodity. So today we can see a continual fall in the price of goods such as computers or DVD players produced in industries where new technologies are causing productivity to rise fastest:

http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=340

As the rate of return on investment declines in its totality, so it is the weakest companies financially – but not necessarily technologically – that go out of business. In turn, this results in an increase in unemployment. Thus workers are able to purchase fewer goods and services. This inevitably leads to a downward spiral of economic slump and crisis within the system as a whole.

But Marx argued that there were countervailing factors which mitigated against a total collapse of the system. For example, the diversion of investment from the production of goods and services to the production of arms – a process that is governed by states that are in constant competition with one another – provided a very important role in producing the long boom after the Second World War.

Also, Marx argued that profitability could be restored by crisis itself, through what he called “the annihilation of a great part of the capital”. During a recession some companies fail and are bought up by rivals, and others have to sell off parts of their business or dump their stock on the market to meet their obligations. Those companies that survive can take advantage of this, grabbing assets at a fraction of their real value and putting them to highly profitable use in the recovery that follows. Depressed wages and high unemployment also allow capitalists to squeeze more out of workers. A process of “creative destruction” may lead to a boom following a slump:

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11255

But this is not some automatic process that pushes the economy back towards some natural equilibrium. The post-war boom followed only after the prolonged horror of the 1930s slump and the destruction of the Second World War, which also forced states to intervene to reorganise whole national economies.

Comparing the present with the Great Depression

There are significant differences between the situation at the beginning of the present crisis and that in 1929.

First, state expenditure has for nearly 70 years been central to the system in a way in which it was not in 1929. In that year federal government expenditures represented only 2.5 per cent of GNP. In 2007 federal expenditure was around 20 percent of GNP:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/

And the speed and vigour with which the government has moved to intervene in the economy has been much greater this time. The Hoover administration (March 1929-February 1933) did make a few moves aimed at bolstering the economy, so that state spending rose slightly in 1930, and federal money was used to bail out some banks and rail companies through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932. But the moves were very limited in scope—and the state could still act in ways that could only have exacerbated the crisis in 1931 and 1932.

The Fed increased interest rates to banks and the government raised taxes. It was not until after the inauguration of the Roosevelt administration in March 1933 that there was a decisive increase in government expenditure. But even then the high point for total federal government spending in 1936 was only just over 9 percent of national output—and in 1937 began to decline.

By contrast, the cost of bailouts pushed through by the Bush government in its dying days, just as the credit crunch began to turn into a recession, could amount to an extra 10 percent of GNP:

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=506&issue=121#121harman_65

Figure 1: Net federal expenditure as a percentage of GDP
Source: Éric Tymoigne, “Minsky and Economic Policy: ‘Keynesianism’ All Over Again?”, Levy Economics Institute, working paper

Figure 2: Composition of federal expenditure
Source: Éric Tymoigne, “Minsky and Economic Policy: ‘Keynesianism’ All Over Again?”, Levy Economics Institute, working paper

The increased importance of state expenditures—and the willingness of central banks and government to spend rapidly in trying to cope with the crisis—means there is a base level of demand in the economy which provides a floor below which the economy will not sink, which was not the case in the early 1930s. In this way, military expenditure, at $800 billion twice the level in current dollars of 2001, plays a particularly important role guaranteeing markets to a core group of very important corporations. Such spending can clearly serve to mitigate the impact of the crisis.

But there is an important second difference that operates in the opposite direction. The major financial and industrial corporations operate on a much greater scale than in the inter-war years and therefore the strain on governments of bailing them out is disproportionately larger. The banking crises of the early 1930s in the US was a crisis of a mass of small and medium banks—”Very big banks did not often become insolvent and fail, even in periods of widespread bank failures:

http://www.questia.com/library/book/too-big-to-fail-policies-and-practices-in-government-bailouts-by-benton-e-gup.jsp

This time we have seen a crisis of many of the biggest banks in most major economies. Within a day of Lehman Brothers going bust, banks such as HBOS in Britain, Fortis in the Benelux countries, Hypo Real Estate in Germany and the Icelandic banks were all in trouble. From there the crisis spread to affect other major banks and the “shadow banking system” of hedge funds, derivatives and so on. The most recent estimate of the total losses so far, from the Bank of England, amounts to a staggering $2,800 billion:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/28/economics-credit-crunch-bank-england

Despite this, global industrial production now shows clear signs of recovering. This is a sharp divergence from experience in the Great Depression, when the decline in industrial production continued fully for three years. Paradoxically, staving off a catastrophic slump may have simply guaranteed that problems linger on, ensuring that recovery remains weak.

The recovery is also uneven. Initial estimates suggested that British growth slowed to just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2010. The US is growing faster, and is also faring better than Germany and Japan, which are more export-oriented and have suffered more from the decline in world trade than from the initial financial meltdown. China was also hit by falling demand for its exports but has continued to boom due to a massive state-sponsored domestic investment programme:

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11255

This has revived the fortunes of some of the developing economies that supply it with raw materials. But even in China there are fears that growth is unstable, with widespread concerns about an emerging property bubble, a glut of lending raising the prospect of colossal levels of bad debt, and the danger that too much is being produced for still-limited markets.

The weakness of the global recovery means that workers will continue to suffer. In some countries this takes the form of high unemployment and attacks on wages, as in the US, Spain and Ireland. In others, such as Germany and Japan, where unemployment has not risen as fast, companies have sought to hold on to workers but have cut pay rates, reduced hours or shifted workers onto part-time contracts. Britain lies somewhere between the two extremes. ibid.

Unemployment and underemployment will persist well into any recovery. A recent IMF report argues that employment falls further and takes longer to recover during recessions that have a significant financial component. The report indicates that it could take a year and a half from the end of the recession for any substantial improvement, assuming that the recovery continues:

http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2010/04/22/imf-global-recovery-stronger-than-expected-but-strength-varies/

Finally, any recovery is and will remain uncertain. State interventions replaced private borrowing and investment with mountains of public debt, and falling tax revenues made it difficult to recover the money spent. Now governments everywhere face a dilemma. Do they cut back to pay off their debts, risking a “double-dip recession” as the stimulus is withdrawn? Or do they continue spending and risk a run on their currencies, as the eurozone experienced amid fears of a Greek default?

Copyright: Daniel Margrain.

The pork steak and rice washed down with a bottle of Buckaneroo beer that I consumed at a beachside restaurant that evening made a pleasant change from the rather predictable food of the Casa’s. Saturday night in Varadero was more subdued than I anticipated. The vast swathes of British package tourists never materialized, having been usurped by their mainly French, Italian and Canadian counterparts.

Veradero, much like other places in Cuba where tourists spend much of their time and money in each others company, is a foreign tourist enclave where small businesses proliferate and operate semi-autonomously from the centralized arm of the Cuban state. This small coastal town is littered with restaurants, bars and numerous plush but sanitized all-inclusive hotels and it was the only place in the country where it illegal for local Cuban’s to let out the rooms of their Casa’s to tourists for profit, which was presumably intended as a means to avoid the eventuality of undercutting the income of the hotel chains. In Veradero, hard currency in the form of the Cuban convertible, has replaced the Peso as the international monetary language and is the place that many Cuban’s come to boost their state salaries.

Hard currency dominates the town which has distorted the local economy and altered the community beyond any recognition of its former feudal incarnation. Veradero is a rather sad place – a kind of miniature version of Las Vegas without the gregarious trappings that one associates with the latter, but nevertheless is as equally as unsuited to the environment  from which it has emerged. Mass tourism and the tourist ghetto that has accompanied it, has created socioeconomic polarizing fractures within the community. Visible, and at times ostentatious displays of material wealth, exist here alongside abject material deprivation – a situation that will undoubtably worsen as the relative trickle of tourists here inevitably turn into a flood in the years to come. The apparent irreconcilable forces that are pulling Veradero apart acts as a warning sign to the rest of the country in a future post-Fidel world. 

So Veradero is far from a representative slice of an ‘authentic’ Cuba that I was in search of.  But I soon came to the realization that my search for an authentic Cuba was perhaps an illusionary one anyway. This is a view certainly shared by many of those who adhere to the Marxist theory of commodification. Those who subscribe to this idea argue that consumerism arises because markets prioritize the importance of ‘things’ as a value system over and above all other aspects of human relations.

All the features of market society with which writer Naomi Klein describes in her book No Logo, such as advertising and branding, are all part of the process where the power of the commodity is said to dominate. It is within this context that Marx in Capital talks about how “definite social relations between people assume the fantastic form of a relation between things”. Commodities, Marx argues, take on a mystical character. It is as if ‘things’ are the driving force in society rather than the exploitative relations and the competitive struggle between rival units of capital.

Elsewhere, Marx says that “the devaluation of the world of human beings is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.” In other words, real social relationships in society are, it is argued, governed by an external power that has control over human beings who make and buy all these ‘things’ as if somehow this process has nothing to do with them. Human beings, in effect therefore, come to ‘fetishize’ or worship things that they consider to be separate and outside of themselves.

This process is an inherent feature of a world where the market, and thus commodities, circulate throughout the system. The market and its driving force, consumption, is to a greater or lesser extent, a feature of Cuban society -albeit currently a marginal one - which explains why Cuba is being pulled in different directions.

For many visitors, the ‘authentic’ Cuban experience means reading Hemingway, dancing to salsa music, Che iconography, the Buena Vista Social Club and bars full of folks drinking Mohito’s and smoking Monte Cristo cigars. But for others – myself included – these aspects of Cuban life represent the turning of goods and services into commodities for human consumption as a precursor for the accumulation of capital and the drive for profit.

The sad but ironic truth is that without the hard currency of the tourists, there would be no ‘authentic’ Cuba for the tourists to enjoy in places like the regenerated Vieja district of central Havana, for example. In Cienfuegos, unlike Havana and Varadero, there were very few tourists and consequently no cariacatures of the kinds of experiences that some Cuban’s connected to the tourist industry who deal in hard currency, believe we as visitors want to experience. 

During my last day in Varadero, I met a Polish woman called Karolina who had been living in Cuba for the past 7 years and worked as a health professional. I asked her about the question of housing and freedom of movement for Cuban’s. She explained to me that Cuban’s are legally allowed to change houses through a kind of swap scheme similar to the principle of council house swaps in Britain. She reafirmed my long held suspicion that Fidel’s well publicised funded programme of exporting Cuban doctors to Venezuela, was essentially a propaganda exercise. Although she was married to a Cuban and had been living in the country for 7 years, she still had many un-answered questions herself.

As I sat at an outdoor bar listening to the resident band work through their worn routine, I realized that the version of Cuba fetishized in Lonely Planet exemplified in places like Veradero and Havana Vieja, no more resembles contemporary Cuba then city stockbrokers wearing bowler hats or the Houses of Parliament represents contemporary London.

Many of the young Cuban’s in Varadero, are more likely to aspire to what they perceive to be an archetypal capitalist lifestyle and the consumption that comes with it, then they are to keep faith with the ideals of Fidel. The popular musical genre known as ‘reggaeton’ enjoyed by the young, is more Miami then Havana and the majority of Varadero youth want to be seen sporting the latest designer clothes and sipping Red Bull rather then lingering on a Mohito or propping up the bar puffing on a Cohiba.

Karolina explained to me that many young Cuban’s, when exchanging homes, are often prepared to ‘downgrade’ their places in terms of size and/or condition in order to obtain cash so as to be in a position to be able purchase elements of this Western ‘lifestyle’. In Varadero, I saw many young Cuban’s dressed in expensive designer clothes and trainers and driving new cars either paid for through tourism, downsizing of accommodation or through the receipt of hard currency from the estimated 1 in 4 Cuban’s who live in exile.

Meanwhile, the majority of Cuban’s who live their lives outside of this bubble, and who have no access to the Cuban convertible, must make do with their meagre state salaries. Thus, Cuban society is bound to become increasingly fractured and divisive in the years to come. When I suggested to Karolina that this scenario would likely necessitate a political crackdown by the Cuban state which would probably lead to the likelihood of a counter-revolutionary struggle, she looked at me in a resigned knowing way: “Yes, sadly I think this outcome is almost inevitable”, she said….But then added positively, “We people in Cuba have to find a way of looking to the future, and we must believe we can succeed.”

References:

Klein, N. (2000) No Logo, London.

Marx, K. (1975) Early Writings, London.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital vol.1, London.

Copyright: Daniel Margrain

It was clear to me, that many Cuban professionals, particularly many of the young, are hungry for change. It was also clear to me that some, but by no means all, want out of Cuba, while many more wait patiently for Fidel to pass away. From my experience though, the majority of Cuban’s adore their leader and would do anything to defend the revolution. But there also exists a kind of resigned pragmatism too.

For many Cuban’s, Obama is perceived as the catalyst for change. But these changes are viewed as only being possible within the context of a transitional Cuban government of which the lifting of the embargo would be the first step in the cooling of US-Cuban relations. Thanks to the 1996 US Helms-Burton Bill, the tightening of of the embargo was pulled up a notch not loosened. But even if a transitional government in Cuba does eventually materialize following Fidel’s death, it is unlikely – given the perilous state of the US economy -  Obama will make Cuba one of his main priorities.

During my time in Cuba I stayed in a variety of different sized accommodations from the small apartment to the large family house and I wondered how this disparity could be explained given the nature of Cuban society. I also wondered how in practical terms Cuban people managed to to move home and set up new lives in new cities and towns within the context of a country where private property is non-existent.

I got to talking about these subjects, as well as comparative notions of democracy and human rights, with some British travellers whilst on a boat trip around the crescent shaped coast of the ’Jewel of the Caribbean’ on a cloudy and relatively cold night in early December. Like myself, they had so far been unable to get any answers. It was clear that I was not going to be able to satisfy my inquisitive mind in the charming laid back atmosphere of Cienfuegos where the notion of time had appeared to have come to a standstill.

What struck me most about this beautiful country, is that the things we in the West take for granted, like the notion of time, appear to have no real meaning or relevance in Cuban society. This squares with Peter Linebaugh’s idea (1) that the very essence of time and the spaces time fills in the vaccum left over from unprofitable ‘surplus’ free time, are necessarily constrained by a capitalist economic logic that prioritises the accumulation of profit above all other human activity. The emergence of the mass-produced time-piece during the 18th century, merely reflects this overiding obsession with time and its coersive affects in perpetuating and reproducing the existing capitalist order.

The Cuban people’s disrespect for time was no more evident than in the streets of Cienfuegos. The relatively modern and tarmaced streets and the squares and open spaces in the centre of town, provide the backdrop for idle chatting, drinking, eating, the playing of dominoes, chess, baseball and general relaxation. Cuban’s of all ages embrace, kiss, talk and laze about – it’s an intrinsic part of the way Cuban folk spend their time together.

I witnessed joy and happiness, as well as saddness and despair on the faces of the people on the streets of Cienfuegos, much like anywhere else on the planet. But of all the people in ’third world’ countries, the Cuban’s are by a country mile, some of the most humble and dignified of any people that I met on my travels, despite the fact that the people have suffered terribly following the break-up of the Soviet Union during the years 1991-94.

I witnessed none of the horrors which characterized that particular period of Cuban history. In Cuba, unlike for example,’democratic’ India, I did not witness emaciated and starving people, neither did I see vast inequalities of economic wealth or witness the social fabric of a country at the point of collapse. Civil society in Cuba - albeit limited by Western standards – functions relatively well when compared to many other countries that we prefer to call third world ‘democracies’.

Further, the perception of street safety and well-being was, in my experience, a reality in all the towns and cities I visited throughout the country. Whilst widespread alcholism, drug addiction, petty theft of property and other social misdemeanors, are a regular feature of everyday life in a modern country like Britain, in Cuba this is not the case. During the odd occasion that I had brought up this particular topic with Cuban people, the response was often one of total dismay and incomprehension.

Women can, and frequently do, walk the streets of Cuban cities alone and in complete safety. This may appear to some folks to be somewhat of a cariacature, but it happens to be true. It is also true that Cuba places a high priority on education which is paid for by the state up to degree level. Healthcare is also free at the point of delivery and housing and utility costs are extremely minimal to non-existent.

Cuba has the highest amount of qualified doctors per head of population of any country on the planet and its low levels of infant mortality and high life expectancy, is enviable to many of the ‘developed’ countries of the world. All this has been achieved within the context of  an extremely damaging and punitive US-initiated trade embargo which has seen Cuba marginalized and isolated, both economically and politically from much of the world.

It is also a nation that remains effectively at war with the most powerful country on earth. It is true that democracy as we have come to understand it in the West, has been ‘suspended’ in Cuba on the pretext that it is a country at war, in much the same way that democracy was suspended in Britain during WW2. This explains the reason for the queues and food stamps.

In keeping with traditon, my Cuban hosts in Cienfuegos were friendly, charming and hospitable. I would often eat dinner at the home of my hosts who occupied a rather grand house close to the centre of town. While staying there, I occassionally took the opportunity to watch some television. Cuban television output is not unlike most national media throughout the world in terms of its targetting of a specific demographic.

In London, I have the potential to be able to tune into close on 100 virtually identical channels. In Cuba the number is a very distinct 4. During my stay, I managed to watch an episode of The Sopranos and the movie Goya’s Ghosts. News and current affairs output and debate in Cuba is clearly more incisive and truthful then say its British state broadcasting counterpart, the BBC. For example, there appears to be none of the fake probing and bating in the interviewing style of “Paxman”, or any of the dubious claims of impartiality and objectivity that typify the BBC.

By contrast, in Cuba the emphasis is very much focused on Latin American affairs as one might expect. Studio debates appeared to be genuinely heated, spontaneous and passionate which, at least as far as I was concerned, made for a refreshing change from the kind of bland Eurocentric and contrived output that passes for news in much of the West.

As much as I enjoyed my time in Cienfuegos, I felt the time had now come for me to move on. I wanted to get a taste of the local Cuban experience within a tourist package environment. This meant only one word, ”Veradero” a relatively developed “package resort” 184 kilometres from Cienfuegos on the Atlantic side of the island…..

Part 3 to follow…

Reference:

(1) Limebaugh, P. (2003). The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, Verso. 

Copyright: Daniel Margrain.

I arrived in Havana from Madrid in the late evening on November 17, 2009 and settled in at the famous Plaza Hotel which had all of the grace and fading colonial grandoir of similar hotels I had frequented in India many years previously. The wooden shutters in my room opened up to a small balcony that overlooked a dimly lit street below whose initial appearance had a sense of forbing about it. Except for the sound of the ocassional old clapped out taxis that passed in the street directly below me and the occassional echo of distant voices, the streets remained eerily quiet.

The capital city contains many delights for the visitor, too numerous to mention for a small article such as this. But to get some sense of the ‘authentic’ Cuban experience, I realized that I would have to journey further afield. After 8 days in this wonderful city, I decided to take a bus to the old Spanish colonial town of Trinidad (pop. 50,000) 375km to the south side of the island. After a fascinating bus journey along near-deserted ‘highways interspersed with lush green paddy fields and remote villages, I was in the end relieved to arrive at my destination, particularly as the bus driver insisted on playing a music video of what seemed like the entire works of Bony M throughout the entire length of the journey. Anyway, I was met at the local bus station in Trinidad by my host Dr Carlos, a specialist in the field of dermetology who made me feel very welcome at his ‘Casa Particulare’ (Hermanos Albalat) on nearby Frank Pais Street.

During the day, I would spend my time relaxing  on Playa Ancon, 12km south of the town, and during the evening I would stroll aimlessly around this quaint old town, drink copious amounts of dark rum and listen to live music or people-watch at the Casa de la Musica situated at the top of a wide stairway just off the central plaza. It was on the steps of the Casa dela Musica on my last night in Trinidad that my overriding lingering memories of the town remain. Nearby, a musician played solo flute and a small child flew a kite overhead as a quarter moon emerged flickering on the palm-fringed horizon in the distance below. For one brief moment I had thought I had gone to heaven.

But as beautiful as my experiences of Cuba had been thus far, I felt that I still had not been able to dig below the surface of the country in any kind of meaningful and insightful way. To experience this, I would have to take the two hour bus journey to the French-influenced fortress port city of Cienfuegos in the province of the same name, home of the ‘The Barbarian of Rhythm’, Benny More.

The city sits on a beautiful bay surrounded by the lush-green and fertile Las Villas Plain that opens into the Caribbean Sea. The legacy of French migrations to the city is evident both in terms of its neoclassical architecture and the wide grid-like street layout. Cienfuegos is an industrial city that appears to rely less on tourism then either Havana or Trinidad, largely because much of the region is devoted to the cultivation of sugarcane and the growing of coffee in the mountains to the southeast of the city.

Upon my arrival, I was immedietly struck by a sense of a real functioning city as opposed to a slightly ‘tourist ghetto’ feel that I experienced in Trinidad and parts of Havana Vieja. The feel of the city reminded me of Penang or Bangalore and its billing as ‘The Pearl of the South’ is most definetly one that has not been over-hyped. In fact the city lives up to its tourist brochure description as consisting of a “world compromised of a multiplicity of shapes, colors and aromas that seduces the visitor….” This is a city where one can enjoy local ‘crooners’ belting it out at the Cafe Cantante More well into the early hours, or witness the sight of young Cuban’s revelling at the Club Costa Sur and walking arm in arm by the Malecon.

I was also struck by the amount of street traders there were here and the numerous amounts of consumerables on offer, as well as the exhorbitant prices of these goods. For example, old-style 1980s tvs were on sale for 300 US dollars and basics like shoes were being sold for a minimum 20 dollars. This, as Dr Carlos informed me, is when an average salary of a doctor is 20 US dollars per month and an engineer earns 30 dollars a month.

A typical afternoon involved me strolling about town where I would regularly see local people queuing, ration stamps in hand, for essentials like sugar, butter, milk and rice, before I would return ‘home’ to my fully equipped CFC-free refrigerated and energy-saving light bulbed ‘Casa’ for a siesta. Such are the contradictions of Cuban society.

But then I am reminded that Fidel is in a state of effective war with his neighbour 90 miles away. Under these circumstances, the normal functioning of society is an impossibility and the suspension of ‘formal’ democracy the norm. The US trade emargo with Cuba has hit the country hard. The US-imposed 1992 Torricelli Act prevents foreign subsidiaries of US companies trading with Cuba and prohibits ships that had called at Cuban ports from docking at US ports for six months.

The end result of this draconian attack on the country, is the effective banning of virtually the entirety of the rest of the world trading with Cuba. This explains why ninety per cent of banned goods consist of food, medicine and medical equipment which naturally is causing terrible suffering, even death, in Cuba.

A sudden realization had hit me. I came to fully understand that my physical presence on this beautiful island was a very special one. Cuba has been left adrift by what are widely considered to be the major players within what is often euphemistically refered to, as the ‘international community’, but nevertheless is a ‘modern miracle’ which had, as I was about to discover, emerged defiant and smelling of roses…..

Part 2 to follow

Copyright: Daniel Margrain

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (Anatomy of Fascism, p 21.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

How can this apparent paradox be explained?

For the answer we have to evaluate a countries democratic credentials in terms of outcome. This relates to the democratic process, not as it applies in theoretical and formal terms, but as it applies meaningfully, in practice. Let’s look at Cuba and the West as comparative examples.

In Cuba, the capitalist market plays no part in the organization of society. Capitalism’s lifeblood is consumerism and the notion of the passive consumer in Western society has become synonymous with a specific conceptualization of democracy. The writer and film-maker Adam Curtis provides a historical analysis of this relationship in his excellent BBC series The Century Of Self  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self).

Cuban democracy, however, is characterized with recourse to the notion of the active political citizen encapsulated through the labour process, not consumption. Cuban democracy, unlike its counterpart in the West, has not therefore become vulnerable to the distortions inherent to the market and the process of consumption that underpins it.

The extent of this overriding corrupting influence is evident throughout the corridors of power of all Western democracies, where the lobbying interests of giant multinational corporations wield extraordinary power to the extent that they are able to literally influence the democratic decision-making processes in their favour to the detriment of the general public good.

In this regard, public sector schools are increasingly being driven by financial targets and league tables, Further and Higher education Research and Development Departments are increasingly under pressure not to be critical of the ethicacy of some of the practices of the giant corporations who are funding them, and many students are simply being priced out of higher education altogether.

The work of professionals like teachers and social workers are increasingly being geared away from the classroom and face-to face contact and interraction and communication with other human beings, towards productivity outputs, time-management and the seemingly overriding obsession of meeting financial targets. Members of the general public who, as passengers, used to travel on what was once integrated and unifying public transport systems funded directly from the public purses of governments’, are now deemed to be customers who travel on largely fragmented and privately owned systems that have been funded through processes by which public tax-payers money subsidize the private capital of the giant corporations who now run them.

In the UK this method of funding is euphemistically termed  The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) but the principle of public money underwriting private capital at exhorbitant costs to taxpayers, is a common practice throughout the democracies of the Western world. In reality the term ‘public’ services is a misnomer as giant corporations increasingly take over the running of these services. What used to be not- for- profit public services run in the interests of the general public who funded them directly from the public purse, are now increasingly being run for profit in the interests of giant multinational corporations whose tentacle like grip extends into virtually every aspect of our lives.

Even healthcare is not immune from this predatory practice. Recipients of healthcare in the US are deemed to be customers rather than patients, as if spending time being wheeled around on a hospital trolley is akin to spending time in a car showroom or shopping for a refrigerator. If one has the misfortune of collapsing in the street in the US, the healthcare worker is obliged in the first instance, to feel for the customer’s credit card before feeling for the patient’s pulse, such is the distorted prioritizing logic of profit maximization inherent to the democracies of the West. What all this illustrates is that western democracy and the economic system of capitalism that it is embedded with, effectively reduces all human relations to the same profit-motivated logic as everything else.

Not so in Cuba, where a totally different set of priorities have come to dominate social life. As Cuba is not a capitalist country, mass consumerism is not a feature of the democractic process and therefore the giant corporations whose life-blood consumerism is, have no role to play in Cuban society. This means that the Cuban people themselves decide democratically how to meet their needs rather than placing democracy in the hands of the corporations.

What does this mean?

This illustrates contemporary Western liberal democracy is based on an economic system that is founded on creating wants and desires aimed towards a passive consumer in order to sustain itself. Cuban society, on the other hand, is premised on the notion that rather than being passive consumers, its people are instead active political subjects who have direct control over the running of their lives free from all the corrupting influences inherent to capitalism.

In this respect, the fundamental ethos that runs through Cuban society is the recognition and understanding that it is not the duty of society to provide favourable conditions for corporations to provide the public with what they think they ought to have, but to ensure that a genuinely responsive democratic government of the people, by the people, for the people, provide the the public with what they need to ensure the maintainence of the basic requirements necessary for public well-being. This includes water, food, housing, education and healthcare which are all provided for free of charge or at minimal cost to all Cuban people irrespective of income and status.

To put it another way, the true measurement of democracy as it is conceived in Cuba, is the extent to which government’s embody, and are responsive to meeting the basic needs of the citizen’s who empower them. In this regard, the state capitalist tyranny of the former Soviet Union, for example, was as much of a dictatorship as its imperial Western counterparts.

The writer Simon Louvish once told the story of a group of Soviets touring the United States before the age of glasnost. After reading the newspapers and watching TV, they were amazed to find that, on the big issues, all the opinions were the same. “In our country,” they said, “to get that result we have a dictatorship, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. So what’s your secret? How do you do it?” (Quoted, John Pilger, Tell Me No Lies, Random House, 2004, p.9).

The answer to the question is that the Western media provide an illusion of freedom and democracy couched in consumption. All capitalist based societies, whatever their guise, are, in reality forms of dictatorship. My fundamental argument is that Cuban socialism and the democratic values that underpin it, necessarily overlap by virtue of the fact that the former is a necessary pre-condition for the establishment of the latter. This explains the reason why Cuban society represents one of the few authentic forms of democracy on the planet.

Hairymarx,

For all your reassurance Id be much happier if calls for an new independent enquiry were heeded. I hold suspicions when groups like The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NITS), agency of the United States Department of Commerce, whose evidence you cite receives (2009) an extra $610 million as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act from the government.

The term ‘conflict of interest ‘ springs to mind here. I find it amusing how they cover themselves with the use of the word unlikely – as in ‘NIST concluded that it was “unlikely that 100 lbs. of thermite, or more, could have been carried into WTC 7 and placed around columns without being detected, either prior to Sept. 11 or during that day.”’

Unlikely it could have been carried in even though….
• The fact that the buildings had recently undergone elevator upgrades, giving access to the support structure
• The fact that the building had an emergency evacuation just a few days prior to 9/11 in which security cameras were disabled (providing access)

NIST claims WTC 7 collapsed due to “normal office fires” which created a “new phenomenon” in high-rise catastrophes: collapse caused by thermal expansion of beams. NIST claims this caused the failure of a single column — the rest just followed.
Heres a video in view of their claim of progressive collapse…

WTC7 in Freefall: No Longer Controversial

The video tracks the motion of the NW corner of Building 7 of the World Trade Center on 9/11 2001. For a period of ~2.5 seconds. This means it was falling through itself for over 100 feet with zero resistance, an impossibility in any natural scenario. This period of freefall is solid evidence that explosives had to be used to bring the building down. In the final draft for public comment (August 2008) NIST denied that WTC7 fell at freefall. In the final report in Nov 2008 they reversed themselves and admitted freefall, but in best traditions of the scientific method denied it’s obvious significance.

It’s a case of who to believe government funded agency or independent inquirers. I think a main issue is the general public gain awareness and are not duped into accepting falsehoods. For example Ted Olsen who served as Solictor General for the Bush Administration, who on 9/11 held a press conference to tell America and the world that his dead wife had called him before her demise from the jet she was on that had just been hijacked. Now we know it was a lie. The FBI has reported February 20, 2008 that no such call between Barbara Olsen and Ted Olsen ever took place on 9/11/2001. It may take a few years for all the evidence to surface and conclusions can be drawn but such an important issue should not be dusted under the carpet for sake of convenience.

I’ll openly admit i’m not qualified in these areas to formulate a definitive conclusions, however, it is your right to accept the evidence as you see it. It is also the right of experts in the field, architects, engineers and pilots to dispute official versions of events and not be subjected to terms (conspiracy theorist) used illegitimately and inappropriately, as a means to dismiss what are in fact substantial and well-evidenced accusations.

Reply:

I understand the potential conflict of interest issue with respect to the US government and NIST funding. But this also pre-supposes that if NIST conclusions of their findings were based upon falsehoods and lies then the alleged cover up would extend to a further 200 technical experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia— many of whom worked independently of NIST and whose work involved:

 - Reviewing tens of thousands of documents.

- Interviewing more than 1,000 people.

- Reviewing 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs.

-  Analysing 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage.

- Performing laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse etc, etc.

Is the general public seriously expected to believe that if the NIST conclusions were based on falsifications, not one individual amongst the literally thousands of people who were involved in the NIST project, would not by now have come forward to publicly question any wrongful and misleading interpretation of events attributed to them by NIST?

You claim that the period of freefall cited is “solid evidence that explosives had to be used to bring the building down”. But such freefall indicates nothing of the sort and the theory was demolished (sorry about the pun) here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9072062020229593250#

The final NIST report on the collapse of 7 WTC in November 2008 explains that fire was the main reason for the collapse, along with lack of water to fight the fire. Fires continued to burn throughout the afternoon on the lower floors. At 5:20 p.m. a critical column buckled, leading to the collapse of floor 13, which triggered a cascade of floor failures within the building, eventually leading to global collapse (http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201A.pdf).

From collapse timing measurements taken from a video of the north face of the building, NIST observed that the building’s exterior facade fell at free fall acceleration through a distance of approximately 8 stories (32 meters, or 105 feet). (http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201A.pdf).

The entire facade above the buckled-column region moved downward as a single unit, until completion of the global collapse sequence.(http://wtc.nist.gov/NCSTAR1/PDF/NCSTAR%201A.pdf).

But even if one thinks that the above conclusions have been distorted for reasons of political expediency – which is what you imply – then how does one explain the fact that other investigations tally with their conclusions? Moreover, how does one explain that other investigations conclude that the fires alone (without any damage from the planes) were enough to bring down the WTC buildings?

Take the University of Edinburgh for example. Edinburgh published a paper in which they concluded that the towers were uniquely vulnerable to the effects of large fires on several floors at the same time. (http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/1216).

When the NIST report was published, Barbara Lane, with the UK engineering firm Arup, criticized its conclusion that the structural damage resulting from the airplane impacts was a necessary factor in causing the collapses.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, numerous structural engineers and experts spoke to the media, describing what they thought caused the towers to collapse. Hassan Astaneh, a structural engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley, explained that the high temperatures in the fires weakened the steel beams and columns, causing them to become “soft and mushy”, and eventually they were unable to support the structure above.

Astaneh also suggested that the fireproofing became dislodged during the initial aircraft impacts. He also explained that, once the initial structural failure occurred, progressive collapse of the entire structure was inevitable. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/09/12/MN101866.DTL&hw=STRUCTURAL&sn=025&sc=505).

Cesar Pelli, who designed the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and the World Financial Centre in New York, remarked, “no building is prepared for this kind of stress.”(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2001/09/12/AR2005033107985.html).

On September 13, 2001, Zdeněk Bažant, professor of civil engineering and materials science at Northwestern University, circulated a draft paper with results of a simple analysis of the World Trade Centre collapse. Bažant suggested that heat from the fires was a key factor, causing steel columns in both the core and the perimeter to weaken and experience deformation before losing their carrying capacity and buckling. Once more than half of the columns on a particular floor buckled, the overhead structure could no longer be supported and complete collapse of the structures occurred. Bažant later published an expanded version of this analysis. (http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Papers/405.pdf).

Other analyses were conducted by MIT civil engineers Oral Buyukozturk and Franz-Josef Ulm, who also described a collapse mechanism on September 21, 2001.(http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/skyscrapers.html)

Are we seriously expected to believe that all these experts and witnesses are colluding secretely with the US authorities?

Furthermore, Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its own expert – an aerospace and mechanical engineer – to test the official findings which can be found here:
(http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html).

These findings tally with the findings of NIST. The expert in question showed that Building 7 collapsed as a result of falling burning debris which ruptured the oil pipes feeding its emergency generators. The reduction in pressure triggered the automatic pumping system, which poured thousands of gallons of diesel onto the fire. The support trusses weakened and buckled and the building imploded: (http://www.counterpunch.org/darkfire11282006.html).

Popular Mechanics magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions: (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/1227842).

Many who have questioned the official version of events argue that the truth can be found by viewing ‘Loose Change’, visiting websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org or by reading articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin, the physicist Steven E. Jones and others. But in all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact; rumour and confusion transformed into evidence; selective editing; the citation of fake experts and the dismissal of real ones.

The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. For example, many within the truthers movement maintain that Popular Mechanics is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. But according to Benjamin Chertoff he and Michael are not in fact related. But hey, what does he know?(http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060903/11conspiracy.htm).

So Popular Mechanics, far from being a government front, has in fact ripped the demolition theories apart. And Popular Mechanics is not alone, as I have illustrated previously. The evidence that planes smashed into the twin towers which triggered a set of events that resulted in their collapse, is overwhelming.

But all this overwhelming evidence is apparently not enough. The general public are expected to believe that the Bush regime was able to wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse.

The failure of the Twin Towers has been exhaustively documented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Far from being impossible, the collapse turns out to have been inevitable. One of the main arguments of those often well-meaning individuals and groups who deny the reality of  the official version of the events on 9/11, is the alleged significance of the official clean up of the destroyed steel columns that existed in the cores of the buildings of the WTC, as evidence of a potential cover up. But the condition of the steel in the wreckage of the WTC towers (i.e., whether it was in a molten state or not) was irrelevant to the investigation of the collapse of the towers since it does not provide any conclusive information on the condition of the steel when the WTC towers were standing.

There are also widespread claims regarding the alleged inability of the WTC buildings to withstand the impact of planes smashing into them. Many so called “Truthers” suggest that the Towers ought to have been able to withstand the impact subjected on them on the basis that the Empire State Building withstood what was understood to have been a similar level impact resulting from a Boeing 707 crashing into it.

However, as stated in Section 5.3.2 of NIST NCSTAR 1, a document from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) indicated that the impact of a [single, not multiple] Boeing 707 aircraft was analyzed during the design stage of the WTC towers. NIST investigators were unable to locate any documentation of the criteria and method used in the impact analysis and, therefore, were unable to verify the assertion that “… such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building.…” as was claimed by conspiracy theorists.

Further, the capability to conduct rigorous simulations of the aircraft impact, the growth and spread of the ensuing fires, and the effects of fires on the structure is a recent development. Since the approach to structural modelling was developed for the NIST WTC investigation, the technical capability available to the PANYNJ and its consultants and contactors to perform such analyses in the 1960s would have been quite limited in comparison to the capabilities brought to bear in the NIST investigation.

The damage from the impact of a Boeing 767 aircraft (which is about 20 percent bigger than a Boeing 707) into each tower is well documented in NCSTAR 1-2. The massive damage was caused by the large mass of the aircraft, their high speed and momentum, which severed the relatively light steel of the exterior columns on the impact floors. The results of the NIST impact analyses matched well with observations (from photos and videos and analysis of recovered WTC steel) of exterior damage and of the amount and location of debris exiting from the buildings. This agreement supports the premise that the structural damage to the towers was due to the aircraft impact and not to any alternative forces.

Contrary to many of the claims of the “truthers”, the buildings were NOT adequately resistant to fire within the context to which they were subjected. Included in a comprehensive investigation (see below) by NIST, the WTC towers collapsed partly as a result of the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns which in turn dislodged fireproofing insulation.

Truthers frequently quote the views of their sympathizers many of whose pronouncements underplay the extraordinary impact of planes smashing into buildings. To this end it is often suggested that the fires that ensued were somehow the consequence of a normal set of events. But the collapse of the WTC towers was not caused either by a conventional building fire or even solely by the concurrent multi-floor fires that day. Instead, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large, jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires weakened the now susceptible structural steel. No building in the United States has ever been subjected to the massive structural damage and concurrent multi-floor fires that the towers experienced on Sept. 11, 2001.

The latest authoratitive and definitive findings of NIST has shown that the Commission report were wrong in their judgement that the Twin Towers collapsed from the pancake effect. This has played into the hands of the truthers. The pancake effect is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system—that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns—consisted of a grid of steel “trusses” integrated with a concrete slab.

Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.

The puffs of smoke that were seen, as the collapse of each WTC tower starts, were not evidence of controlled demolition explosions as is often claimed. As stated in Section 6.14.4 of NIST NCSTAR 1, the falling mass of the building compressed the air ahead of it—much like the action of a piston—forcing smoke and debris out the windows as the stories below failed sequentially.

These puffs were observed at many locations as the towers collapsed. In all cases, they had the appearance of jets of gas being pushed from the building through windows or between columns on the mechanical floors. Such jets are expected since the air inside the building is compressed as the tower falls and must flow somewhere as the pressure builds. It is significant that similar “puffs” were observed numerous times on the fire floors in both towers prior to their collapses, perhaps due to falling walls or portions of a floor. Puffs from WTC 1 were even observed when WTC 2 was struck by the aircraft. These observations confirm that even minor overpressures were transmitted through the towers and forced smoke and debris from the building.

A central plank of the truther’s argument is the contention dust samples match aluminothermine residues found in sample residues contained in WTC dust. This implies that the discovery of unspent aluminothermic explosives and matching residues in WTC dust means that the Towers must of been demolished. What other conceivable reason, it is often argued, could there have been for there to be what it describes as “tons of high explosives in the Towers except to demolish them?

However, a very large quantity of thermite (a mixture of powdered or granular aluminum metal and powdered iron oxide that burns at extremely high temperatures when ignited) or another incendiary compound would have had to be placed on at least the number of columns damaged by the aircraft impact and weakened by the subsequent fires to bring down a tower. Thermite burns slowly relative to explosive materials and can require several minutes in contact with a massive steel section to heat it to a temperature that would result in substantial weakening. Separate from the WTC towers investigation, NIST researchers estimated that at least 0.13 pounds of thermite would be required to heat each pound of a steel section to approximately 700 degrees Celsius (the temperature at which steel weakens substantially.

So, whilst a thermite reaction can cut through large steel columns, many thousands of pounds of thermite would need to have been placed inconspicuously ahead of time, remotely ignited, and somehow held in direct contact with the surface of hundreds of massive structural components to weaken the building. This makes it an unlikely substance for achieving a controlled demolition.

Analysis of the WTC steel for the elements in thermite/thermate would not necessarily have been conclusive. The metal compounds also would have been present in the construction materials making up the WTC towers, and sulfur is present in the gypsum wallboard that was prevalent in the interior partitions.

Some 200 technical experts—including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia—reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse.

Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its own expert – an aerospace and mechanical engineer – to test the official findings (http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html).

He shows that NIST must have been right. He also demonstrates how Building 7 collapsed. Burning debris falling from the twin towers ruptured the oil pipes feeding its emergency generators. The reduction in pressure triggered the automatic pumping system, which poured thousands of gallons of diesel onto the fire. The support trusses weakened and buckled and the building imploded (http://www.counterpunch.org/darkfire11282006.html).

Popular Mechanics magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions: (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html).

NIST concluded that “blast events inside  building 7 did not occur” and “found no evidence supporting the existence of a blast event.” A NIST WTC 7 fact sheet summarized the case against controlled demolition:

“In addition, no blast sounds were heard on the audio tracks of video recordings during the collapse of WTC 7 or reported by witnesses. According to calculations by the investigation team, the smallest blast capable of failing the building’s critical column would have resulted in a sound level of 130 decibels (dB) to 140 dB at a distance of at least half a mile, if unobstructed by surrounding buildings. This sound level is consistent with a gunshot blast, standing next to a jet plane engine, and more than 10 times louder than being in front of the speakers at a rock concert.”

For the building to have been prepared for intentional demolition, walls and/or column enclosures and fireproofing would have to be removed and replaced without being detected. Preparing a column includes steps such as cutting sections with torches, which produces noxious and odorous fumes. Intentional demolition usually requires applying explosive charges to most, if not all, interior columns, not just one or a limited set of columns in a building.

The NIST WTC 7 team also found that thermite/thermate was used to sever columns was highly unlikely:

“To apply thermite to a large steel column, approximately 0.13 lb of thermite would be needed to heat and melt each pound of steel. For a steel column that weighs approximately 1,000 lbs. per foot, at least 100 lbs. of thermite would need to be placed around the column, ignited, and remain in contact with the vertical steel surface as the thermite reaction took place. This is for one column … presumably, more than one column would have been prepared with thermite, if this approach were to be used.”

NIST concluded that it was “unlikely that 100 lbs. of thermite, or more, could have been carried into WTC 7 and placed around columns without being detected, either prior to Sept. 11 or during that day.”

The simplicity of the official theory—that unchecked fires led to a chain of failures and then progressive collapse—and the extensive computer modelling of the hypothesis place it squarely in the best traditions of the scientific method. Moreover, specialists in structural mechanics and structural engineering generally accept the model of a fire-induced, gravity-driven collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, an explanation that does not involve the use of explosives. See for example:

Bažant, Zdeněk P.; Mathieu Verdure (March 2007). “Mechanics of Progressive Collapse: Learning from World Trade Center and Building Demolitions”. J Engrg Mech 133 (3): 308–319. doi:10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9399(2007)133:3(308). http://www.civil.northwestern.edu/people/bazant/PDFs/Papers/466.pdf.

Gravois, John (June 23, 2006). “Professors of Paranoia?”. The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i42/42a01001.htm.

Asquith, Christina (September 7, 2006). “Conspiracies continue to abound surrounding 9/11: on the eve of the fifth anniversary, a group of professors say the attacks were an “inside job.””. Diverse Issues in Higher Education: 12. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WMX/is_15_23/ai_n27000635/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1.

Even if you have seen or read no other accounts of 9/11, what must occur to most people is the complete lack of evidence for the alternative to the official version. Take the documentary film “Short Change” for instance. The film-makers claim to ask experts what it was that brought down the Twin Towers.  But they don’t ask the experts. The film makers take some old quotes, edit them to remove any contradictions, then denounce all subsequent retractions as further evidence of conspiracy.

The only people they interview are a janitor, a group of firemen and a flight instructor. They let the janitor speak at length, but cut the firemen off in mid-sentence.  Structural engineers, materials scientists, specialists in ballistics, explosives and fire are conspicuous by their absence. The film makers now say that the third edition of the film will be fact-checked by an expert, but he turns out to be “a theology professor who they do not name: (Ed Pilkington, 26th January 2007. ‘They’re all forced to listen to us’. The Guardian). 

The theories advanced by the so-called 9/11 truthers requires a complete suspension of disbelief. Professional demolition experts have repeatedly explained that it takes weeks of work to prepare a building for a controlled demolition. And how could such a massive conspiracy, involving hundreds if not thousands of people, be kept silent? And what of the lack of any evidence of an explosion, as pointed out by the NIST team?

The next evident flaw is that the plot and cover up they propose could not have been executed without the help of demolition experts, the security firms guarding the World Trade Centre, Mayor Giuliani (who hastily disposed of the remains), much of the US Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the relatives of the people “killed” in the plane crashes, the rest of the Pentagon’s staff, the Los Alamos laboratories, the FBI, the CIA and the investigators who picked through the rubble.

Read some conflicting accounts, and thre truthers case,  exemplified by Loose Change, crumbles faster than the Twin Towers. Hundreds of people saw a plane hit the Pentagon. Because it collided with one of the world’s best- defended buildings at full speed, the plane was pulverised: even so, both plane parts and body parts were in fact recovered. The wings and tail disintegrated when they hit the wall, which is why the holes weren’t bigger (http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html).

This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues – global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality – while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for a New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.

This line of thinking is in tune with historian Kenneth J. Dillon who argues that the arguments of the so called truth movement represent an overly easy target for skeptics and that their criticisms of the scientific method and the rational conclusions derived from such a method, obfuscate the underlying issue of what actually happened. Dillon suggests that the answer is criminal negligence on the part of the president and vice president, who were repeatedly warned, followed by a cover-up conspiracy after 9/11 (http://www.scientiapress.com/findings/amoc.htm).

This was expanded upon by columnist Matt Mankelow.  Mankelow concludes that 9/11 truthers while “desperately trying to legitimately question a version of events” end up playing into the hands of the neoconservatives they are trying to take down by creating a diversion (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18266).

Main Sources:

NIST conducted an extremely thorough three-year investigation into what caused the WTC towers to collapse, as explained in NIST’s dedicated Web site, http://wtc.nist.gov from where the substantive material from the above piece is derived. The above site includes consideration of a number of hypotheses for the collapses of the towers.

The following is an excellent documentary film by the BBC which is an extremely considered and well-balanced summary of all the arguments which led up to WTC 7’s collapse: