Please bear with me on this, there may be some redundancies but this is going somewhere, I promise.
I was 14 and in south Jersey on September 11. It was the second week of school and I was already over it so I faked sick in second period and went to the nurses’ office. I must have done a decent job of faking because they put me in the back room and called my dad. In that back room I overheard that a plane had hit a tower in NYC, but the report was pilot error. My dad picked me up and we listened to the reporters on the radio describe the impossible inferno, the mayhem, the debris, the bodies leaping from the sky. The images on TV were worse. My dad went back to work and I stared at the TV. Every channel was the news, even Nickelodeon. I watched the towers fall and knew nothing would be the same, even if I couldn’t comprehend why.
How do we come back from this, I thought. We can’t un-ring this bell.
I wanted to know Why. I wanted to know what would compel someone to fly planes full of people into buildings full of people. I’ll be the first to admit that I went down the conspiracy hole. I was scared, angry, and looking for answers. I was 14.
There was the bullshit from Nostradamus about the death of the two brothers signaling some sort of apocalypse going around the email chains (when I brought this information to my dad he scoffed: “They used the same prophecy when the Kennedy brothers were murdered.”) Later I watched Loose Change and became an immediate believer. The anger and fear I so deeply felt was explained in this nice and neat little package. I was enraged at the injustice of it all and fixated on that for a while, trying to find out more and more and more.
In the course of all of this I was reading books. Non-fiction, American history, military history. “Legacy of Ashes,” by Tim Weiner, a history based on declassified CIA documents, changed my worldview. Nearly every conflict I’d ever tangentially heard of – Pinochet in Chile, the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, but essentially all of South and Latin America – had America’s invisible hand stirring the pot. The stated goal was to install democracies, but that never actually happened.
What really happened, which I learned by reading ‘The Shock Doctrine,” by Naomi Klein, was that the CIA overthrew these democratically elected governments at the behest of Corporate America.
As hard as it is to fathom these stories, they are backed up by proof: sources. These books appear dauntingly thick but it is an illusion; ~20% of pages are footnotes describing where the information came from. These footnotes are verified and fact-checked by publishers for moral and ethical reasons but largely for legal reasons as they don’t want to be sued into oblivion every time they published a book. Truth is a defense for libel.
Gradually, my Loose Change conspiracy views didn’t have room to exist within the knowledge I accumulated. There was too much documented evidence that the CIA knew a little, that the FBI knew a little, and local law enforcement knew a little but none knew enough or cared enough to tell each other. The ones who tried weren’t taken seriously.
September 11th was largely a result of bureaucratic failure.
The hardest part to believe of the conspiracy, in hindsight, was the part right in front of our eyes, that is, that George W. Bush had the brainpower and the wherewithal to pull off the greatest terrorist attack in world history, on his own country, when the man couldn’t even string 3 words together in a coherent sentence. There is cognitive dissonance everywhere if we just open our eyes. However, I speak from experience when I say that these ideas are still hard to give up, in my heart, even if I know they are factually incorrect in my brain [Side note: if you wanna talk about aliens building the pyramids I am all ears; not a single fuckin’ footnote in the hieroglyphics and I am here to speculate wildly].
These books, along with dozens of others, painted a collective worldview that aligned with one another and had the evidence to back it up. That worldview paints a picture that looks like this:
MCI wants to expand and sees an untapped market in Bolivia. Bolivia’s infrastructure is state-run and MCI wants to privatize it. Bolivia says, No. MCI goes to the CIA and says, give us someone we can work with down there. The CIA overthrows a democratically elected leader, whether through violence or election fraud or what have you. The new guy is inevitably a dictator who hands the contract to MCI and the country inevitably suffers and MCI inevitably makes fortune after fortune after fortune.
What does MCI do with this fortune? Does it pay taxes in the country where it is providing service? No it does not, thanks to the free-market principles that this new dictator inevitably implemented. In order to succeed, business must be entirely unregulated, un-taxable, and untouchable. Business is sacred, and it is what will save your country.
So MCI doesn’t pay taxes in Bolivia. Does it pay taxes in America? After all, it is an American company that benefited from American tax dollars bankrolling an American intelligence agency’s overthrow of a democratic nation.
Except, MCI is NOT an American company. It’s home offices, like most corporations, are offshore – specifically for tax reasons. So that untold fortune, built on the backs of violent insurgency, bloodshed, and fascism (definition: a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition) sits in offshore bank accounts to grow nothing but personal wealth.
Trying to understand September 11th led me down a path so that on January 6th, when those traitorous motherfuckers attacked the Capitol Building in an overt action to overthrow a democratic election that I fucking voted in, I fucking knew exactly what I was seeing. My heart wasn’t ready, but I fucking knew it.
What did anyone think would happen when MCI ran out of Bolivia’s to exploit? Did we honestly expect them to be loyal to America, even after they explicitly went offshore to avoid paying their share, and their fortunes were built by American tax dollars and the blood of innocent foreigners?
Well, guess what. They came home. Corporate America is doing to us what they’ve already done across South and Latin America and most recently in Iraq. The only thing Trump actually accomplished in his presidency is passing the trillion dollar tax cuts to the richest humans in America, which is all they really wanted him to do when they backed him 5 years ago. Now that he’s out in the open as a dangerous liability you’re seeing those same backers distance themselves (Home Depot joined a growing list when they pulled their financial support for the president this morning; they got what they needed and are moving on to the next candidate who can save them a few pennies). More recently, who can forget the trillion dollar corporate bailout, or the trillion dollar corporate debt relief packages that passed in the past 9 months?
MCI is now Verizon. Comcast owns Disney who owns ABC who owns ESPN. NBC is somewhere in that pile, owned by GE. There are only like 6 corporations, and they own it all. Their only competition is small business, all of whom are struggling and dying at an alarming rate amidst this appallingly mishandled pandemic. There is only one group that still has money, and mark my word they will sweep up all of these dead and dying businesses at a bargain bin rate, if only to consolidate power. This administration made a conscious decision on who they aided and don’t bother pretending otherwise. The ramifications will be felt for generations.
Donald Trump did not invent this system, but it was built by people like him, for people like him.
September 11th shattered the myth of America’s infallibility. We were no longer untouchable titans; a bunch of scrubs with box cutters saw to that.
January 6th shattered America’s domestic infallibility. A bunch of scrubs with pipe bombs, zip ties, GoPros and tacit approval of the President of the United States saw to that.
How do we come back from this? We can’t un-ring this bell.
Every single person who set foot inside that building is a traitor flying a dumb traitor flag. Investigate this – thoroughly – and let the chips fall where they may. The only way through is with the truth.