IMF and the rape of national sovereignty

IMF loan means loss of sovereignty

Max Keiser talks to Stacy Herbert about the IMF taking global control.


From Gordon Brown Spills the Beans on the IMF by Michael Hudson (Counterpunch)

Last month the G-20 authorized the International Monetary Fund to increase its loan resources to $1 trillion. It’s not hard to see why. Weakening currencies in the post-Soviet states threaten to raise default rates on foreign-currency mortgages as collapse of the Baltic real estate bubble drags down Swedish banks, while the Hungarian property plunge threatens Austrian banks. It seems reasonable to infer that creditor-nation banks hope to be bailed out. The IMF is expected to lend the Baltic, central European and other debtor-country governments money to pay them. These hapless debtor economies are then to follow IMF “conditionalities” to squeeze enough money out of their populations to pay foreign creditors – and repay the Fund by imposing yet more onerous taxes on their labor and industry, making them even more high-cost and therefore pushing them even further into trade and credit dependency. This is why there have been so many riots recently in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Ukraine, as was the case for so many decades throughout the Latin American countries that introduced the term “IMF riot” to the global vocabulary.

For fifty years the IMF has organized such payouts to creditor nations. Loans are made to debtor-country governments to “promote exchange-rate and price stability.” In practice this means pouring tens of billions of dollars into currency markets to make bad gambles against raiders. This is supposed to avert the beggar-my-neighbor nationalism and financial protectionism that aggravated depression in the 1930s. But the practical effect of IMF lending is to demand that debtor countries impose onerous IMF “conditionalities” that stifle their domestic markets. This is why the IMF was left with almost no customers until last year’s debt crisis deranged the world’s foreign exchange markets.

It is supposed to be merely incidental that the largest IMF shareholders, the United States and Britain, happen to be the major creditor nations and their banks the main beneficiaries of IMF loans. But in a Parliamentary question-and-answer session on May 6, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown spilled the beans. Under pressure for his notorious “light-touch regulation” as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1997-2007), he undid half a century of rhetorical pretense by announcing that he was pressuring the IMF to bail out Britain in its nasty dispute with the Icelandic owners of a British bank that went under. He was in a position to know the nitty-gritty of who owed what and which nation’s monetary authorities were responsible for which banks. So when he said that he was strong-arming the IMF and other organizations to force Iceland’s government to pay for his own government’s mistakes, he must have known this was breaking the unwritten law of pretending that the IMF is not the servant of creditor nations in bilateral disputes with smaller economies.

Here’s the background. Mr. Brown and his New Labour predecessor Tony Blair have saddled British taxpayers with a generation of payments to pay for their decade of deregulating London’s financial sector. Bad mortgage lending led to the failure first of Northern Rock and then the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose ambitious junk-mortgage program had made it the world’s largest bank. At $3.8 trillion before it collapsed, it was nearly twice the size of Britain’s $2.1 trillion gross domestic product (GDP). (For a review of New Labour’s deregulatory policies see Philip Augar, Chasing Alpha: How Reckless Growth and Unchecked Ambition Ruined the City's Golden Decade [2009].) So one can understand why Mr. Brown was flailing around to blame someone for New Labour’s “Don’t see, don’t ask” policy. ...


From Andrei Sannikov: “The most important thing is liberation of a person: in politics, economy, science and creative work”

In an interview to film director Yury Khashchavatski, the leader of the civil campaign “European Belarus” Andrei Sannikov tells about his vision of the Belarusian dream.

[ ... ]

- Now, in the conditions of the crisis, the Belarusian regime is taking huge credits, the state’s foreign debt is skyrocketing, secret, behind-the-scenes deals on sale of enterprises are made. What are possible threats of that?

- This is a very dangerous situation. Business mustn’t be dirty, and deals mustn’t be secret. Everything should be controlled by the public and independent media. We should develop relations with all countries on the terms which would bring the greatest benefit to the country and its people.

It is madness that the regime is accumulating credits today. Lukashenka can drive the country into such bondage that it would become a bankrupt. And then, it is possible to sell debts of the country. Entire countries were bought in this way in the 1990ies – their debts were bought, and in fact they were losing their sovereignty.


From Re-engineering our Economic Model: There are Alternatives by V. Bhardwaj

Indeed, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Rajiv Gandhi, political sovereignty has always been a precursor to economic sovereignty. This has been responsible for not getting India overexposed to the underbelly of globalisation and liberalisation. Safeguards to moderate the impact of adverse global impulses have been built into the process of economic reforms and had been the characteristic of India’s economic reform process since 1991.

While Russia and Latin America accepted the Washington Consensus during the period that their economies went wrong, India moderated, regulated and calibrated under the leadership of P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh. “Indian institutions have always been cautious, as we came from a mixed economy. With a huge deficit of poverty, we can't afford to throw everything to the market.”

[ ... ]

Everywhere, in the rest of the world, countries and regions are moving away from the discredited neoliberal paradigm. Africa has been the main victim of ruthless neoliberal policies imposed by the IMF and the World Bank for nearly three decades, with catastrophic economic, social and political consequences that we are still witnessing. Therefore, it is time to make bold and decisive moves toward an alternative development paradigm that recognizes the importance of economic security and builds a consensus behind the objectives of democratic, equitable and sustainable development and working toward the realization of a long-term vision of the democratic alternative. The beginnings of a strategy for getting us from here to there are outlined below:

An alternative strategy

Public Finance: Discard fiscal and monetary austerity as prescribed by the IMF, because these policies tend to choke off economic growth by limiting public investments in key sectors and by drastically reducing social spending. Spend more on social services and social investments. The largest portion of the next budget should go to social services and investments – health, education, housing, social welfare, investments in energy and agriculture, etc.


From The IMF and Economic Sovereignty by John Kutyn

When the IMF moved into Thailand, Korea, and Indonesia, their first order of business was an attempt to restore confidence in currencies through a major increase in interest rates. The IMF's second order of business was to institute severe austerity programs.

The economic crisis in these countries was due primarily to excessive corporate debt levels - which due to over capacity and falling profitability, companies were unable to repay. By raising interest rates and bringing in austerity programs, the IMF substantially increased business costs, while at the same time caused contraction of demand. The IMF's totally illogical policies will bankrupt virtually every major company in these countries.


From Central banks give countries' financial sovereignty to IMF by Joan Veon (News With Views)

In January, the Bank for International Settlements chief economist, William White wrote a white paper of his own calling for a return to the gold standard or global or regional currencies to help with global imbalances and for the IMF to have the power of surveillance over a country's finances even if it means losing part of their national sovereignty.

This IMF/World Bank meeting was extremely historic because it, in essence, gave the IMF more power than ever before in its history. Part of the crescendo in this opera was the fact that everyone was calling for a greater supervisory role for the IMF. The white papers, the discussion, the agenda, the objective of the meeting was simply to use "global imbalances" to take more financial sovereignty that ever before. The chief economist of the IMF said this, "People tend to dismiss these [role of various actors today] as minor frictions, sand in the gears of the globalization juggernaut. History, however, suggests there is a short distance from economic patriotism to unbridled nationalism. This is why the multilateral discussions in meetings like this are so important. They help ensure we continue to benefit from globalization in an atmosphere of mutual responsibility and shared destiny."

In a speech by Rodrigo de Rato, the IMF Managing Director, he said, "the IMF should pay the role of "umpire" in the international system." He explained that "neither the players nor the rules of the same are static. The days when G7 finance ministers could sit in a hotel room and make decisions about exchange rates are gone. This is a whole new ballgame." He went on to say, "As the players and the ground rules in the global economy change, we have the capacity to reflect these changes, and to be the place where policy makers can come together to shape the forces of globalization and make it work for us." He talked about the issue of surveillance and the problem of global imbalances and how "coordinated action would be both politically easier and economically more effective than governments in systemically important countries acting alone.

He proposed that the Fund begin REGIONAL consultations (my words, not his). He described it as "the Fund complement its existing arrangements for consultations with individual countries with multilateral consultations, which would allow the Fund to take up issues comprehensively and collectively with systemically important members and, where relevant with entities formed by groups of members such as the EU and the Gulf Cooperation Council." The IMF is now calling for regional not individual country participation. The IMF will devise a "more systematic assessment of the consistency of exchange rate policies with national and international stability."

There was also a great deal of talk about "shared responsibility" and "multi-stakeholder" participation. Multi-stakeholder participation refers to the fact that in the 21st century interdependent world, ALL ACTORS must work together: government, business, NGO's, labor unions, academia, etc. NO ONE CAN DO IT ALONE! The phrase "interdependent" not only refers to a world without borders, it also refers to the fact that no one country, NGO, business, labor union, etc. can do it alone. There is a new glue that now holds the world together.

MPs' expenses: This crisis has revealed what is really wrong with Britain

Iain Martin writes in the Telegraph:

Amidst the horrors, there have been a few moments of unintentional comedy. Of all the myriad excuses from MPs in the last week, I have a favourite.

Stewart Jackson is the Conservative MP for Peterborough. He made an expenses claim in relation to his swimming pool and attempted to explain it as follows: "The pool came with the house and I needed to know how to run it. Once I was shown that one time, there were no more claims. I take care of the pool myself. I believe this represents 'value for money' for the taxpayer."

How, precisely, does one operate a swimming pool? Surely it's not difficult. You fill it full of water and, when it's sunny, you jump in.

Note also that Jackson says "the pool came with the house", as though his estate agent had neglected to mention the fact: "There's something we forgot to tell you, sir. Your new house. It has a swimming pool." I imagine Jackson with his head in hands: "Good God, man, why on earth didn't you warn me? That's simply awful." Estate agent: "Shall we have it removed, sir?" Jackson (wearily): "No, don't bother. I'll just have to live
with it."

In contrast, the country is not in a mood to live with politicians who claim for moats or who make manifestly dodgy mortgage claims. A feeling abounds that there must be punishment. But then what?

Traditionally, the British have preferred to avoid too much introspection, regarding an excess of self-examination as embarrassing. But, from time to time, it becomes unavoidable and a crisis prompts the country to ask itself whether it is content with the direction in which it is headed. If the answer is no, the consequences for those who rule or govern can be highly unpredictable.

[ ... ]

It should not be forgotten that before these events there were good MPs who understood that the relationship between the electors and the elected was changing, and who ordered their affairs accordingly. But they were outnumbered by those trapped on Planet Politics, who refused to believe that their world was ending. They know now. Heading back to their constituencies, after modern Parliament's worst week, a good number looked absolutely terrified.

Why is the country quite so angry? Well, it has become clear that, as the economy headed for the rocks, those paid to pay attention were otherwise occupied filling out expense claim forms. Voters, forced to adjust to an age of austerity, want the pain shared.

But I would argue that it is about much more than that. There has been an inchoate sense for some time that Britain no longer functions effectively, despite the vast sums spent maintaining it. Virtually every activity the law-abiding undertake seems to have become entangled in a web of energy-sapping orders from officialdom.

What ails Britain – beyond our economic problems – is that we have allowed a bossy Commons (the same body which has ripped us off) to legislate our society piece by piece, to the point where modern life is excessively rules-based.

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Athens- Video from Friday muslim protests

http://www.tvxs.gr/

U.S. cybersecurity head quits, citing growing role of spy agencies

The official in charge of coordinating the U.S. government's cybersecurity operations has quit, saying the expanding control of the National Security Agency over the nation's computer security efforts poses "threats to our democratic processes."

"Even from a security standpoint," Rod Beckstrom, the head of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber Security Center, told United Press International, "it is unwise to hand over the security of all government networks to a single organization."

"If our founding fathers were taking part in this debate (about the future organization of the government's cybersecurity activities) there is no doubt in my mind they would support a separation of security powers among different (government) organizations, in line with their commitment to checks and balances."

In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last week, Beckstrom said the NSA "dominates most national cyber efforts" and "effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees, technology insertions and the proposed move" of the NCSC to an NSA facility at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.

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[ Via Ignorance is futile! ]

Open letter to Susan Gaertner from the mother of Dave Mahoney

...After the initial parental dismay, I decided to do more than look up the meaning of ‘anarchist’ in Webster’s dictionary. (By the way, the Oxford English Dictionary makes no mention of violence in its definition of anarchist.) Some further reading was called for, and this is what I found.

Despite their popular image as sinister plotters conspiring to assassinate presidents and archdukes, most anarchists are not violent.

Anarchism has been around since the ancient Greeks. As part of the spectrum of political ideology, it is usually confined to a small minority, but the ideas keep re-emerging in every society across the world, especially in turbulent times.

During the European Reformation in the 17th century, anarchistic religious movements such as the Hussites and the Anabaptists appeared. The Diggers and Levellers set up their rural communes during the English Civil War. Early settlers described indigenous American society, not disapprovingly, as a form of anarchy, without state, laws, prisons or private property.

In the late 18th century, the English writer William Godwin advocated the abolition of government through a gradual process of reform and enlightenment. The French propagandist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (“Liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order”) was the first of the radical nonconformists to call himself an anarchist. He was succeeded by the Russian revolutionary thinkers Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as Christian anarchists like Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace.

I’m sure you are aware of the rich tradition of American anarchism, including influential thinkers such as Benjamin Tucker, founder of the journal ‘Liberty,’ and Henry David Thoreau, whose essay on civil disobedience inspired, amongst others, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

The long list continues throughout the twentieth century, from the feminist Emma Goldman in the 1920s, to the anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman in the 60s, to the immensely influential philosopher Noam Chomsky.

If American society is broad and tolerant enough to accommodate these great radical thinkers, surely it can do the same for their followers? We should not react to alternative views with fear and loathing. As the British civil liberties campaigner Shami Chakrabarti pointed out recently: “Dissent is the lifeblood of democracy and progress.”

Had my son David and his friends been born four decades earlier, they would probably have made the journey to Woodstock rather than calling themselves activists. But 40 years after that festival of love and peace, what legacy have we, the idealistic Woodstock generation, handed down to our children? Global warming, the collapse of a financial system built on greed, mass employment and pointless wars that have ruined the lives of millions.

No wonder they are angry. Who can blame them for wanting to voice that anger at a self-congratulatory gathering of the Republican Party, whose policies are widely held to be responsible for many of these catastrophes? Remember that this was the occasion when Sarah Palin was introduced as a potential president of the United States. Abraham Lincoln himself said that silence is a sin when protest is called for.

As a middle-aged risk-averse parent, I would naturally have preferred my son to confine his political beliefs to campus debates. However David and his contemporaries, like many before them, see ‘direct action’ as a way to make their voices heard. Some of their activities could be dismissed as nuisance behaviour, but history shows that what might seem at the time to be banal property crime can trigger far-reaching changes.

The Boston tea party was a pivotal event in the American colonies’ struggle for independence. Were it to happen today, would the perpetrators be charged with conspiracy to riot, assault in the second degree and criminal damage? In the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Law is often the tyrant’s will.”

On a speaking tour of America 100 years ago, the English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst said: “The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable in modern politics.” She and her fellow campaigners were famously imprisoned for breaking windows. Their harsh treatment by the authorities merely served to raise their profile and rally public support to their cause. The suffragettes have gone down in history as pioneers of female emancipation, but who now remembers the names of their jailors?

Very early in his career, Winston Churchill presented a budget that attracted the wrath of the establishment, who felt it was too left-wing and detrimental to their vested interests. He retorted: “We are denounced as … Anarchists and Communists and all the rest of the half-understood vocabulary of irritated ignorance.”

I fear that ‘irritated ignorance’ underlies the attitude of the police and prosecution to my son and his friends. The police’s portrayal of them in the local media as violent extremists with filthy habits shows a mixture of incomprehension and personal distaste.

For me, this biased approach has disturbing echoes of the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s. No doubt you are familiar with the words of the notorious Judge Webster Thayer, who boasted of nailing those “anarchistic bastards,” although the charges faced by the two men had nothing to do with their political beliefs.

Anyone who took the time to speak to David and his friends would find that, far from being “intent on committing … highly dangerous acts of violence,” they are in fact earnest young citizens who are trying in their own way to make the world a better place.

The American libertarian Murray Bookchin describes three versions of the American dream. “One is the John Wayne tradition … of pioneering individualism; another is the immigrant American dream, this being the land of opportunity … But there is a third American dream, which is the oldest of the lot, dating back to Puritan times, which stresses community, decentralisation, self-sufficiency, mutual aid and face-to-face democracy.”

I can’t speak for David and his friends, but this is my understanding of what they are trying to achieve. It is hard to see how that constitutes any kind of threat to society. At worst, they could be derided as ineffectual dreamers, but when the ice caps melt and the oil runs out, who knows, they could have the last laugh. ...

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An environmental professional speaks out on fluoridation

In this video, Brent Foster, the State Conservation Chair for the Oregon Sierra Club, explains why he came to oppose water fluoridation.

To sign the Professionals Statement Calling for an End to Fluoridation, see: http://professional.fluoridealert.org

Soma - An anarchist play therapy

You can learn more about a man in an hour of play, than in a year of conversation. - Plato

Plato was not alone in thinking that, of all human activities, play can best display that which is most truthful in people. Play seems to represent human essence, evoking the child or the animal in a person, since play precedes culture and civilization, language and rationality.
Some have argued that humans distinguish themselves precisely by the manner and frequency by which they play. In Homo Ludens, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argues that our impressive ingenuity and creativity is due to play, which he defines as anything done for purposes other than sheer necessity. Play

is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task. It is done at leisure, during ‘free time’. Only when play is a recognized cultural function – a rite, a ceremony – is it bound up with notions of obligation and duty. Here, then, we have the main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. (8) 1

This idea was also apparent to Roberto Freire, an anarchist doctor and psychoanalyst from Brazil, who, after a lifetime spent in struggle against oppressive powers, took the play postulate to heart, and created a therapeutic practice built upon it. Calling the practice Soma, Freire fashioned his therapy to differ greatly from other forms of psychotherapy. Instead of relying solely on months, or even years, of conversation to understand and treat his patients, Freire realized that understanding could be achieved more effectively through group participation in physically and emotionally challenging activities, what he called “exercises.” Soma, therefore, was created as a combination of play, response, reflection, experimentation, and challenge – everything taking place within a cohesive group setting in order to facilitate honest, independent character growth. All of this, coupled with the regular practice of capoeira angola, is integrated into Roberto Freire’s practice.

To understand Soma, it is essential to understand Roberto Freire’s story. Born in 1927 in São Paulo, he lived through and fought against two dictatorships, and felt the pervasive effects of oppression on his own body and throughout his life. Having come of age in a radical time and place, Freire became sympathetic to anarchism from an early age. Freire was many things in his life: doctor, psychoanalyst, anarchist militant, theater producer, novelist, magazine editor, reporter, and much more.

In April 1964, the Brazilian military carried out a coup d’etat - the first of a series of right-wing coups throughout Latin America. In a matter of weeks, as a result of his activism, Freire was arrested. His house was raided in the middle of the night and he was dragged from his bed in his pajamas in front of his wife and children. He was tortured for days on end: beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to read aloud subversive articles he had published. Eventually they released him, but he would be arrested again several times.

Freire attributed going blind later in his life to the torture he endured. One method in particular, dubbed “the telephone,” caused enormous internal pressure on the eye balls: it consisted of repeatedly slamming the victim’s ears at the same time. Surgeries would return his sight in one eye. By the time I met him, he always wore an eyepatch that gave him the fitting look of a pirate.

Freire recalls the years after the coup as extraordinarily difficult. Worse than the physical pain from the torture was the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by the political climate upon his community. He was forced to live underground, always on the run. He suffered through a divorce, struggled with alcoholism and feelings of immense frustration with his art and his cause.

Around 1970, he went to France for a period of decompression, and on that trip he was introduced for the first time to the works of Wilhelm Reich. The Living Theater, an American expatriate acting troupe was performing in Paris. Julian Beck, its co-director, introduced Freire to Wilhelm Reich, the dissident student of Freud who emphasized the connection between body and psyche, and who explained how the causes of emotional and psychological disturbances are to be found in authoritarian social structures.

Freire came back from the trip in France with all the major works of Reich in his possession. He returned to his private practice and for the next several years he studied Reich and other radical approaches to psychotherapy and psychiatric theories. He got together with friends from the theater – people experienced with acting training and techniques – and began to research his own radical method of therapy. This would soon coalesce into Soma.

Another of Freire’s main inspirations and influence was Thomas Hanna’s Bodies in Revolt. Hanna defends the theory that we are at the beginning of a human r/evolution. By revisiting the works of what he calls Somatic Philosophers (Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Cassirer, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Nietzsche) and of Somatic Scientists (Darwin, Lorenz, Freud, Reich, and Piaget), he sustained the idea that humans have, “through an enormous expenditure of aggressive energy” created a new environment “which no longer ignores man’s existence and needs but which positively supports them. In return, the enormous quantities of energy released by this environment are creating a new kind of human, a cultural mutant”(8).2 If in the old environment humans spent most of our energy under the urge of primary drives (physiological needs), the new environment is producing the emergence of secondary drives – precisely the ones related to play.

Proto-mutants, says Hanna, will challenge the traditional culture until they “see the destruction of much of two or three millennia of Western culture.” The Industrial Revolution is a watershed in this process, but Freire, in line with Herbert Marcuse, stresses the phylogenetic information gathered by generations of struggle against the repression of instincts as a major force shaping the mutation.

Hanna lays down the meaning of Soma: it is the totality of what constitutes the human being. It’s the indivisible and non-hierarchical unity of the person’s body and mind, genes and environment, emotions, memories, expectations, desires, culture, social behaviors, relationships, and actions that makes up a person at every moment. It’s a holistic concept that rejects traditional dualities and dichotomies. Somatherapy, therefore, is in contrast with psychotherapies that deal only the psyche.

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Anarchy, or spontaneous order, on the streets of Saigon

From LewRockwell.com

By Joshua Snyder

News of the several successful experiments by several European cities with getting the state out of traffic regulation created quite a stir last year. (See European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs.) Non-libertarian-minded folks saw it as counter-intuitive, not self-evident, that people themselves would do a better job looking out for their own safety rather than relying on a nanny state to warn them of every conceivable danger. But it turned out that drivers slowing down at intersections and looking both ways was much, much safer than blindly trusting one's life to a mindless green light.

Perhaps these successful experiments with traffic anarchism would have come about sooner had planners visited a city ironically located in a socialist country and renamed after a socialist "icon" of the 20^th Century. The streets of what is now called Ho Chi Minh City offer the same lessons learned from the European experience, and much more. Following is a description of what the author experienced on a visit in 1997. In the intervening decade, I'm not sure to what extent archy has broken out, if at all, and destroyed the glorious freedom on the streets of the Paris of the East that I am about to describe.

[ ... ]

This rule was utterly useless, I found. Looking both ways, I was paralyzed with fear. Getting struck by a motorbike or cyclo probably wouldn't finish me off, and colliding with a lovely áo dài-clad lass on a bicycle might be a pleasant experience, but nonetheless I hesitated to put my foot on the street. When I finally got up the nerve, I hastily bolted through the traffic, looking in every direction and wishing I had eyes on the back and sides of my head.

I grew anxious every time it came for me to cross a street, and did so as quickly as possible. I did not realize that my haste and overcautiousness were putting myself and others in greater danger.

Then, I observed the Saigonese. What was it that allowed the city's natives to cross so effortlessly across the teeming streets? At first, I chalked it up to being one of the many mysteries of the East. "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner," said General William Westmoreland. "Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient." Could this man I held to be a monster have been correct after all?

Unlike the general, however, I decided that there might be something to learn from the Vietnamese, so I observed them. With Zen-like serenity, they crossed the streets, with their eyes focused directly in front of them, never glancing to the left or the right. This, then, was the key, but I did not realize it until I gave it a try myself.

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9/11 Blueprint for Truth presented by Architect Richard Gage, AIA

9/11 Blueprint for Truth: The Architecture of Destruction Commercial architect Richard Gage (founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth) presents a watertight case for controlled demolition of the three steel-building collapses at the World Trade Center, New York on 9/11/01. Includes physicist Steven Jones' updated evidence of thermite. Gage's website, www.ae911truth.org, is rapidly drawing building and engineering professionals to the 9/11 movement.

Part I - WTC Building #7 1 Symmetrical Collapse 2 Explosions 3 Fire 4 FEMA Report 5 Free Fall 6 Expert Corroboration 7 Squib Explosions 8 Molten Metal 9 Foreknowledge 10 Bldg 7 Conclusions Part II - WTC Twin Towers 1 WTC History 2 Twin Towers' Structure 3 FEMA Deception 4 Explosions 5 Columns Cut 6 Rapid Onset 7 Demolition Waves 8 Free Fall Speed 9 Explosive Squibs 10 Symmetrical Collapse 11 Skeleton Broken Up 12 Molten Iron 13 Dust Clouds 14 Destruction by Fire 15 NIST Deceptions 16 Foreknowledge 17 Expert Corroboration 18 Conclusion

FIND OUT MORE

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth Website:
http://www.ae911truth.org/
Scholars for 9/11 Truth & Justice Website:
http://www.stj911.org/
Pilots For 9/11 Truth Website:
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/

General 9/11 Links, News and Events
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