[Peace-discuss] Economic Dirty Bomb explodes in Manhattan

[Brussel Morton K.]

Tom Engelhardt writes movingly in

http://www.truthout.org/032309L


  …  And yet, in a sense, as on September 11, 2001, maybe we were just  
looking the wrong way. After all, you might say that an economic dirty  
bomb did go off in downtown New York and this city (not to say, the  
nation and the world) has been experiencing a second 9/11 ever since,  
even if in slow motion.

     In my neighborhood, back in those fateful September days in 2001,  
you could hear the sirens, see the jets streak overhead, catch the  
acrid smell of the towers and everything chemical in them burning, and  
like the rest of America, watch those apocalyptic-looking scenes of  
the towers collapsing in clouds of ash and smoke again and again. But  
if the look then was apocalyptic, the damage, however grim, was limited.

     This time around there's no dust, no ash, no acrid smell, no  
sirens, no jets, and no brave rescuers either. And yet the effect  
might, sooner or later, be far more apocalyptic and the lives  
swallowed up far greater. This time, of course, the fanatical  
extremists were homegrown. Their "caves" were on Wall Street. They  
hijacked our economy and did their level best to take down our world.

     And they may have come closer than most of us imagine. Alpine  
Sound and Oppenheimer, Tokyo Pop and Planet Kids, Docks and Ruby Foo's  
have all gone down (and more are surely headed that way). For the  
people who owned, or ran, or worked in them, unlike the survivors of  
the original 9/11, there will be no moving bios in the local papers,  
no talk of compensation, and no majestic memorials to argue about.

     For the perpetrators, who have, at worst, gone home pocketing  
their millions, there will be no retribution. No invasions will be  
launched, no missiles shot into homes or hideouts. None of them will  
be pursued to their lairs, or kidnapped off the streets of New York,  
or from their palatial mansions, or apartments, or estates. None will  
be spirited to foreign lands to be imprisoned and tortured. None will  
be labeled "enemy combatants."

     Quite the opposite, in 9/11, The Sequel, the U.S. government is  
willing to pay many of them and their institutions in the multi- 
billions for their time and further efforts.

     In the second 9/11, all the pain and torture is in the  
neighborhood.
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