Warren leads Dem charge on student debt

Remember who is on your side... 

June 2, 2014

Derek Pugh
Campaign for America's Future
ourfuture.org

This week Senate Democrats will begin turning their attention to the 40 million Americans whose lives are being hampered by student loan debt. The goal is passage of a bill with a provision that will allow these Americans to refinance their loans at lower rates.

Not surprisingly, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the face of the new populist movement, is leading the charge.

Last month she introduced the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, which would allow borrowers with existing student loan debt, at interest rates of about 7 percent or more, to refinance at the same rate current undergraduates receive, which is currently 3.86 percent. Legislation with language similar to the Warren bill is expected to be put to a vote next week.

Homeowners can refinance a mortgage at under 4 percent. Car loans are available for under 3 percent. Yet college graduates are paying interest rates of nearly 7 percent or higher on existing undergraduate loans, and are unable to refinance.

Outstanding student loan debt now averages $29,400 per graduate. A recent analysis by the Congressional Research Service found that refinancing would save the average graduate $4,000 over the life of the loans.

Warren’s bill is a key part of the Senate Democrats’ “Fair Shot” agenda, which Democratic leaders are using to highlight how out of touch the Republican Party is with the needs of working Americans. Warren’s bill as introduced would not have added a single dime to the national deficit, because its cost would be financed by enacting the “Buffet rule,” which would ensure that Americans earning more than $1 million annually are paying taxes at a rate at least as high as middle-income workers.

Unfortunately, this is the section of the legislation that is most likely to be removed, as some Democrats bow to objections from wealthy donors. Even after that, a watered-down bill has little chance of getting past a Republican filibuster and clearing the Senate. That’s even though most Americans fully support her original one, according to polls highlighted on the Populist Majority website:

• 71 percent believe Congress should pass the “Buffet rule.”
• 91 percent agree that interest rates on student loans should not be higher than on regular consumer loans.
• 68 percent want to eliminate the [carried interest] loophole that allows Wall Street hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than middle-class tax payers.
• 69 percent believe that improving the educational system should be a top priority for the president and Congress in 2014.
• 86 percent believe that student loan debt is creating problems for America and making it harder for young people to get ahead.

Millennials overwhelmingly support such proposals:

• 87 percent of millennials support (54% strongly) lowering interest rates on student loan debt.
• 79 percent of millennials want the government to be more involved in making college affordable.
• 69 percent of millennials favor enacting the “Buffet Rule.”

A major impediment holding back millennials from entering the middle class, and Democrats from turning them out to vote, is student loan debt. Congress’ inaction on college affordability and other issues young adults care about has led many to distance themselves from the political process altogether, with only 23 percent certain to vote this November. If millennials see Democrats fighting for them on the student loan issue, that could well encourage some of them to head to the polls.

This is not just an issue affecting young adults, either. The nearly $1.3 trillion in outstanding student loan debt is dragging down our economy, exacerbating inequality and stunting our recovery. There are even seniors who are having their Social Security checks garnished to pay back their loans or loans they co-signed for a child or grandchild.

Big banks aren’t the only ones making money off the backs of students. So is the federal government. In April the Congressional Budget Office found that interest from the federal student loan program will bring in $16.2 billion in additional revenues.

That adds up to $127 billion over the next 10 years. This should not be, especially when big banks get federal loans at the rock bottom interest rate of 0.75 percent.

Refinancing, even at a high rate of 3.86 percent, would put hundreds and even thousands of dollars back into the pockets of individuals who need it the most as wages are stagnating and our economy is contracting. Americans deserve their fair share and Warren’s bill helps to get a little piece of that back.

Dear GOP: Get a life - US has negotiated with terrorists throughout our long history

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. (photo: US Army)

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

02 June 14

readersupportednews.org

 
he GOP talking points in response to the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in a trade for five former officials of the 1990s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) focused on a few basic premises. !. You don’t negotiate with terrorists; 2. such a swap would encourage terrorists to capture Americans; 3. these officials are the worst the worst.

Tagging movements as “terrorist” and then refusing to deal with them is frankly stupid. The Taliban in Afghanistan are not a small terrorist group like, say, the Italian Red Brigades of the 1970s and 1980s. They are guerrillas belonging to a movement that at one point had captured the state and run it. The Taliban are now a guerrilla group, holding territory.

The US has all along negotiated with the guerrillas it has fought on the battlefield. William Howard Taft (later president) in the Philippines was all for negotiation with Filipinos who rejected US rule, and he created “attraction zones” to win them over. At the conclusion of the Aguinaldo resistance to US occupation in 1902, Teddy Roosevelt declared a general amnesty for the resistance fighters. These resistance fighters had committed some atrocities, including on captured US troops, but Roosevelt just let them walk free. Talk softly, carry a big stick, and let all the terrorists go, seems to have been his motto.

The US negotiated with the Viet Cong in South Vietnam, who were very much analogous to the Taliban and whom the US would now certainly term “terrorists.” In 1973, the US used intermediaries to negotiate with the Viet Cong for release of captured US soldiers at Loc Ninh. Americans on the political right made a huge issue about 1300 US soldiers never having been released by the Viet Cong (only about 400 were), and the shame that these men were left on the battlefield by the Nixon and Ford administrations. Conservatives seem to want to have it both ways. If you negotiate the release of US captives with the enemy you are “negotiating with terrorists.” If you don’t, then you have left soldiers behind on the battlefield. The fact is that the only way to have freed them was to have offered something for them in detailed negotiations. As for the Viet Cong “terrorists,” many of them are in government now and the US has cordial relations with them.

In the 1980s radical Shiites in Lebanon took American hostages. In order to free them, the Reagan administration not only negotiated with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini but actually stole T.O.W. anti-aircraft munitions from Pentagon warehouses and shipped them to Tehran, receiving the money for them in black bank accounts and sending it to right wing death squads in Nicaragua. Khomeini and his government were listed as terrorists by the State Department at the time, and selling weapons to Iran was highly illegal. Not only that, but the US was allied with Iraq at the time, so Reagan screwed over Baghdad this way. Reagan did it, in part to free US hostages in Lebanon (Iran put pressure on its clients for their release).

As for encouraging groups to take US hostages, if the GOP really is so worried about this outcome they should stop putting the idea in the minds of terrorists by trumpeting it all over the news media. There was no rash of hostage-taking of Americans after Reagan bribed Iran to have them released, so the expectation is ahistorical.

The Israelis did a prisoner swap, at 1000 to one, for Gilad Shalit, and it hasn’t caused more Israelis to be captured. Why do right wing Americans only hold up Israel as a model when it acts unwisely, rather than when it (as it often does) acts pragmatically?

In fact, groups like the Taliban are always trying to take US personnel captive. Every day all day. This agreement changes nothing. The reason they only had one American in captivity was not the US policy of not negotiating. It is because guerrilla groups find it difficult to kidnap people from hardened bases and other such relatively secure facilities.

Finally, as for the 5 Taliban officials being the worst of the worst, that is probably true. However, there are other worst of the worst out there– big Afghan warlords of the 1990s with massive amounts of blood on their hands– whom the US has left alone to operate freely in Afghanistan. Gen. Rashid Dostam was even a vice presidential candidate, and Abu Sayyaf serves in parliament. Look them up. US politicians appear not so interested in who committed massacres but in whether they are presently cooperative with the Karzai government.

Seattle Approves $15 Minimum Wage...

Sets a New Standard for Big Cities

By KIRK JOHNSONJUNE 2, 2014

Campaign for America's Future

ourfuture.org 

Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle, right, after the City Council approved a minimum wage that is more than double the federal minimum. The $15 rate is the highest among the nation’s big cities. Credit Ted S. Warren/Associated Press

SEATTLE — The City Council here went where no big-city lawmakers have gone before on Monday, raising the local minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum, and pushing Seattle to the forefront of urban efforts to address income inequality.

The unanimous vote of the nine-member Council, after months of discussion by a committee of business and labor leaders convened by Mayor Ed Murray, will give low-wage workers here — in incremental stages, with different tracks for different sizes of business — the highest big-city minimum in the nation.

“Even before the Great Recession a lot of us have started to have doubt and concern about the basic economic promise that underpins economic life in the United States,” said Sally J. Clark, a Council member. “Today Seattle answers that challenge,” she added. “We go into uncharted, unevaluated territory.”

But some business owners who have questioned the proposal say that the city’s booming economy is creating an illusion of permanence. The fat times and the ability to pay higher wages, they warn, will not go on forever.

“We’re living in this bubble of Amazon, but that’s not going to go on,” said Tom Douglas, a prominent restaurateur in Seattle, referring to the local boom in jobs and economic growth from hiring at Amazon, the online retailer, which has its headquarters here. Mr. Douglas said the new law will inevitably result in costs being passed on to consumers. “There’s going to be some terrific price inflation,” he said.

The measure has the support of Mr. Murray, who ran last year on a pledge to raise the wage to $15 and made it one of his first priorities in office.

Cheers and jeers repeatedly erupted in the City Hall meeting room, which was packed with supporters of the plan, who often interrupted speakers in the 90-minute debate before the vote with chants.

“We did it — workers did this,” said Kshama Sawant, a socialist who campaigned for a $15 minimum wage when she was elected to the Council last year. Ms. Sawant sought to accelerate the carrying out of the measure and to strip out a lower youth wage training rate, but the council rejected her proposals.

The vote, economists and labor experts said, accentuates the patchwork in wages around the country, with places like Seattle — and other cities considering sharply higher minimum pay, including San Diego, Chicago and San Francisco — having economic outlooks increasingly distinct from those in other parts of the nation. Through much of the South, especially, the federal minimum of $7.25 holds fast.

Eight states plus the District of Columbia have already increased their minimum wages this year, the most to have done so in a single year since 2006, and at least eight other states and municipalities could put minimum wage ballot measures before voters by November. But it is the scale of ambition that is catching the attention of economists, labor leaders and business owners.

“In past rounds of minimum wage increases, proposals sought chiefly to restore the value of the minimum wage lost to inflation over the decades,” said Paul Sonn, the general counsel and program director at the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based group that supports raising the minimum wage. The increases in places like Seattle, Mr. Sonn said, go beyond playing catch-up. “The $15 proposals make real gains,” he said.

Economists who study the minimum wage are not sure of the effect of having sharply different levels — in some places, it is twice that of others. Though records are a bit uncertain, people who track minimum wage law say the range of mandated minimums, lowest to highest, is the largest it has been since a national minimum was established by Congress in 1938.

“Nobody has studied a doubling of the minimum wage — that’s outside our experience,” said Dale Belman, a professor of labor and industrial relations at Michigan State University and co-author of a coming book about the minimum wage.

Individual workers and business owners in and around Seattle are unsure of the implications. Washington State already has the highest state minimum wage in the nation, $9.32, but more than 24 percent of Seattle residents earn hourly wages of $15 or less, according to the city, and approximately 13.6 percent of Seattle residents live below the federal poverty level.

Under the plan approved on Monday, the hourly wage will rise to $15 by 2017 for employers with more than 500 workers that do not provide health insurance, and by 2018 for those large employers who do. The minimum will be phased in through 2021 for smaller employers.

In its early years, the law allows employers to include tips as part of a workers’ compensation in reaching the minimum, but that provision is phased out over time.

“The short-term side of it says it’s attractive,” said Mickey Adame, a bartender who works in Bellevue, Washington’s fifth-largest city, which is just outside Seattle, and the new $15 wage boundary. “But I think people in Seattle aren’t going to tip as much, knowing the servers are getting paid $15,” added Mr. Adame, who lives in Seattle and is trying to start a music record label called Sounder Music, for which his tip jar, he said, is crucial. “If I had to pick an answer, I would say I think I’ll make more in Bellevue.”

Ms. Sawant, in her comments to the Council and the crowd, did not take the tone of someone who was savoring a victory. The fight for workers’ rights and economic fairness, she said, is not over.

“We have fought to the last day, the last hour, against all the loopholes demanded by business,” she said. “The attempts of business to undermine $15 will continue,” she said, as would the battle to “turn the tide against corporate politics.”

She added: “$15 in Seattle is just a beginning. We have an entire world to win.”

No jail time for rich guy with 7 DUIs

Protesters Demand Answers After Rich Man Avoids Any Jail Time for Seventh DUI Conviction

Adam Peck

Think Progress / News Investigation

Published: Monday 19 May 2014
nationofchange.org 

On Friday, protesters gathered in front of the Thurston County courthouse to demand answers.

At the very end of last year, Shaun Goodman left a bar in Olympia, Washington in his Ferrari and led police on a high speed chase that approached 100 mph at times before crashing into two cars, jumping the curb and eventually careening into the side of a house. An unsuspecting passenger who had accepted a ride from Goodman was forced to leap from the moving car as it slowed down approaching an intersection.

Police arrested Goodman, whose blood alcohol content was twice the legal limit in Washington. He pleaded guilty to felony charges of eluding a police officer and driving under the influence, his seventh DUI conviction. And last week, Judge James Dixon handed down his sentence: no jail time and one year in a work release program.

Members of the community are crying foul, and argue that criminals who have money play by a different set of rules than others who commit similar crimes, drawing comparisons to several other recent cases of wealthy defendants getting off with minimal punishment. On Friday, protesters gathered in front of the Thurston County courthouse to demand answers.

“The judge has said at some point that he’s an important businessman in the community, and it wouldn’t be fair for him (and) his employees would suffer if he went to real jail,” said Sam Miller in an interview with local station KOMO News. “And my question is, what about the people that might suffer if he kills somebody?”

Ever since his arrest, Goodman has been the recipient of relatively lenient punishment from the court system. His bail was initially set at $75,000, which he paid. Though his request to leave the state for a trip to Las Vegas was denied, Judge Dixon did grant Goodman permission to fly to New York City for the Super Bowl just barely a month after his arrest. Goodman’s lawyer told the judge that his client had “what may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see his hometown team play in the Super Bowl.”

Goodman’s punishment is a far cry from Washington State’s sentencing guidelines for DUI offenders. According to the court system’s most recent DUI sentencing grid, anyone found with a BAC above .15 (Goodman’s was .16) and with two or three prior offenses (Goodman had six), the mandatory minimum jail time is 120 days. The minimum sentence may not be overturned “unless the court finds that imprisonment of this mandatory minimum sentence would impose a substantial risk to the offender’s physical or mental well-being.”

Regard for a defendant’s “mental well-being” is the argument that defense attorneys have used with alarming success in recent months to get their wealthy clients out of jail sentences or any other serious punishment. Last year, a teenager who killed four people and injured two others by driving drunk in Texas avoided jail after the lawyer hired by his wealthy parents claimed their son suffered from “affluenza,” an infliction suffered by the extremely wealthy that prevents them from accepting any responsibility for their own actions. And in March, an heir to chemical magnate Irénée du Pont who raped his own three-year-old daughter accepted a plea bargain that reduced his charges to fourth-degree rape and received probation, avoiding a mandatory jail sentence of 10 years. In her decision, the judge in that case explained that the defendant “will not fare well” in jail.

Colorado reaping huge rewards for legal pot

Colorado Sells $19 Million in Weed in March: $1.9 Million Goes to Schools and Crime Down 10 Percent

Christina Sarich

Natural Society / News Report

Published: Monday 2 June 2014

nationofchange.org

All the naysayers who were against marijuana legalization are eating crow about now. Colorado’s weed sales just keep trending up, and with the sales of legal weed, they are improving their schools and reducing overall crime rates.

Not counting medicinal weed sales, Colorado sold nearly $19 million in their recreational weed market in the month of March, and $1.9 million of that goes straight into government coffers and towards building schools. At this pace, according to PolicyMic, Colorado will make $30 million this year in pot taxes alone.

What’s even more promising is that these numbers are still low estimates, as the recreational and medicinal marijuana markets (coinciding just fine, take note Washington) are likely to keep trending upward. Many say that a figure closer to $60 million in weed tax revenue is a more likely assumption. Medical marijuana is also not as heavily taxed as recreational marijuana, and hopefully it will stay that way. 

Crime rates in Colorado have dropped by 10.6% while Dunkin Donuts has begun expanding its brand in the state (really). It looks like a really good future for people living in Colorado, or any state that legalizes both medical and recreational marijuana – though it is admittedly too early to tell.The cherry on top of this tax-generating cake? Crime rates are also down in Colorado, so while kids are hopefully going to get a better education, the government (idealistically) will spend more money improving infrastructure and other business opportunities for Colorado citizens, and unemployment rates are plummeting. The Colorado police can take a little rest from their duties.

Is it ludicrous to conclude that perhaps happy, smokers of marijuana have no time for violence and expend their energy elsewhere? Probably, but it’s looking more and more like a reality. When you legalize this plant, people have less to be angry about–and less angry people means less crime.

The only draw-back of legalization in Colorado? It’s snowing in May. But only Nancy Grace would attribute that to ganja and not global warming. And whether Nancy and the haters like it or not, more recreational dispensaries are coming to Denver, Boulder, and beyond.

According to Weedmaps, there are currently 97 recreational dispensaries in Colorado, and that number should hit 100 in the next few weeks – likely climbing higher. And higher. And higher.

GOP's concern for vets is hypocritical

(photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)

Fake Political Outrage

Is the Real VA Scandal

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

01 June 14

readersupportednews.org

 

ince the Afghanistan war began in 2001, over 2,700 veterans have taken their own lives. Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs showed that in 2010 alone, 22 veterans committed suicide each day – that’s another wounded warrior gone every 65 minutes. Luckily for Army Reserve veteran Kye Hardy of Ashland, Kentucky, who served for a year in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, none of the soldiers he fought alongside have taken that drastic step yet.

“I was lucky to join a unit of men who knew how to keep younger veteran soldiers safe even after coming home,” Hardy said. “I don’t go a week without calling or receiving a call from someone I deployed with just to chat for a bit.”

Hardy, an E-4 specialist, is diagnosed with muscle damage and potential spinal damage, and qualifies for VA services. However, the years-long backlog has kept him from applying, as he wants those with more serious injuries to get the treatment they’ve been waiting for rather than adding to the backlog. Hardy doesn’t believe politicians’ outrage over the VA backlog is genuine. Rather than the resignation of top VA officials like the recent exit of General Shinseki and a continued top-down bureaucratic structure, Hardy instead wants to see a more community-based, veteran-led approach to VA services.

“Wounded warriors who are on disability for the remainder of their lives oftentimes have serious trouble readjusting to civilian life,” Hardy said. “[They] seem to improve when they’re communicating with other veterans.”

However, the Republicans feigning the most concern for veterans are the ones most at fault for the crisis in veterans’ health care. Paul Ryan, author of three separate GOP-approved budget plans that severely cut VA services, has made no bones about his plans to privatize Medicare and turn it into a voucher system. He's also called for changes in VA services that would cut off care for 1.3 million vets. Outrage over the VA scandal could also be manipulated by Ryan and his ilk to force a similar privatization over veterans’ health care.

The extreme rightists who control the House of Representatives don’t want to privatize the VA to help veterans – if the Republican majority truly cared about veterans, they wouldn’t have repeatedly voted against bills providing jobs, homes, and health care to veterans and their families. The budget deal that Ryan and Senator Patty Murray approved last year cut veterans’ pensions by $6 billion. The GOP actually wants to see the VA fail to score more political points.

By continuously cutting VA services, the far-right wants to reinforce their anti-government narrative by cementing the idea into people’s heads that government is bloated and inefficient, and that private companies unaccountable to voters should seize control of public assets. This is why GOP leaders in Congress don’t seem to mind that the approval rating of Congress has slipped consistently in the polls – they’re counting on voters to blame the president and his party in the months before the next Congressional elections. They’re also counting on voters to grow increasingly mistrustful of government and public services in general.

When Republicans held the White House between 2000 and 2008, they demanded that everyone stand with the troops that they sent overseas to fight a costly war waged on false premises. As President Bush stated, Americans could either stand with the president and his war or be considered sympathizers with the enemy. But now that troops have left Iraq and are soon to be leaving Afghanistan, veterans coming home with multiple physical and mental health issues have been left by the Republican-led House and a relentlessly-filibustering Senate minority to fend for themselves. It’s similar to the GOP’s belief in fighting for children while they’re still growing fetuses in a womb, but cutting off their Medicaid, WIC, and food stamps once they’re born. They’re pro-war, but anti-vets. They’re pro-life, but anti-children.

The American public must not allow themselves to be fooled by the GOP’s blustering over the VA backlog. It’s certainly a tragedy that 40 vets died while waiting for health care in Phoenix, but instead of blaming overworked and underpaid medical staff and an administration dealing with an uncooperative Congress that’s trying its best to make the government fail the people, voters should blame hypocrites and deficit hawks in Washington who have allowed a longtime crisis to turn into a scandal. When someone runs for office on a platform of cutting government services to pieces, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that government services under their leadership have been cut to pieces.

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Carl Gibson, 27, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nonviolent grassroots movement that mobilized thousands to protest corporate tax dodging and budget cuts in the months leading up to Occupy Wall Street. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary We're Not Broke, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Carl is also the author of How to Oust a Congressman, an instructional manual on getting rid of corrupt members of Congress and state legislatures based on his experience in the 2012 elections in New Hampshire. He lives in Sacramento, California.

9/11 Museum shows no plane hit Pentagon

Artifacts on display from the attack at the Pentagon. (photo: John Makely/NBC News)

9/11 Museum World Trade Center Evidence: No Plane Hit Pentagon?

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

31 May 14

readersupportednews.org
 

bsence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Astronomer Carl Sagan was fond of saying this when talking about the possibility of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also used the expression in his own portrayal of intelligent life on this planet, in reference to his inability to find Saddam Hussein’s WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) that didn’t exist.

It’s a basically useful mindset that has both useful and useless applications, as in Rumsfeld’s using it to mean, apparently, something like: “We don’t need no stinking evidence, we know his WMDs used to exist, we believe they still exist, and that’s good enough – trust us.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” applies as well to the events of September 11, 2001, and it’s still not clear which usage applies best to which argument from any perspective. The assumption here is that, at a minimum, the official 9/11 story is false in some of its essentials. The official 9/11 story has too many elements to assume they’re all false, or even that they’re mostly false. On the contrary, whether one assumes official honesty or an official cover-up, the motive is the same: to get as much right as possible and/or necessary. The best lies are embedded in truth. 

9/11 Museum full of contradictions, acknowledged and ignored

The National September 11 Memorial Museum (cost: $700 million) opened ceremonially in New York City on May 15, 2014. The museum (operating budget: $60 million a year) opened publicly six days later (admission: $24). The openings were characterized by both reverence (President Obama called the museum a ”sacred place of healing and hope”) and controversy (over the gift shop, and especially its Darkness Hoodie ($39) and its United-States-shaped cheese platter with hearts marking 9/11 death sites (price unavailable), as well as serious censorship (no charge) and the CEO’s salary ($378,000)).

A “Museum Review” in The New York Times pondered the museum’s “trifurcated identity:”

Was it going to be primarily a historical document, a monument to the dead or a theme-park-style tourist attraction? How many historical museums are built around an active repository of human remains, still being added to? How many cemeteries have a $24 entrance fee and sell souvenir T-shirts? How many theme parks bring you, repeatedly, to tears?

Because that’s what the museum does. The first thing to say about it, and maybe the last, is that it’s emotionally overwhelming….

Despite that overwhelming ad hominem character, emphasizing the emotional impact of the lives of the living and dead, the museum defines itself with a contradictory pose of academic detachment: “The National September 11 Memorial Museum serves as the country's principal institution concerned with exploring the implications of the events of 9/11, documenting the impact of those events and exploring 9/11's continuing significance.” More credibly, the museum defines its mission as bearing witness to the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001. Most compellingly, the 9/11 Museum seems to be a guardian of the official 9/11 story. 

Omission can also be a form of bearing witness

Among the 9/11 Museum's artifacts on display (its collection numbers more than 10,000 items, mostly small and personal), there are parts of the Boeing 767 airliners that hit the twin towers. The larger artifacts include a charred piece of fuselage with a missing window and the “World Trade Center Cross” (which a federal judge has ruled an “artifact,” not a violation of the First Amendment separation of church and state).

The museum also has a collection of unidentified or unclaimed human body parts, some 14,000 of them, stored in an underground repository not open to the public.

Without apparently intending to do so, the 9/11 Museum’s body of evidence that tends to reinforce the official 9/11 story in New York, also tends to reinforce longstanding questions about the official 9/11 story at the Pentagon. That story is that the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757 carrying 58 passengers and 6 crew) flew into the Pentagon at almost ground level, killing all aboard as well as 125 in the building (all but five of whom were, eventually, officially identified).

From the beginning, the official 9/11 Pentagon story caused cognitive dissonance, since the visual evidence suggests that nothing as big as a 757 could have hit the outside wall of the Pentagon and disappeared even more completely than the planes that hit the World Trade Center, where they burned until the WTC collapsed around them. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The alternative stories posit a missile or specially rigged small plane hitting the Pentagon. There is no known physical evidence to support such stories. According to Snopes.com (as of April 2008), these stories are false. Much of the evidence collected by government investigators remains secret. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Even a determined debunker of 9/11 skeptics, while laying out a coherent argument that the official 9/11 Pentagon story is true (and conflating physical evidence with photography), ends up concluding:

In this essay I asked what conclusions about the Pentagon attack were supported by physical evidence – primarily post-crash photographs of the site. I found that, in every aspect I considered, this evidence comports with the crash of a Boeing 757. At the same time, the evidence does not conclusively prove that the aircraft was a 757, much less that it was Flight 77. However, that lack of conclusiveness should not be surprising given the systematic suppression of evidence by authorities.

The 9/11 Museum, for all its claims to being the principal institution for exploring the events of 9/11, has next to nothing to say about the Pentagon or about the other 757 that crashed in Pennsylvania. New York has shown more respect for the dead than the Pentagon, where higher officials overruled subordinates and dumped human remains in a landfill. 

The first step in learning the truth is choosing to look for it

At best, the events of 9/11 represent the catastrophic failure of numerous American agencies, including airport security, air traffic controllers, national air defense command, and the U.S. Air Force. That reality alone is enough to raise suspicions of a cover-up, if only to avoid accountability for lethal incompetence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

At worst, the events of 9/11 were the result of an almost unimaginable criminal conspiracy designed to produce the “new Pearl Harbor” that would enable fans of the New American Century (many of them members of the Bush administration) to take the United States in new, warlike, world-dominating directions (maybe something like a Global War on Terror).

In any event, the Bush administration fought long and hard to prevent any investigation of 9/11 and continued to work to undermine the 9/11 Commission until it produced its flawed report in August 2004. That final report omits any mention, much less explanation, of what Vice President Dick Cheney knew and when he knew it regarding the attack on the Pentagon. The 9/11 Commission knew full well – and chose not to confront – the serious implications of the testimony to the commission by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (May 23, 2003):

During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President … the plane is 50 miles out … the plane is 30 miles out … and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand; have you heard anything to the contrary!??”

Conspiracies are by their nature hard to discover and hard to prove. All the same, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Even now, still in the shadows of 9/11, it might be instructive to hear President Bush and members of his administration vigorously questioned, under oath, as to why they decided to pay no attention – none at all (Bush is said to have told a CIA officer “you’ve covered your ass,” which sounds in retrospect almost like foreknowledge) – to the CIA briefing paper with the title: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Long after the facts of 9/11, the Bush people defended their absolute inattention and inaction based on the absence of evidence.

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.