I'm Your Money

Is it possible that the Government Accountability Office is the last bastion of our federal government that hasn't been overrun by GOP political hacks? Here is the sweet news:

From the New York Times: "Federal auditors said today that the Bush administration had violated the law by purchasing favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" inside the United States, in violation of a longstanding, explicit statutory ban."

The Times article goes on to note that the Education Department, which funneled $180,000 through Ketchum Inc. (a public relations company) to Mr. Williams to big up Bush Inc.'s so-called No Child Left Behind education initiative on TV, radio, and in print, could not produce any evidence (speeches, articles, etc.) of the services that Mr. Armstrong had performed in exchange for all the taxpayers' money.

What, they don't got Google at the Education Department? I know many of Dubya's political appointees are inept (this one's for you, Brownie), but c'mon!

I Love a Man in a Uniform

So, John Roberts was sworn in as the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court yesterday, with a tearful and smug Dubya at his side (no doubt thinking that he FINALLY made good on Rove's Faustian deal with the religious right). During the time it takes for the court cases regarding privacy, etc. to bubble up to the Supremes, you might want to: stock up on birth control (we're talking Costco-megasized here, Roberts is on the bench for life); get that safe and legal abortion you've always been thinking about; file that complaint/lawsuit about being wronged because of your race (non-white), ethnicity (methinks it will not be a good time to be of Arab descent and come under suspicion of anti-American activity), gender (female), sexual orientation (gay, transgendered), or injury (non-rich, non-Bush corporate crony), or religion (non-evangelical protestant); take out some books targeted for burning before they're ash or politically unpopular books from the library before the Feds open their file on you; bone up on the theory of evolution so you can help pass it on orally to the next generation of liberals; or generally exercise your civil rights as a citizen of these United States without all sorts of (up till now) Constitutionally prohibited interference from the government.

Ah, to be rich, male, white, born-again, and conservative in America...your government salutes you for your ongoing patriotism!

For the rest us, the clock is ticking, people! Get on it!

One Thing Leads to Another

It's pretty amazing to read all about ultra-boob Brownie blaming everyone else (New Orleans' Mayor, Louisiana's governor, the press, the Department of Homeland Security for cutting his budget, etc., boo-hoo, woe is me) for FEMA's lame and deadly response to Katrina (the body count so far is over 1,000). But it's yet another instance of business as usual at Bush Inc.: they believe government is essentially bad and have little use for it, except as a means to reward and enrich loyal fundraisers and business cronies, and to dismantle any agency or law that prevents their buddies from making even more money. Check out Molly Ivins' column and wonder if any federal agency will function again once Bush Inc. leave office:

"There's a doctoral dissertation to be written about Bush appointees named during the administration's frequent fits of Petulant Pique. These PP appointments are made in the immortal childhood spirit of "nanny-nanny boo-boo, I'll show you." Susan Wood resigns [from the FDA] in protest over the politicization of women's health care? Ha! We'll show her -- we'll put a vet in charge, instead.

The PP appointments are less for reasons of ideology or even rewarding the politically faithful than just in the old nyeh-nyeh spirit. You could, for example, put any number of people at the Department of Labor who are wholly unsympathetic to the labor movement -- Bush has installed shoals of them already. But there is a certain arch, flippant malice to making Edwin Foulke assistant secretary in charge of the health and safety of workers.

Republican appointees who oppose the agencies to which they are assigned are a dime a dozen, but Foulke is a partner from the most notorious union-busting law firm in the country. What he does for a living is destroy the only organizations that care about workers' health and safety.

Here's another PP pick: put a timber industry lobbyist in as head of the Forest Service. How about a mining industry lobbyist who believes public lands are unconstitutional in charge of the public lands? Nice shot. A utility lobbyist who represented the worst air polluters in the country as head of the clean air division at the EPA? A laff riot. As head of the Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund regulations? Cute, cute, cute. A Monsanto lobbyist as No. 2 at the EPA. A lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute at the Council on Environmental Quality. And so on. And so forth.

The Federal Trade Commission was finally embarrassed enough by demands from Democratic governors to start an investigation into recent price gouging by oil companies. But the investigation will be headed by a former lawyer for ChevronTexaco. Is this fun or what? Nanny-nanny boo-boo."

Look what Bush Inc.'s arrogant and shortsighted the-ends-justify-our-means policies have wrought on our military -- we have U.S. soldiers snapping pictures of dead Iraqis and posting them on a website in exchange for access to porn, and reports that troops in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division were involved in severe and regular beatings of people suspected of being part of the Iraqi insurgency (even the cook could come by to work off some steam by pummelling a prisoner with a metal bat). (Prisoners are supposed to be guarded by Military Police, who are specifically trained in handling POWs -- not by regular troops, who are not, and who may be pissed at the POWs for killing their buddy in a firefight, etc.) Read the Human Rights Watch report and weep for what is done in our name.

And Karen Hughes, as she tours the Middle East in her quest to improve America's image in the Arab world, is supposedly genuinely surprised to find that women in Saudi Arabia are generally happy with their non-American way of life and angry about U.S. policies in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and Israel/Palestine.

Amazing what happens when you leave the Bush bubble, isn't it?

Kill the Poor

In a move to further punish the less well-off among us in America (and possibly in retribution for daring to ask for federal help in the wake of Katrina -- on national TV, no less), House Republicans have come up with a way to pay for Katrina relief and reconstruction efforts by -- and I'm not making this up -- proposing to further slash programs for low-income Americans as well as increasing tax audits of poor Americans, as they apparently are depriving the federal coffers of billions of dollars (unlike the richest of the rich or politically connected corporations). According to the Washington Post's Achenblog, here's what's on the table:

"-Delay the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill for One year
-Increase Allowable Co-pays in Medicaid
-Block Grant Medicaid Acute Services
-Reduce Farm Payment Acreage by 1%
-Eliminate Subsidized Loans to Graduate Students
-Increase Medicare Part B Premium from 25% to 30%
-Level Funding for the Peace Corps
-Eliminate the Federal Anti-Drug Advertising
-Eliminate Federal Funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
-Eliminate State Grants for Safe and Drug-Free Schools
-Eliminate the Even Start Program
-Eliminate Teen Funding Portion of Title X Family Planning
-Eliminate Funding for Penile Implants Under Medicare

That's just a sample. Some of these items would save a lot of money, some would save very little. But there's one item that the GOP believes would save $85 billion over 10 years:

Verify Income of Earned Income Tax Credit Participants

This appears to be a proposal to audit people who claim to be poor, to make sure they are truly poor and deserving of the tax credit. I'll try to find out more to make sure I'm not missing some essential element of the idea. The GOP apparently believes that massive fraud exists in this program, and that we could ease the federal deficit by aggressively collecting taxes from the not-truly-poor -- people who could be defined as the merely non-affluent, the not-doing-so-well, the just-scraping-by. But not "poor." The GOP wants these posers to pay up. [And then the GOP will eliminate the Estate Tax, but that's another matter entirely.]"

Some of these proposed cuts are not surprising (they've been after those damn fairies Bert and Ernie on PBS for years -- and the very impudence of giving poor and minority children a good educational foundation with Head Start drives them freakin' INSANE!), but killing the anti-drug efforts seems weird for the Grand Old Party of Just Say No (but maybe with that nasty coke tart Kate Moss knocked off billboards for the near future, the incidence of drug use will plummet?). Yet now that Americans have discovered that millions of poor people are amongst us and have been generously opening up their wallets to help out, it would seem to be a bad political move for them to cut anti-poverty programs, etc. Then again, Dubya's approval ratings already are in the toilet and the Republicans' hubris knows no limits -- plus it's the poor people's fault that they are poor, right?!

I know the Republicans HATE the New Deal and FDR, but wouldn't it be a good idea to set up WPA-type programs to clean up and rebuild the Gulf Coast cities by hiring all of those people without means who are now destitute? I think a lot of Americans would much rather see their tax dollars go to helping their fellow citizens earn a decent living (and to rebuild their lives) instead of further enriching Halliburton's golden boys.

Having said all that, I'm just happy that I already took care of my penile implant...

All that Money Wants, Part II

Surprising sharp commentary here for a corporate media outlet (Newsweek/MSNBC). Fareed Zakaria blasts Bush Inc.'s outrageous fiscal irresponsibility in light of Iraq and Katrina -- highlights below:

"Whatever his other accomplishments, Bush will go down in history as the most fiscally irresponsible chief executive in American history. Since 2001, government spending has gone up from $1.86 trillion to $2.48 trillion, a 33 percent rise in four years! Defense and Homeland Security are not the only culprits. Domestic spending is actually up 36 percent in the same period. These figures come from the libertarian Cato Institute's excellent report "The Grand Old Spending Party," which explains that "throughout the past 40 years, most presidents have cut or restrained lower-priority spending to make room for higher-priority spending. What is driving George W. Bush's budget bloat is a reversal of that trend." To govern is to choose. And Bush has decided not to choose. He wants guns and butter and tax cuts.

People wonder whether we can afford Iraq and Katrina. The answer is, easily. What we can't afford simultaneously is $1.4 trillion in tax cuts and more than $1 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next 10 years. To take one example, if Congress did not make permanent just one of its tax cuts, the repeal of estate taxes, it would generate $290 billion over the next decade. That itself pays for most of Katrina and Iraq."

And...

"Today's Republicans believe in pork, but they don't believe in government. So we have the largest government in history but one that is weak and dysfunctional. Public spending is a cynical game of buying votes or campaign contributions, an utterly corrupt process run by lobbyists and special interests with no concern for the national interest. So we shovel out billions on "Homeland Security" to stave off nonexistent threats to Wisconsin, Wyoming and Montana while New York and Los Angeles remain unprotected. We mismanage crises with a crazy-quilt patchwork of federal, local and state authorities—and sing paeans to federalism to explain our incompetence. We denounce sensible leadership and pragmatism because they mean compromise and loss of ideological purity. Better to be right than to get Iraq right."

Right on, brother! Let's man the barricades!

Dear God

Last night, as I was watching Paula Zahn on CNN freak out over Hurricane Rita ("the third largest storm on record!"), then the Jet Blue plane with landing gear problems that was circling LAX (and later landed safely, thanks to the brilliant pilot), and also news reports that a twister had touched down right outside of Minneapolis, I turned to my wife and said, "Maybe God really is mad at America..."

...for using Him to justify the so-called "war on terror", to fuel hatred of His gay sons and daughters, to enact policies that greatly reward rich friends of the president and do nothing to lift many of His people out of poverty, and for our president's incredibly dangerous arrogance in assuming that he is somehow acting as an instrument of God's will in all that he does.

Same as it Ever was

Can't stand Bush, so I didn't watch his effort to save his presidency from the crapper. I did read that even though he gave his speech to the nation in the French Quarter last night, no American citizens were in attendance, and the press were kept at bay, so he didn't take any questions. You'd think Rove would at least have rounded up a crowd of loyal, God-fearing Republicans to give the impression that Dubya has our support (like they did during the '04 campaign and the propaganda tour for the effort to kill Social Security). The truth is the guy everyone thinks they could share a beer with doesn't really like or care about us, as we might displease him with annoying questions and the like...that's why his crew keeps him in a bubble all the time.

While I'm glad to see that Federal money is going to help with the reconstruction (to the tune of $200 billion+), where is all of the money coming from (and where is the call for our common sacrifice to help out our brothers and sisters)? Yeah, Dubya's pulling out the charge card, again (this, on top of the $200 billion we've spent in Afghanistan and Iraq AND in addition to all the tax cuts for the rich and welfare checks for big business). I bet most Americans would be willing to pay a bit more in taxes to help out the Gulf states...(and don't you think it's time that the rich, who have done so very well under the Bush administration, step up to the plate to pay a bit more in taxes to help thousands of people who have lost everything?)

The other disturbing fact is that much of the reconstruction effort is going to cloak Bush Inc.'s sleazy agenda to bust union and minimum wages, crush environmental safeguards, eliminate affirmative-action programs, weaken the public school system, and reward GOP business cronies (read: Halliburton and their subsidiaries).

From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 15, 2005: "Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond ... In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region. Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims' right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction ... 'The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot,' says Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who leads the Republican Study Group, an influential caucus of conservative House members."

I understand that the GOP truly does believe in some of these policies, but how exactly does paying a sub-standard wage help people that have lost everything in Katrina's wake? Wouldn't it be nice to pay them a bit extra for all the things they are going to need?

Oh, and did I mention that the Katrina Reconstruction Czar is not a Colin Powell type (or even the dark lord Cheney), but none other than Karl Rove (egads!):

From the New York Times: "Republicans said Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff and Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, was in charge of the reconstruction effort, which reaches across many agencies of government and includes the direct involvement of Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development."

Hey, why have someone with actual experience be in charge of rebuilding New Orleans, Gulfport, etc. when you can have Rove making sure that GOP business buddies are handsomely rewarded. (Kind of undercuts the message that Dubya really cares about black people, doesn't it...I mean Rove is the guy who came up with the outrageous rumors during the 2000 election that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate child with a black prostitute, when he and his wife had, in fact, adopted a child from Bangladesh -- sent Dubya to speak at the racist Bob Jones "University" to secure the white supremacist vote, etc.)

Punky Reggae Party

On IFC last night, I happened to catch most of Don Lett's new documentary, "Punk Attitude." The majority of the archival footage was new to me, and the present day interviews with members of The NY Dolls, Ramones, Clash, Damned, Slits, etc. were pretty insightful. In fact, it makes a great visual companion to the book "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk," by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, which I commented on here. Gotta find out when this sucker's on again...

Also, if you're kind of obsessed about New York City in the 70s, as I am, you might want to check out Allan Tannenbaum's photo book "New York in the 70s." He was the house photographer for the Soho Weekly News, and captured some of the incredibly wild stuff that was going down at the time. Check out some on-line photo galleries of his terrific photographs here, here, and here.

Happy Death Men

From today's New York Times:

"American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.
Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect possible weapons had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little was done to remedy the problem, the Sept. 11 commission found."

But I'm confused, our National Security Advisor at the time, Condelezza Rice, made the following declaration back in May of 2002:

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."

Oh well, add it to the laundry list of things Bush, Inc. didn't do to protect us from Osama and his thugs.

And remember how Dubya insisted that he wanted bin Laden "Dead or Alive"? A feature from last weekend's New York Times Magazine ("Lost at Tora Bora") reveals that during the battle at Tora Bora in December 2001, when we had the opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, we left most of the fighting to warlords with past links bin Laden -- only committing about three dozen U.S. troops to the mission!

"Now, as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign."

So, here's the guy that ordered and financed the hijacking of three passenger airlines, which are then slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and they intended to hit the U.S. Capitol Building or the White House, had not the passengers of Flight 93 not fought back), killing over 3,000 American citizens. It's the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor -- and we only send 30 Special Forces after bin Laden and outsource the rest of the job to tribal warlords that may still have some allegiance to him? And people still think that Dubya is some great leader-patriot? Read on, my friend:

"Defending its decision not to commit forces to the Tora Bora campaign, members of the Bush administration - including the president, the vice president and Gen. Tommy Franks - have continued to insist, as recently as the last presidential campaign, that there was no definitive information that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora in December 2001. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19, 2004, Op-Ed article in The New York Times. Intelligence assessments on the Qaeda leader's location varied, Franks continued, and bin Laden was "never within our grasp." It was not until this spring that the Pentagon, after a Freedom of Information Act request, released a document to The Associated Press that says Pentagon investigators believed that bin Laden was at Tora Bora and that he escaped."

The real kicker? We haven't known for certain where bin Laden has been hiding out since (although it is assumed he is in Pakistan, but we can't press President Musharraf to hand him over, because he certainly would be overthrown and replaced with an Islamic fundamentalist regime).

But don't question the competence of your leaders! It's unpatriotic! Nothing to see here, now move along! Gotta go pin a medal on Brownie...

Red Skies, Part II

I don't care how many ways Judge Roberts dances around the abortion question during his Senate confirmation hearings (Roe v. Wade is "settled as a precedent of the court, entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis."), you damn well KNOW that he's a conservative Trojan Horse. His seemingly pro-choice answers to the abortion questions should be raising the alarms with the James Dobson (Focus on the Family), Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Pat Robertson (700 Club) crowd -- but they, apparently, like what they hear and see.

So any middle-of-the-road to liberal American should be raising hell about this guy.

And c'mon...once bitten, twice shy, right? Remember, this is the administration that sold the American people on the Iraq invasion and occupation, even though Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, had no WMDs, and was by no means an imminent threat to our national security. Mushroom clouds, indeed. They lied to our faces. And have done so many times since.

Clearly, Bush, Inc. only cares about appeasing their wealthy, white, conservative GOP business friends (they are the base that Rove caters to in all of Bush's policy, from tax-cutting, business deregulation, to the Kyoto treaty), so you can bet that Roberts (clearly a highly intelligent person, but a judge with only two year's experience on the bench) is their guy to help gut Roe v. Wade and everything else that is on the right wing's agenda for the Supreme Court.

God Save the Queen

Check out this completely damning analysis of Dubya's handling of Katrina in Newsweek ("How Bush Blew It") that reveals our President to be the detached, nasty bully that I've always suspected him of being:

"President Bush knew the storm and its consequences had been bad; but he didn't quite realize how bad.

The reality, say several aides who did not wish to be quoted because it might displease the president, did not really sink in until Thursday night. Some White House staffers were watching the evening news and thought the president needed to see the horrific reports coming out of New Orleans. Counselor Bartlett made up a DVD of the newscasts so Bush could see them in their entirety as he flew down to the Gulf Coast the next morning on Air Force One.

How this could be—how the president of the United States could have even less "situational awareness," as they say in the military, than the average American about the worst natural disaster in a century—is one of the more perplexing and troubling chapters in a story that, despite moments of heroism and acts of great generosity, ranks as a national disgrace.

President George W. Bush has always trusted his gut. He prides himself in ignoring the distracting chatter, the caterwauling of the media elites, the Washington political buzz machine. He has boasted that he doesn't read the papers. His doggedness is often admirable. It is easy for presidents to overreact to the noise around them.

But it is not clear what President Bush does read or watch, aside from the occasional biography and an hour or two of ESPN here and there. Bush can be petulant about dissent; he equates disagreement with disloyalty. After five years in office, he is surrounded largely by people who agree with him. Bush can ask tough questions, but it's mostly a one-way street. Most presidents keep a devil's advocate around. Lyndon Johnson had George Ball on Vietnam; President Ronald Reagan and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, grudgingly listened to the arguments of Budget Director Richard Darman, who told them what they didn't wish to hear: that they would have to raise taxes. When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no one to tell President Bush the plain truth: that the state and local governments had been overwhelmed, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was not up to the job and that the military, the only institution with the resources to cope, couldn't act without a declaration from the president overriding all other authority."

Red Skies

Over the weekend, I caught a rerun of the movie The Siege (the working title for this film, eerily enough, was "Against All Enemies" -- the title of Richard Clark's most damning book regarding the Bush Administration's complete failure to address the al Qaeda terrorist threat leading up to 9/11), which is about Islamic terrorists striking New York City after a terrorist leader is adbucted by U.S. Forces in Lebanon. Denzel Washington and Tony Shaloub play FBI agents hunting down several active terrorist cells in NYC with the aid of CIA spook Annette Benning, and in the process, an MTA bus, a Broadway theater, and the building at 26 Federal Plaza (which houses all sorts of U.S. government agencies) are blown up, along with thousands of fictional New Yorkers.

The makers of this film, which came out in 1998, were prescient enough to connect many of the dots that most of us were unaware of at the time (that the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was connected to the plot to blow up the United Nations, the George Washington Bridge, and Lincoln Tunnel, and the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, etc. through this world-wide network of Islamic terrorists, including al Qaeda) and foreshadows 9/11 (26 Federal Plaza is brought down by the terrorists, and there are scenes of police and firefighters combing through the massive wreckage for survivors), Abu Ghraib (a suspected terrorist is sexually humiliated, tortured, and then executed by the U.S. Military), and Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay (martial law is imposed in Brooklyn and all Arab men, regardless of their rights as citizens, are rounded up and illegally interred in the search for the last sleeper cell), etc.

I remember watching the movie back then and thinking how far-fetched and looney all of this seemed. They had caught the terrorists who had bombed the WTC -- they were just this lunatic fringe group that was now shut down (c'mon, the blind sheik seemed like something out of central casting!). The first bombing of the WTC was an aberration...these kind of attacks occurred in the Middle East and Europe, not New York City.

How far we've come since then...

* * * * *

On 9/11, as I watched the smoke pour out of the enormous gash in the North Tower from the 16th story of the Gramercy Park building I worked in, I clearly remember telling my wife on the phone that I was going to avoid subways and buses on my trip home because they might be attacked by suicide bombers (on that day, I had no trouble imagining the worst case scenario...). As I started my 3 1/2 mile walk home to the Upper East Side, I nervously eyed all of the tall buildings, scanning the skies for the planes I heard (which turned out to be the fighter jets scrambled to protect the city) that might slam into the skyscrapers all around me. Bizarrely, so many people seemed to be going about their regular business, buying cups of coffee, or heading back to the office after a smoke. I was racing home to protect my wife and kid, and to figure out a way to flee the city (we didn't, as the subways were shut down, the bridges/tunnels closed, and there was no easy or safe way out).

Around 42nd Street, I overheard someone mention that one of the towers had collapsed, and assumed that meant that the top quarter of the North Tower above where the plane had hit simply had fallen off. I mean, after all, the tower had withstood a huge jetliner crashing into it...

My mind resumed its review of all the possible targets the terrorists might hit -- and I planned the rest of my route home accordingly -- but I still couldn't believe that so many people were dying on this incredibly beautiful day.

Surrender

9/11 has been on my mind for some time now, well before this fourth anniversary that is upon us. Twice a week, I work in an office building on Wall Street near the East River that essentially has been abandoned by one of the major US banks -- their operations presumably have moved to a safer, less conspicuous locale in the suburbs, and they haven't made up their minds what to do with the property. To their credit, the bank donates some of their space to non-profits who could never dream of affording these kind of digs.

Fewer than a dozen people work on the tenth floor where I am, in a space meant for maybe two hundred. And a sense of loss is palpable every time I need to visit the men's room, which is on the opposite side of the floor -- the dark side that none of us work on. I pass by the empty kitchen and break room, and then dozens of abandoned cubicles, all stripped of anything personal that could reveal something about their former occupants. These workers didn't die, but clearly they're gone for good.

An Eastern European cleaning woman comes by at the end of each day to empty our small collection of garbage cans, and the mail is dropped off/picked up once a day by some nervous guy from the mailroom, but it feels like an afterthought, as so little comes in and goes out. The men's room hardly ever needs cleaning, so much so that the blue-green cleaning solution poured into the toilets makes rings on the porcelain from lack of use. My very own elevator always awaits me in the lobby in the morning, and I never have to wait more that a few seconds when I want to return to the street.

As much as I like working for this non-profit (which promotes education in developing countries), I'm always a little sad working here. The fear from that day in 2001 still hangs in the air. Unlike so many other parts of the city, life here has not made a comeback, but is frozen in time. I can't help but return to September 11, 2001 every time I'm here.