Petronas Twin Towers | Good Engineering

It was a breezy summer day; global warming was still in the future. The wind caressed the tall building, which didn’t bend under that soft pressure. On that Saturday morning, a little girl was trying to find her house in the concrete jungle far below the watching deck of the skyscraper. Her mother was petrified and failed to alert her daughter that a USAF bomber was approaching the building. This couldn’t be real.

At 9:40 AM Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr. hit the building with his B25 bomber. Very little damage was caused; the building closed for the rest of the weekend, but next Monday it was reopened almost as usual.

This isn’t a futuristic description eulogizing some avant-garde construction technology. It happened on July 28, 1945. The victim was the Empire State Building in New York, which survived even the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The last fell on September 11, 2001.

Inaugurated in 1998, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, had become one of the most recognized – and tallest – buildings of the world. The elegant and graceful towers have more in common with the Empire State than with the WTC, despite their being taller than both. Both were constructed with solid reinforced concrete; in sharp contrast, most American skyscrapers constructed since the second half of the 20th Century use a variety of construction techniques based on a combination of light frames and unsafe balancing systems barely capable of keeping the building upright under normal conditions of use. Beating any of these skyscrapers with a baseball bat may lead to serious damage to the building framework. On September 11, 2001, we all saw American engineers had used a bad design for the towers. Good engineers prevent even the improbable.

It could be easily dismissed as a bad school of enginery that took over the American society. Sadly, there is more than that. The fact the replacing tower – ironically known as “One World Trade Centre” – is being built using the same crazed principles of its twin predecessors is another sign something systemic is wrong in America. Americas seemed to have learned nothing from the event – at least on its architectural angles.

World Trade Center | Bad Engineering

Between Recessions and Plane Crashes

At least in MBA classes, economy is presented as a well established science, with substantial masses of scientific research supporting its main theories. I remember a Scottish professor lucidly explaining the reason for the cycles we all witness in western economies. The word “cycles” is a soft phrasing for periodical crashes. Even if sticking only to America – the Light of the Free World according to some naive souls – the list of crashes is amazing:

1819 – Economic recession with bank failures
1837 – Economic recession with bank failures; a 5 yr depression ensued
1857 – USA economic recession with bank failures
1873 – Economic recession with bank failures, known the Long Depression
1893 – Collapse of railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures
1896 - An acute economic depression precipitated by a drop in silver reserves and market concerns on the effects it would have on the gold standard
1901 – Crashing of the New York Stock Exchange
1907 – Economic recession with bank failures
1929 - Wall Street Crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression – the largest and most important economic depression in the 20th century
1973 - Oil prices soared causing the 1973–1974 stock market crash
1987 – Black Monday, the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history
1989–91 – Savings & Loan crisis
2001 – Bursting of dot-com bubble – internet companies crashed
2007–10 – Financial crisis followed by recession
This is just a partial list. Economists understand perfectly well the reasons for these failures; yet, they fail avoiding them. Is that another example of a “wrong school taking over society?” As claimed with architecture, that doesn’t make much sense.

In fact, avoiding the crashes is simple. Don’t steal from the future; use your own resources and not expensive loans; systemic debts and deficits are wrong. Yet, as with the Twin Towers, the economic phoenixes emerging from the ruins are invariably as sick as their predecessors. Curious, isn’t it?

No less curious is a similar periodicity in the military. I am almost tempted to oversimplify American history: “First they killed the Native Americans, now they are after the rest of us.” It’s tempting, but I won’t do that, it wouldn’t be fair toward this self-righteous regime. Fact is that American industry is based on the development and building of killing machines. America’s growths depends thus on an ongoing state of war. Most American wars were wars of choice, and thus unacceptable. That’s true from the Vietnam War (known as the “American War” in Vietnam) to the pinnacle of human military history: the Brave and Honorable Conquest of Grenada. The attack on Iraq was based on proven lies; the attack on Afghanistan was based on unproven allegations. The list goes on.

Oligarchy

In The Cross of Bethlehem, I describe a close encounter I had with oligarchy at work. I witnessed how Dow Chemical and Gadot Gadot – Israel’s main chemical port – manipulated the market, creating an illegitimate oligarchy. What unifies all these events is not their sharing bad schools of specialists, or the copying of incompetence but their working for the financial benefits of oligarchs. Periodical crashes, disasters, economic deals and wars allow enormous profits for those in the know.

There is nothing real new here. Two millennia ago we were taught that “…I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.” (Jesus in Matthew 7:24-25). America was built on bad foundations – be it architectural, financial or military ones – and we all are hit by its falling debris. Can this recurring terrorism be fixed? It’s high time for you – The People – to speak again!

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