Among the most popular genres marketed to the youth-oriented Cineplex world is the disaster film. The natural disasters range from tornadoes, volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor strikes to luxury liners capsizing from either a rogue wave or an iceberg. The plot is dictated by the necessity of survival and generally involves a strong male lead trying to unite with a daughter or wife who he has become separated from after the disaster strikes. Such films naturally require a major investment in special effects or computer graphics since that’s the only way to depict New York City being destroyed by a flood of biblical proportions or a fireball produced by a humongous rock from outer space striking the planet.
Hollywood generally dumbs down such films since they are intended to scare you like a roller coaster ride rather than make you think. When Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox produced “The Day After Tomorrow”, they wanted you to sit at the edge of your chair hoping that the paleoclimatologist dad (Dennis Quaid) would somehow make it across thousands of miles of ice produced by climate change to reach and rescue his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) holed up in the public library on 42nd street. Do you think that the film had much to say about how the new ice age happened? Don’t be silly.
Three years ago, I saw “The Wave”, a Norwegian film about how rockslides created devastating tsunamis twice in the twentieth century in the village of Tajford. The first tsunami occurred in 1905, killing 60 people. Thirty-one years later, another 74 lost their lives from the same natural disaster. Considering the fact that Norway’s population was only 2.5 million in 1905, the first tsunami would have killed the equivalent of about 7,000 people in the USA today.
Roar Uthaug, the director of “The Wave” (Bølgen), who admits to being a fan of Hollywood films like “Twister” and “Armageddon”, decided to make his own such film but on a micro-budget probably proportionate to the percentage difference in population between Norway and the USA. Unlike “Twister” or “Armageddon”, “The Wave” played in an arthouse in New York. Even if a teen audience would have loved a dubbed version of “The Wave”, subtitles are a show-stopper for most Americans, including those with Ph.D.’s. Speaking for myself, dubbing is more painful than a toothache.
Although I loved “The Wave”, I didn’t bother reviewing it—mostly because it was a bit far afield from my usual beat. If I had written a review, it might have read something like what Anthony Lane wrote for the New Yorker but in plainer language:
You would hope that a Norwegian disaster film would take place on a fjord, and so it does. The director’s name is Roar Uthaug, and that, too, fulfills all expectations. Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) is a geologist, on his final shift at the fjord; he and his wife (Ane Dahl Torp) and their children are packing up and preparing to move to the city. A nearby mountain chooses this day—of all days!—to crack and slide into the water. This causes a tsunami, which surges toward the town where the family lives; other souls are in equal danger, but they matter less. In short, far from wriggling free of the standard tropes of Hollywood catastrophe, Uthaug embraces them eagerly, right down to the hero’s kids—a teen-age boy, stirred to moody heroics, and a Teddy-bear-clutching young girl. As for fleeing the flood, they naturally have ten minutes to reach high ground. (Kristian, ever thorough, sets his watch.) Yet the movie works; the setting feels grandly unfamiliar, and the aftermath of the wave, with its elemental mix of water and fire, seems like a plausible vision of Hell. In Norwegian.
This time around, I will not neglect reviewing the sequel to “The Wave”, this time directed by John Andreas Andersen but featuring the geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) and his family once again. As should be obvious from the title, “The Quake” (Skjelvet), is about an earthquake pulverizing Oslo. There was an earthquake in 1904 that damaged some buildings but resulted in no fatalities (as far as I can determine.) Some geologists warn that conditions exist for producing a “severe” earthquake but it is safe to say that the one depicted through CGI in “The Quake” is far more devastating than any than that the worst earthquake has ever produced. It is a movie after all.
In the sequel, the family has disintegrated. Kristian has remained in Geiranger, the town that suffered the tsunami, while his wife and two children have relocated to Oslo. He appears to be a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder, holed up in his house pasting articles about the disaster in an upstairs room. When his young daughter Julia comes for a visit, she asks him what he is up to in this room and he lacks the presence of mind to give her a proper answer. The next day, he cuts her visit short and puts her back on the boat to Oslo.
A few days later, he receives a packet of articles from a fellow geologist indicating that a major earthquake is in the works. Just after putting the package in the mail, the colleague dies in a cave-in in a tunnel underneath a fjord leading into Oslo. Kristian then contacts the man’s daughter who gives him free rein to examine the geologist’s office where he finds convincing evidence that a “big one” is about to hit Oslo.
A desperate Kristian meets with the chief geologist for the government who warns Kristian about going overboard. Meeting indifference everywhere he goes, including from his own family, he begins to resemble Jack Lemmon’s character in “China Syndrome”.
When the earthquake hits, he finds himself in the same 34-story office building as his wife and daughter Julia, where he embarks on a rescue mission that is as hair-raising as I have seen in a movie since that scene in “Wages of Fear” when Yves Montand attempts to maneuver a truck filled with nitroglycerine off a rickety wooden platform on a mountain ledge.
“The Quake” opens on Friday at selected theaters but, fortunately, on VOD as well. Information on its availability is at the film’s website. As for “The Wave”, it is available on Amazon Prime and other VOD platforms as well.
In today’s NY Times, there is a report on a limousine company that was responsible for the death of 20 people in upstate NY–the driver, 17 passengers and two pedestrians. The first paragraph: “A driver with an improper license. A limousine company with a trail of failed inspections and ties to a scheme to illegally obtain driver’s licenses. And a limousine that had also been deemed unsafe.”
We learn that owner of the limousine company was an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain who participated in stings and who was known to his victims as “Malik”.
Mr. Hussain, the man whose name seems to be associated with the limousine company, posed as a wealthy Muslim radical and was the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque. Six years later, Mr. Hussain, who posed as a terrorist, played a key role in the government’s case in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Bronx.
He became an F.B.I. informant after being charged in 2002 with a scheme that involved taking money to illegally help people in the Albany area get driver’s licenses.
Shahed Hussain first came to my attention in 2009 when I was compiling a dossier on FBI entrapment.
His first sting occurred in 2004 as mentioned above. I referred to a NY Times article from 2006 that identified Shahed Hussain’s role in Albany:
The New York Times, October 11, 2006
2 Albany Men Are Convicted In Missile Sting
By MICHAEL WILSON; Dennis Gaffney contributed reporting.
A federal jury on Tuesday convicted two Muslim immigrants of participating in a plot with a man who said he was helping plan a missile attack on a Pakistani diplomat in New York City in 2004.
The man to whom the immigrants were linked was actually an informant working with the F.B.I. in a sting operation against the two defendants, Yassin M. Aref, 36, an Iraqi refugee and the imam at an Albany mosque, and Mohammed M. Hossain, 51, a Bangladeshi immigrant and the owner of a pizzeria here. The gestation of the case, with the government’s informant ingratiating himself with the men and initiating all the conversations about a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, led to claims of entrapment from Mr. Hossain’s lawyers during the three-week trial in Federal District Court.
The case began when the undercover informant, Shahed Hussain, who used the name ”Malik,” introduced himself to Mr. Hossain at the Little Italy Pizzeria on Central Avenue in July 2003, bringing gifts for the restaurateur’s children, according to testimony. The two became friends, and the informant offered to lend Mr. Hossain $50,000 for improvements to the pizzeria. At later meetings, Mr. Hussain testified that he told Mr. Hossain that the money he was going to lend to him came from the sale of a missile launcher that would be used to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York.
In reality, there never was a plot. In one meeting, captured on a video that was played at the trial, the informant showed Mr. Hossain a launcher. The restaurateur said he had only seen such a weapon on television, and he asked if it was legal, and the informant replied, ”What is legal in this world?”
This was not the last of Hussain’s dirty tricks. Three years later he conned four very marginal men into staging attacks on Jews that would help bolster the “war on terror” hysteria of those days. The NY Times reported on May 23, 2009:
The members of the mosque now believe that Maqsood was the government informant at the center of the case involving four men from Newburgh arrested and charged this week with having plotted to explode bombs at Jewish centers in New York City. The government has said that the four men, several of whom visited the mosque in Newburgh and all of whom spent time in prison, were eager to kill Jews, and prosecutors charged that they had actually gone so far as to plant what they believed to be bombs on the streets of New York, an act the F.B.I. captured on videotape.
It turns out that Maqsood was none other than the owner of the limousine company that now has the blood of 20 people on his hands:
The informant was not identified in court papers unsealed on Wednesday in Manhattan. But according to a person briefed on the case, the informant is Shahed Hussain, the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque.
Lawyers for those men argued that Mr. Hussain, who had posed as a wealthy Muslim radical, had entrapped their clients in an ultimately fictional plot to kill a Pakistani diplomat with a missile. But a federal jury convicted the two men, and they were sentenced to 15 years in prison.
HBO made a very good documentary about the second sting that I reviewed in 2014. I stated:
Five years ago I posted a Dossier on FBI entrapment in “war on terror” prompted by what had happened to four men in Newburgh who were arrested by the FBI for their alleged role in a plot to attack Riverdale synagogues and fire a missile at airplanes on the Stewart Air Force base tarmac. The NY Times displayed some skepticism about the arrest. An FBI agent provocateur had no luck recruiting men from a local mosque who regarded him as suspicious. Instead he approached someone who had only a fleeting connection to the mosque and who was more interested in a quick buck than in jihad. In claiming that the four men were Islamic terrorists, the District Attorney did not let the facts get in the way:
Law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday. Mr. Payen reported himself to be Catholic during his 15-month prison sentence that ended in 2005, according to a state corrections official. Mr. Cromitie and Onta Williams both identified themselves as Baptists in prison records, although Mr. Cromitie changed his listed religion to Muslim upon his last two incarcerations; David Williams reported no religious affiliation.
Now, five years after their arrest and five years into their 25-year sentences, HBO has begun airing a documentary titled “The Newburgh Sting” that is both a stunning exposé of the entrapment but a timely warning to all people involved in social struggles to maintain a watchful eye against those who urge “more revolutionary” actions such as planting bombs. From the looks of things, they are likely to be FBI operatives.
Much of the film consists of footage that was recorded by hidden FBI cameras to make its case. There is something both pathetic and comic about the discussions that take place between the “brains” behind the conspiracy and his unwitting dupes. Sadly, the four men, who are not very bright, show little appetite for killing anybody and are far more interested in talking about what they are going to do with the money they make. As happens universally in such cases, there was less than a zero possibility that any of them would have gotten involved in such a plot if the FBI had not set the gears in motion, particularly a Haitian youth who was barely capable of taking care of himself even if he had a bankroll. The NY Times reported:
Payen, described as a nervous, quiet sort who took medication for schizophrenia or a bi-polar disorder, was unemployed and living in squalor in Newburgh. His last arrest, in 2002, was for assault, after he drove around the Rockland County village of Monsey, firing a BB gun out of the window — striking two teens — and snatching two purses. A friend who visited Mr. Payen’s apartment on Thursday said it contained bottles of urine, and raw chicken on the stovetop.
For those of you who are HBO subscribers, you are probably aware that it has supplanted PBS as a primary source of cutting edge documentaries. It broke the story on the West Memphis Satanic Cult miscarriage of justice and is continuing in that vein with “The Newburgh Sting”.
Fortunately, you can now see the HBO documentary on YouTube:
I hope some radical filmmaker can make a new film that connects the dots between this scumbag’s entrapment operations and his homicidal limousine business. It will illustrate how FBI stings and wanton disregard for safety regulations are driven by the same deadly logic that puts the national security state and the sorry state of consumer protection on the same footing.
Like many urban-based universities, Miami’s Florida International University had a tendency to expand. With more than 50,000 enrolled undergraduate students—many of whom are Cuban-American—it is the fourth largest in the USA. In recent years, expansion took place geographically as well. After more than 4,000 students found housing on the other side of an 7-lane highway to the north of the main campus, the school decided to build a bridge across it. Since the highway was a major artery in Miami, the school decided to use Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) that avoided the detours that would have blocked the flow of the city’s commercial lifeblood. In ABC, the first step is to build the bridge on a remote construction site and then transport it to the destination where it will be installed in a day or two at most.
Here is the breathless come-on to investors about the benefits the bridge will bring:
Here is the celebratory inauguration of the installed bridge on March 10th:
And here is its collapse on March 15th that left 6 people in the cars beneath the 950 tons of concrete dead:
As it happens, FIU was not only enthusiastic about this particular application of Accelerated Bridge Construction but also about ABC in general, so much so that it created a department devoted to the technology (https://abc-utc.fiu.edu/) in 2010 missioned to “reduce the societal costs of bridge construction by reducing the duration of work zones, focusing special attention on preservation, service life, construction costs, education of the profession, and development of a next-generation workforce fully equipped with ABC knowledge.”
Two days before it collapsed, the lead engineer with the Figg Bridge Group, one of the two principal construction companies on the project left a voice mail indicating that he saw a crack in the bridge with an employee of the Florida Department of Transportation, who was out of the office and did not hear the voice mail until after the bridge had collapsed. It is not clear that anything would have been done had he been in the office since the voice mail did not sound a particularly urgent note.
While the Florida Department of Transportation was out of the loop, FIU itself was not. At a meeting at 9am on March 15th between Figg employees, including the lead engineer, and school administrators, they were told that “that there were no safety concerns and the crack did not compromise the structural integrity of the bridge.” A couple of hours later the bridge would come crashing down.
This was not the first time Figg had supervised the construction of a collapsing bridge. In 2012, there was an accident that fortunately did not involve motorists or pedestrians beneath even though four workers suffered minor injuries. The company paid a miniscule fine and moved on.
Required by state law to undergo an independent review of the project, Figg selected the Louis Berger Group, an engineering firm that lacked pre-qualification credentials from the Florida Department of Transportation. A November 5th 2010 NY Times article by James Risen, however, suggested that this firm was especially pre-qualified to scam the people that hired it:
A New Jersey-based construction and engineering company has been hit with the largest fines ever imposed on a contractor working in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, after a whistle-blower revealed that the company had been overbilling the government.
The company, the Louis Berger Group, based in Morristown, N.J., will pay $18.7 million in criminal penalties and $50.6 million in civil penalties for overbilling the United States Agency for International Development for work in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan. As part of the civil agreement, the company will pay $14.2 million of the civil penalty in the next 30 days and the balance over the next four years.
Figg’s partner on the project was Munilla Construction Management, a firm whose vice-president Pedro Munilla is a former attorney who was disbarred in 2001 for violating trust accounts, which conceivably might have meant conning his clients in the same way the Louis Berger Group conned tax-payers (not to say that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was not a con job to begin with.)
Pedro Munilla is a typical construction company wheeler-and-dealer. Last year he met with a a Chinese investor looking for U.S. acquisitions. Guess who was advising the investor: Paul Manafort. It’s a small world when corruption is involved. Munilla runs the firm with his four brothers who as might be expected were enthusiastic about Donald Trump. Representing the brothers, Pedro Munilla had a meeting last June with Vice President Mike Pence to review the administration’s Cuba policies. The five brothers have ponied up more than $100,000 to the anti-Castro U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee, whose chief Mauricio Claver-Carone blogs at Huffington Post for what that’s worth.
The Munillas have also contributed heavily to Republican Party politicians both in Florida and in Congress. This kind of influence-peddling must have opened doors for a a lucrative $63.5 million contract from the Defense Department in 2016 to build a school on the U.S.-controlled Guantánamo Naval Base in eastern Cuba.
Locally, their payoffs to politicians has been worth it as well. In 2012 Miami-Dade Commissioner Bruno Barreiro voted to award a $25 million contract to Munilla for a test track for Metrorail cars while renting office space from the firm’s owners, county records show. Four of the brothers contributed the maximum campaign donation of $500 each to Barreiro, who was won his commission seat for a fifth time.
All of the brothers are FIU graduates so everything came together from a military-industrial-academic complex standpoint.
The Miami Herald, which has provided outstanding reporting on the bridge collapse, ran down the Munilla brothers’ record, which is as shoddy as Pedro Munilla’s legal career:
MCM construction sites, meanwhile, have been inspected eight times by the federal government since 2013 and fined on four occasions for violations worth more than $50,000. The company has also faced a slew of standard negligence and personal liability cases — typical in the industry. A contractual dispute with a subcontractor that walked off the job resulted in a $143,000 judgment against MCM; the subcontractor cited safety issues with the project, a $13.5 million bridge reconstructing project on Red Road.
Court documents from the lawsuit show that Southeastern Engineering Contractors left the job, citing structural problems and “arguable collapse” at the worksite because of the “failure of temporary sheet piles on the south bend of the site.” Attempts to reach attorneys representing both sides in that case were unsuccessful, as were efforts to reach principal Pedro Munilla by cellphone.
This entire incident manages to touch all bases of the rotting capitalist system in the USA, both economically and politically.
To start with, what kind of university establishes a department with a single focus on Accelerated Bridge Construction? Isn’t a university supposed to provide general engineering courses that prepare a student for a career? The department chair is Atorod Azizinamini, who was honored by the Obama White House as a Champion of Change in 2015. Given the need to construct new bridges across the USA using a time-saving technology, including the replacement of the Tappan Zee bridge recently, you can understand why the big bourgeoisie would be thrilled by his innovation even if it just killed six people “accidentally”. After all, that’s the price of progress. Btw, remind me to not use the NY State Thruway the next time I go up to the Catskills since it crosses the Tappan Zee.
It also illustrates how influence-peddling can undermine the economic fabric of capitalist society itself even if benefits a particular corporation. Hasn’t this been the Achilles Heel of capitalism all along? Despite the libertarian, free market precepts shared by Republicans and Democrats alike (except for an outlier like Bernie Sanders), everybody knows that politicians are bought and sold. In a review of the Democrats who voted for a relaxation of the Dodd-Frank rules, it turned out that According to the Financial Times, the 12 Democrats behind the Crapo bill (aptly named after Mike Crapo, the Republican Senator who introduced it) receive a substantial percentage of their campaign donations from banks with just under $50 billion in assets—those, in other words, who will benefit from this deregulation.
Finally, it demonstrates that profits come before people. When shady construction companies collaborate with a university that serves as a vocational school for the technology they are utilizing and ignore obvious signs that peoples’ lives are endangered, that’s about as clear a sign as you will get about the decadence of this crumbling system.
Update from a Florida comrade:
From a union worker, explaining how “right to work” results in incompetent workmanship; in the recent tragic case in Florida, it got people killed:
For 30 plus years. I worked as a Concrete Form Carpenter. The media keeps saying they were doing a stress test when the bridge went down . The bridge deck was a cable stay deck instead of using Rebar, they used cables. So after the concrete is poured the cables are pulled tight. So these Idiots waited till the concrete was rock hard. When they pulled the cables they busted through the bottom deck. So down she goes.
The cables should been tightened before the rock turned hard but when the concrete was wet right after it was poured. I have worked in Florida, the companies hire anyone to work construction . The super down to the laborer. Unskilled people doing skilled labor. This is a right to work state.
Union Busting. Florida is a right to work state. No training. Crane Operators are not required have proof of any experience. It is a mess here. That is why I moved back to NY.
I have done bridge decks in the past. In Connecticut and New York state. I have never heard of a stress test. The media should inform them selves before issuing statements like that. They fucked up the cables should have been tightened before the concrete set up. When it is wet, a subcontractor should have been on site right after the pour and pulled the cables.
Before every concrete pour, the concrete is tested for water content and temp is taken. And core samples are taken to a lab. Were they are put in a press to test for strength. These idiots should have known better but here in Florida it is a right to work state. No Unions so the work force is unskilled. The contractors will hire anyone with a pulse.
I was trained by The United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Florida is a right to work state. No Unions, zero trained workforce. Idiots running these job sites all to save a dollar.
Between 1872 and 1882, Frederick Engels worked on a book titled “The Dialectics of Nature” that sought to apply Marxist dialectics to the natural world. Although it was never completed and is filled with dated ideas about science, it is a work that has earned the respect of some of the most important scientists on the left such as Stephen Jay Gould who praised its best known chapter that was issued separately as a pamphlet—The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. Long before people such as Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson were laying the groundwork for the eco-socialism of today, Engels anticipated the kind of contradictions that have led to three disastrous hurricanes: Katrina, Sandy and now Harvey. Engels wrote:
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.
If you understand that the prairies surrounding Houston, the wetlands to the south of New Orleans and the brush that grew across the coastline around greater New York were closely related to the forests of the earliest class societies that Engels refers to, you will realize that “each victory” will bring us closer to the ultimate defeat of civilization itself. Just consider the words that follow those above:
When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons.
Furious torrents. Are there any words better matched to the pictures of Houston seen on television every night?
