High Rise Safety Initiative

The ballot initiative’s supporters say that it isn’t only about Building 7 and the conflicting and unanswered questions about its collapse. The group wants to improve the safety and dependability of high rise buildings, both now and in the future. Their referendum asks that an investigation be launched into all high rise building collapses in New York City going back to September 11, 2001. The measure specifically excludes the twin towers, but not Building 7.

The three key provisions of the ballot initiative (from High Rise Safety NYC):

• Requires NYC Department of Buildings to investigate the causes of high-rise building collapses that occurred on, or any time after, September 11, 2001, excluding the collapse of WTC 1 and 2.

• Requires the Department of Buildings to prepare and make public a report detailing the results of each investigation.

• Establishes a 0.9% surcharge on construction permits issued by the Department of Buildings in order to fund the $1 million in estimated annual costs when an investigation is being conducted. This 0.9% surcharge would be lifted, however, if the High-Rise Safety Fund exceeds $3 million, and reinstituted if the High-Rise Safety Fund falls below $1 million.

Initiative’s next steps

While the organization has accomplished quite a feat in collecting 67,000 signatures and mobilizing so much grassroots support for a new investigation into the collapse of Building 7, there’s no guarantee the question will actually be printed on the ballot. Municipalities have numerous ways to exclude politically damaging or embarrassing ballot questions. But so far, the group is on course to satisfy all the ballot requirements, and then some.

A detailed report from the New York Post two weeks ago explained that there are still three more hurdles to jump before the initiative will be printed on the November ballot. First, the New York city council must vote to include it. If the council votes against the measure, the group can still apply to have the question printed by submitting 15,000 more signatures by September 4th. But as the reporter explains, city officials can still quickly sue to keep the voter referendum off the ballot if they want to.

The account explains how the same grassroots organization tried to get the question on the ballot in 2009 but failed to turn in enough valid petition signatures. This time around, the group has raised over $200,000 and hired petition circulators to guarantee they collect at least double the required number. The initiative’s leaders have also reportedly been lobbying NY city council members in an attempt to sway their vote in favor of a new investigation once the process moves into its arena.

RT News says 9/11 “probably” an inside job

A couple weeks ago, our friends at RT News created some controversy when the network broadcast and published its assertion that 9/11 was “probably” an inside job. Your author spent some time this morning trying to find the video clip of that broadcast. But we found it mysteriously removed from the first four seemingly independent news outlets that had previously published the video of the RT segment. Then, we finally found it still being rebroadcast by our friends over at Planet Infowars.

Since the sound quality is somewhat poor and our earphones are currently broken, instead of quoting the on-air segment from RT News, we’ll do one better and quote a simultaneous published report from RT’s Robert Bridge titled, ‘911 Reasons 9/11 was (probably) an Inside Job’. In his lengthy four-part series, Bridge introduces his meticulously compiled list of 911 reasons by describing the setting he was in on that moment in time nobody can forget. He was in a Moscow diner when the TV broadcast the attacks.

He says that as he watched in stunned silence with everyone else, two curious things stuck out. One was the appearance that nothing was left after the first tower fell but ground-up dust. The other was the way the US media instantly assigned blame to Osama bin Laden in only the first few hours and before the attacks had even concluded.

“As it turned out, those red flags that popped up in my mind concerning the events as explained by ‘the experts’ in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were shared by many other individuals around the world,” RT reporter Robert Bridge says, “In fact, the only things that really added up on 9/11, for those who were keeping score, were the incredible number of inconsistencies.”

For more information on New York’s ballot initiative, visit HighRiseSafetyNYC.org. To read the full four-part report from Robert Bridge, visit RT.com.