The Great Darkness

ERICH FOLLATH, HANS HOYNG, GERD ROSENKRANZ, HILMAR SCHMUNDT, GERHARD SPÖRL

Der Spiegel (Germany) i.34, 18aug03

America between appearance and reality. The collapse of the power grid in the Northeast revealed the weaknesses of the superpower's infrastructure. Although New Yorkers showed composure, they had difficulty concealing their fears of an ongoing vulnerability.

Even on satellite images, New York is still visible as a glowing star, and the northeast coast of the United States as an almost continuous sea of lights. This is a place where progress is concentrated. It contains the beating heart of capitalism, the world's largest stock exchange on Wall Street in Manhattan. No other region in the world shines more brightly than America's biggest city - normally. Last Thursday, at 4:11 p.m., this global metropolis' heartbeat faltered, as the collapse of the power grid in the largest blackout in New York's history revealed a deep vulnerability, exposing the weaknesses of the world's sole remaining superpower. The same thought - not another time, not again, not me - suddenly passed through thousands upon thousands of minds, the minds of hordes of office workers making their way through the narrow, dark stairwells of New York office towers, and of the tens of thousands who were suddenly stuck in the subway deep beneath Manhattan, and who didn't want to get out, since they had no idea what was going on outside. Had terrorists crashed planes into a few skyscrapers again, as they did on September 11, 2001?

People in the other major cities between Canada and New Jersey, between Ohio and Connecticut, who were experiencing the same power outage as the metropolis on the Hudson, were tormented by the same fear. Jenny Goldberg, the manager of a downtown hospital in Toledo, Ohio, later said that the first thought on her mind when the lights went out was: "terrorists."

"When we heard that several cities had been affected," says James Henken, who was suddenly sitting in the dark in his art museum in Cleveland, "we all thought it was another terrorist attack."

What was going on outside? What was happening? The officers on duty at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Cheyenne, Wyoming, scanned their radar screens for aircraft that may have been hijacked en route to their destinations. F-16 fighter jets took off from bases along the Atlantic coast, ready to shoot down airliners hijacked by terrorists, if necessary.

At the CIA and the National Security Agency, the government's enormous surveillance machine, analysts feverishly reviewed their reports from the preceding days. They thought they might have somehow missed concealed or encoded hints of a day X, and that a clueless America was once again at the mercy of terrorists. At the Defense Department, the officials on duty prepared themselves for requests for troops by New York City and other major cities to suppress panic before it could get out of hand.

The New York Police Department also assumed, as a precaution, that Osama bin Laden had struck again. The command center that had been established for such situations after September 11, 2001 immediately deployed heavily armed teams to bridges and tunnels, as well as to the Statue of Liberty and other highly symbolic danger zones.

"WE ALL THOUGHT IT WAS ANOTHER TERRORIST ATTACK." But it was not an attack. Apparently, it was simply a routine catastrophe in which chaos quickly set in. It was the day on which the superpower's nerve center was crippled within seconds. The entire northeast of the United States, an area more than half as big as Germany.

Within three minutes, nine nuclear power plans and twelve conventional power plants automatically shut themselves down. Production came to a halt at the major auto production plants in Detroit. Fifty million Americans and Canadians were forced to make do, on this hot August day, without air conditioners, refrigerators, microwave ovens, computers and TVs. It was the biggest blackout mankind has ever experienced.

When the computers of the information elite in Manhattan shut down, tens of thousands of people flowed from their offices into the open air of a summer afternoon. Like a horde of ants, commuters walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge and other bridges, or they crowded into overfilled buses because the blackout had shut down the city's trains and subways. At the entrance to the completely clogged Holland Tunnel, the eye of the needle into New Jersey, Irvin Acevedo sat down on the hood of his car, put his arm around his 13-year-old son, and watched as the city systematically fell apart: "We're stuck here. I drove for four blocks. That took me two hours."

Thousands of people crowded onto the piers on the Hudson River and pushed their way onto the ferries. On the other side of the river, in New Jersey, Governor James Greevey ordered hundreds of buses to the piers to pick up passengers from Manhattan and move them along as quickly as smoothly as possible. A subway train became stuck in the middle of a tunnel under the East River, which separates Manhattan from the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. It sat there for two hours before a diesel locomotive towed it back to Pennsylvania Station by a diesel locomotive. The passengers, who were beginning to lose oxygen in the hot train, removed excess clothing but remained remarkable calm.

SENATOR CLINTON PRAISED THE CITIZENS OF THE CITY. New York's three airports closed down for a few hours because their backup generators couldn't power enough light to enable passengers to get to planes and to ensure safe takeoffs and landings. Cell phones stopped working, because too many people were trying to reach their loved ones at the same time to find out where they were and whether they would make it home. Long lines formed at phone booths, the remnants of a different communications era. Hospital emergency rooms were packed with people suffering from the heat. It took a while before most people received the information that had already been issued 45 minutes after the blackout began by the CIA, the FBI, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the White House in an effort to calm the public, and that was later confirmed by President George W. Bush, who was travelling in California at the time: it was not an attack, not an act of terrorism, not another September 11, 2001.

All politicians whose job was to deal with this technological disaster were practically giddy with relief upon discovering that their worst fears had not come to pass. Mayor Bloomberg gave his citizens good advice, telling them to walk home and drink lots of water to deal with the heat, and not to forget their pets. Governor George Pataki and Senator Hillary Clinton praised the citizens of this city, who remained calm instead of succumbing to hysteria. In fact, the New Yorkers had once again spontaneously demonstrated their admirable sense of community. Pedestrians positioned themselves on the street and directed traffic at intersections where traffic lights were out. Ice cream vendors sold their wares at half-price before they melted away. Hotels distributed blankets to people who were stranded and were forced to spend the night in Times Square. On Broadway, New Yorkers transformed the night without lights into a happening. With only a few exceptions, there was no looting in a city that suddenly seemed so vulnerable to crime. This was not the case in the Canadian city of Ottawa, 550 kilometers to the north.

On Thursday night, 10,000 police officers patrolled New York's dark streets, while 3,000 firefighters swarmed across the city. They only had to put out 60 fires, most caused by candles that had fallen over. Other firefighters helped free 800 people who were stuck in elevators. 80,000 calls were made to 911, more than twice as many as usual.

At night, the man who became a symbol of New York's moral strength on September 11, 2001, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, who now commands astronomical fees as a consultant to global corporations, was also to be seen on the city's streets. This is the way he knows his city, he said, poetically moved: full of patience, prudence and inner calm, a model for America.

But the initially impressive calmness of New Yorkers, later followed by probing questions and growing criticism, couldn't change the fact that America's uncertainty since Nine/Eleven, its awareness of its tremendous vulnerability, had returned.

Once again, it had become evident that the masters of the world can be crippled in the most grotesquely simple of ways. Just as the terrorists of September 11th required little more than simple box cutters to hijack airplanes, what is now presumed to have been a power plant failure that triggered a chain reaction was capable of bringing everything in the northeastern portion of this superpower that depends on electricity to a grinding halt. It was a throwback to the days of harmonious coexistence in candlelight.

Osama bin Laden prophesied that Americans would "never again dream or know or taste security or safety." Without having anything to do with it, the great villain seemed to have come a little closer to his goal again late last week. Of all days, this was the day on which one of bin Laden's most important supporters, an Indonesian man named Hambali, was arrested near Bangkok. And of all days, this was the day on which US President George W. Bush reiterated his unwillingness to allow the United Nations to play a greater role in Baghdad, while at the same being forced to ask for greater international support in bringing peace to Iraq. Angst - it's a German word the Americans have incorporated into their own language. These days, it appears more and more frequently in lead stories in the press. Angst, a word with such strong associations that it's often printed in italics, describes an emotional state imbued with a lack of faith in the future. The term also describes a nervous, fidgety, insecure nation - "a jittery nation."

Now this basic emotion has truly become part of the Americans' self-image. Until recently, an optimistic and dynamic forward-looking attitude was an essential part of the pragmatic Protestantism that unifies the descendants of Quakers, Puritans and Methodists in "God's Own Country." We Americans can get things done, no one can stand in our way, we accomplish whatever we take on. USA - Number One. USA - the world's only remaining superpower, the country that tells the rest of the world what to do, in every respect. In the opinion of California political scientist Chalmers Johnson, "Washington's political elite, arrogant, supercilious, self-confident, fancies itself in the role of a New Rome."

All of this because of a faulty fuse? Is it that easy to tie down the muscle-bound Gulliver, to cripple his massive force? What can terrorists learn from this amazingly banal weakness of the hated USA?

"WASHINGTON'S POLITICAL ELITE FANCIES ITSELF IN THE ROLE OF A NEW ROME." In Europe, especially in the "old" part bordering the "new" NATO member states of Eastern Europe, the part reviled by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, people were rubbing their eyes in disbelief. This could not be true. The Americans, who swagger their way through international politics to the point of hubris, who have developed all kinds of high-tech weapons - and they can't even provide electricity to a large portion of their population? Oh America, are you truly better off than the rest of us? At first glance, the triumphant Americans, who had proudly patted themselves on the back in May after their lightning victory over Saddam Hussein's army and after US forces occupied Iraq, seemed to have every argument on their side.

At probably no other time in the history of mankind has one country been so dominant with its politics, its tanks and its products as the United States is today. With only 4.5 percent of the world's population, it is responsible for 31 percent of total economic output on this planet. It spends more on defense than the next 20 countries combined. It employs a healthy share of the world's Nobel prize winners in its elite universities. It floods the world with "culture products" like Big Macs, "Baywatch" and Beyoncé's pop songs. And the angry young people of the Third World often wear "stone-washed Levis" while they're busy burning the American flag and condemning "Coca Cola colonization."

Patriotic American media outlets like Fox News constantly try to impress upon Americans just how great their technological advantage is over the rest of the world. And this is certainly true in some areas. US laboratories, unfettered by European misgivings, create the most advanced genetically modified varieties of wheat, the most daring human reproductive technologies, the most modern satellites. Most of all, however, American scientists are constantly building newer weapons. At the bidding of the Pentagon, they're studying an entirely new species of nuclear weapons designed to be used against heavily fortified underground command centers, weapons that could erase the distinctions between conventional and nuclear warfare.

Some America experts believe, however, that it is precisely this concentration on a few high-tech products, especially in the field of weapons technology, that also carries the seed of decline. That's because America has long since ceased to develop innovative television sets or truly high-quality automobiles. Even the Boeing Corporation, long the world's leading aircraft manufacturer, has fallen behind Airbus.

"The US' problem is creeping de-industrialization," said French political scientist Emmanuel Todd, author of the bestseller " Weltmacht USA - Ein Nachruf" (Superpower USA. An Obituary.), in an interview with Der Spiegel in March. "European (civil) industrial production surpasses that of the United States by far, even in areas of peak technology. The American society consumes more than it can produce." Others, like American historian Paul Kennedy ("The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers"), see "imperial over-extension" as the greatest risk to the United States. Even such an enormous and strong power like the United States, says Kennedy, lacks the capacity to deploy its troops to dozens of hot spots throughout the world - from Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia to, possibly, Iran and North Korea in the future. In light of its tremendous power, Washington may currently find its unipolar world rather comfortable. In Kennedy's opinion, however, signs of a possible US decline are everywhere.

In addition to its imperial over-extension and the enormous federal deficit (this year's record deficit amounts to 455 billion dollars), the fact that the giant is standing on shaky ground also seems to be a result of the Bush administration's priorities. It sets little store in "soft power," in the generally difficult and consistently non-spectacular improvement of the infrastructure and the standard of living among large segments of the population, both in the United States and in "colonies" controlled by Washington, particularly Iraq.

The Americans constantly claim that their goal is to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. In truth, however, all the Americans are doing is asserting their military control. All they are creating, with their rude manner and their obvious inability to make the especially ailing power supply in Iraq one of their top priorities, are new enemies, enemies they will be forced to fight again. After a visit to Baghdad last week, Thomas L. Friedmann, chief commentator of the New York Times, urgently called for new objectives. "What's the best way to display our might in Iraq? Let's start with the power supply."

One can't help but draw parallels between the blackouts in Baghdad and on the US east coast. To date, the Americans have not even been able to bring the power supply back up to prewar levels, which were already completely inadequate. At temperatures well in excess of 40 degrees Centigrade (104 degree Fahrenheit), air-conditioning often exists only in the generator-driven US facilities. Iraqi employees spend hours waiting in the scorching sun in front of the main US headquarters building, a "humiliation," says Friedmann. It certainly comes as no surprise that Baghdad residents accustomed to constant blackouts ridiculed the great darkness in New York via CNN, saying that they'd be glad to give the spoiled Americans a few survival tips. Others claimed that the "hand of God" was involved, and that God was punishing the Americans for condemning their city on the Tigris to a life of darkness ever since the US intervention in Iraq.

At least Bernard Kerik, former New York Chief of Police and currently working as an instructor in Iraq, doesn't have to worry about the heat. Last Thursday, his office in Baghdad was much more pleasant than those of his colleagues in the Big Apple. Although the power supply on the US east coast is generally superior to that of Iraq, the big blackout changed things, at least for 24 hours. Suddenly the capital of capitalism had been reduced to the level of a major city in a backward developing country - Harare on the Hudson, so to speak. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in all seriousness, warned his New Yorkers not to switch on their washing machines and air-conditioners as soon as the power returned. He might as well have pointed out that there's a little man in your refrigerator who would refuse to switch on the light if you didn't comply.

Even the early socialists dreamed of electricity as an engine of growth. One of them was Karl Steinmetz, who emigrated to the United States because of persecution under Bismarck. He eventually became a senior engineer at giant corporation General Electric. His hope was that the electric spark would prove to be a "powerful factor on the road to nationalization." After the Russian October revolution, Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin used the same logic in coining his programmatic formula: "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the entire country."

And what is America's success formula? "We are a dominant superpower with the power network of a third-world country," said Bill Richardson, Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton and now the Governor of New Mexico, coining the withering phrase that best characterizes this historic day in August. However, this grim paradox doesn't just characterize the nation's power supply, but is also emblematic of America's astonishingly deficient everyday technology - the appearance and reality of the United States.

"WE ARE A SUPERPOWER WITH THE POWER NETWORK OF A THIRD-WORLD COUNTRY." For inexplicable reasons, this superpower treats itself to the luxury of poorly insulated houses, as if large portions of the country weren't exposed to tremendous natural forces year after year. It manufactures its famous SUVs, marketed on the notion that sheer size provides safety. In reality, however, they pose a mortal danger to passengers because of their abysmal cornering ability. It makes do with power-hungry toasters, refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers that other advanced industrialized countries have long since eliminated. And in front of its tremendously energy-consuming houses stand antiquated wooden power poles supporting power cables that supply electricity to the houses. Even a moderately heavy summer thunderstorm or snowstorm is enough to knock down power lines, causing a power outage.

The Americans are by far the biggest squanderers of energy among the nations of the world. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, they consume 25 percent of all resources. Energy conservation is a foreign word in the United States, especially in George W. Bush' home state of Texas. He actually encourages his big business friends to draw on unlimited resources, while occasionally preaching environmental protection.

The discrepancy between demand and reality has becoming increasingly clear to Americans under George W. Bush. The President who, like several of his cabinet secretaries, is a man with roots in the oil industry, has placed little emphasis until now on improving the infrastructure, as long as it doesn't recognizably serve the interests of Big Business. According to American economics professor Paul Krugman, public services have been cut back in many areas to the benefit of "tax breaks for the rich." By now, government agencies spend virtually no money on repairing the dozens of dilapidated bridges in major American cities, not to mention streets filled with potholes. Washington is withdrawing from more and more public services. Bush' credo is that the market will take care of things.

THE HORRIBLE NIGHT - A COLLECTIVE AVOWAL OF FRIENDSHIP. The American economy is becoming more and more dominated by the financial markets and less by the production of goods. The brokerage dealings of the Enron Corporation were a perfect example of this development. With fictitious transactions, the company not only manipulated prices, but also contributed to the destabilization of the energy supply, and all of this without a single accident or lightning strike. Although some Enron executives were convicted of criminal activities, it remains doubtful that the system will change as a whole.

It was the great catastrophes, the crippling blizzards, the two blackouts of 1965 and 1977, as well as the attacks of September 2001 that awoke in the self-consciousness of New Yorkers the proud conviction that there is nothing they cannot overcome. In fact, the unofficial hymn of the metropolis is "If I can make it here, I'm gonna make it anywhere."

Making the best of things and not giving in to fate was already the motto of New Yorkers when all the lights went out on November 9, 1965. 25 million people were without heat and electricity for almost two days. It was a night that generated legends, one in which the poor and the rich came together in the giant halls of Grand Central Station and spent the next fifteen hours, until the trains started running again, playing cards and talking - the ideal of a classless society in the heart of the toughest city in the world.

800,000 people had been taken off-guard by the collapse of the power grid during rush hour. Back then, people were also stuck in elevators and subway cars. For years, the question "where were you when the lights went out?" would give New Yorkers an opportunity to talk about small acts of heroism and spontaneous parties with strangers who had become accidental acquaintances. The horrible night - a collective avowal of friendship.

However, its one of those urban myths that seem to survive, even in the face of cold facts to the contrary, that countless New Yorkers also used the light-less night to engage in reproductive acts, and that this resulted in a baby boom nine months later.

In contrast, the blackout that struck New York twelve years later and extinguished its lights on a very hot July 13, 1977 threatened to tear the city apart. The only ones who celebrated during that blackout were Greenwich Village's bohemians. In the dilapidated sections of the Bronx and Brooklyn, however, entire blocks seemed to have succumbed to looting. Rich New Yorkers barricaded themselves in their fortresses on upper Park Avenue as looters descended on the expensive shops nearby.

The police arrested 4,000 suspects during that wild, anarchistic night. The damage came to well over a billion dollars. The fire department counted 1,037 fires. An entire neighborhood, Bushwick in Brooklyn, was so devastated that it looked as though it were part of Beirut and not New York, and it hasn't recovered from the devastation to this day. At the time, Father Gabriel Santacruz told his parishioners in the local St. Barbara parish that "God has abandoned us." A few weeks ago Thomas Kuhn, President the Washington-based Edison Electric Institute, almost prophetically predicted the threat of another disaster in his country: "Investments in the infrastructure of the electricity system are insufficient to keep pace with the growing demand for energy and use of the transmission network."

Experts in the United States have long been familiar with the problem of ailing power lines. After the California disaster that happened three years ago, the political will finally exists to at least bring the country's antiquated network structures closer to European standards. The only problem is that since the Enron scandal, there has been a lack of confidence in the big energy companies on the financial markets, and therefore a lack of funds. Before confidence in the "integrity of our sector of the economy" is reestablished, says Kuhn with resignation, it will be impossible to raise, on the financial markets, the enormous investment funds needed to overhaul the electricity system.

It's a vicious circle. As long as regular blackouts darken daily life, it will be difficult to build confidence, especially after Black Thursday.

"IN THE UNITED STATES COMPETITION IS BASED SOLELY ON PRICE." But that's exactly what is necessary. While the German and European systems are what experts call a "tightly knit high-voltage network" which, thanks to opulent reserve capacity, is even capable of maintaining stability if a key group of plants fails, the outdated network in the United States is on the verge of collapse.

"This isn't so much an issue of technical capabilities," explains Gundolf Dany of the Institute of Electrical Equipment and Energy Commerce in Aachen. "It's really a question of philosophy. In Germany, our top priority is to guarantee supply, and we are also prepared to pay more for it. In the United States, however, competition is based solely on price. In return, they are more likely to accept risks."

Last Friday, it was still not entirely clear as to whether line problems, lightning or a problem at a power plant, possibly even involving an incident in a nuclear power plant, triggered the fatal chain reaction. However, experts do agree on how the domino effect could have happened, one in which 61,800 megawatts of power - about half the output of all of Germany's power plants - were lost.

"The exemplary European power network," says Bochum-based energy engineer Hermann-Josef Wagner, "does not exist in the United States, at least not beyond individual states." For this reason, existing capacity from states bordering on the affected regions could not be sufficiently tapped. As a result, the failure of the first power plant created voltage and frequency disruptions within the power grid. This automatically caused several dozen other power plants to be disconnected from the grid, one after the other, and to shut themselves down.

To the sweating Americans, it seemed an eternity before these plants could be restarted. It takes hours for internal backup diesel engines to take coal power plants from their "cold" state back up to full power. The same process can take days for nuclear power plants.

This meant that the return to normalcy had to be painfully slow. More than a day after the blackout, the necessary power plants still hadn't been reconnected to the grid. This was not the first time that the lights went out in the new world. If we could take a time-delayed look across the Atlantic, the lights on the opposite shore would flicker like those of a lighthouse. That's how often the power system fails. Although every power outage is different, a pattern has been becoming increasingly clear for some time. Ironically, the high-tech state of California - the world's sixth-largest economy, the cradle of the New Economy, and the home of the computer industry - is considered a prime example of a structural short circuit in the power system. The symptoms of the chronic power crisis are generally known and obvious. Three years ago, the lights went out with increasing frequency in the sunny state - a foretaste of a creeping crisis that also struck the east coast last week. Meanwhile, the causes are the subject of considerable debate. The fact is that California's plight began after the state legislature enacted the deregulation act for the power industry in 1996. The plan was for California to serve as a model of deregulation. It is the first US state that essentially turned over the power supply to the forces of the free market. Power suppliers and network operators were separated, and electricity was traded on its own exchange, just as stocks are traded elsewhere.

But the system did not function as intended. Price did not drop. In fact, they increased to a sensitive degree and, in some cases, ended up being twice as high for consumers. The governor ordered an investigation of the explosion in prices. Hot weather and higher gasoline prices were supposedly responsible for the price hike. The commission report, however, pointed toward unfair speculation on the electricity exchange.

Out of sheer greed, the power companies had delayed important investments for years, and now they lacked the necessary funds. The networks were not expanded, modernized, or maintained. Instead of building new power plants, overpriced power was purchased from neighboring states to satisfy demand.

When Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric slipped into insolvency, the state was forced to invest 400 million dollars of its own funds. Washington enacted an emergency order forcing power companies from other states to supply California with electricity. In spite of this measure, the power companies were unable to avoid rolling blackouts, like in a third-world country - darkness in the sunny state.

Experts disagree on exactly what was responsible for the debacle. Some say it was deregulation. They call for keeping basic and essential power supply services in the hands of government agencies. Others believe that the blackout in the "Golden State" illustrates precisely the opposite: too much control by the government which, after all, wanted to dictate prices.

The truth may lie somewhere between these two extremes: The exchange was introduced too hastily, and the state's reaction came too late and was incorrect.

It was from California, of all places, that President Bush announced, four-and-a-half hours after the New York blackout, that this was a "serious situation" and a "wake-up call for the nation." However, Bush said, it was important to look to the future: "Slowly but surely we will deal with this massive national problem."

Slowly, from north to south, from upstate New York to Lower Manhattan, the power returned on Friday. In Times Square, which had been filled with a party-like atmosphere just the night before, but where thousands had been forced to sleep on sidewalks, the lights of the Bertelsmann Tower returned on Friday morning, shortly after 7:30 a.m. But darkness still prevailed on the west side of the square.

"IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE." The lights had barely come on under the golden arches at McDonald's a few blocks away, but New Yorkers were already waiting in long lines, New Yorkers who were hoping to get a cup of coffee and who quickly summarized the events of the previous days with a composure so unique to this city: "It could have been worse." Trading at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street began on time, thanks to the exchange's own generator. New York's beaches, however, remained closed. During the power outage, the sewage treatment plants had failed and the coast was covered with fecal matter. To make up for the closures, City Hall ordered sprinklers to be left on throughout the day in all public parks.

The ferries from Staten Island and Hoboken, New Jersey, which had evacuated tens of thousands from Manhattan on the day before, brought back the first commuters. They had decided not to pay attention to the Mayor's recommendation that people should stay home if at all possible. "The world," said Mayor Bloomberg to everyone who couldn't make it to work that day, "will keep on turning without you."

But all politicians of every stripe were asking people to do one thing: "Save energy." At least until the supply had been re-stabilized, Americans on the east coast were being asked to do something they had forgotten how to do throughout decades of thoughtless consumption: turn off their air-conditioners and open their windows. Or drink cold water, leave their cars at home, and hang their laundry out to dry.

But as soon everything returns to normal, which shouldn't be any later than the beginning of this week, America can return to its previous absent-mindedness.

ERICH FOLLATH, HANS HOYNG, GERD ROSENKRANZ, HILMAR SCHMUNDT, GERHARD SPÖRL

Translated by Christopher Sultan

source: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,261665,00.html 19aug03