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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Dispatches from Libertopia: Who Is John Galt? Edition

Digby, Atrios, and many others are already laughing at this, and I can't help but join in the hilarity as well. Excerpted, via the NYT. No comment necessary, but I'll provide a nicely summarizing slogan at the end, anyway:
The John Galt Corporation of the Bronx, hired last year for the dangerous and complex job of demolishing the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, where two firefighters died last Saturday, has apparently never done any work like it…. John Galt, it appears, is not much more than a corporate entity meant to accommodate the people and companies actually doing the demolition job at the emotionally charged and environmentally hazardous site at the edge of ground zero.

The companies and project managers who have been providing the expertise, the workers and the financing for the job are Regional Scaffolding and Hoisting Company, which is not in business to demolish skyscrapers, and former executives from Safeway Environmental Corporation, a company that was already removed from one contract at 130 Liberty because of concerns about its integrity.

Safeway first surfaced on the scene at 130 Liberty when it, along with Regional Scaffolding, won a $13 million scaffolding contract in 2005 for the bank building. But Safeway... had a troubled history. [Former owner] Greenberg... has gone to federal prison twice for crimes related to the industry. Identified by federal investigators as a Gambino crime family associate, he was convicted in 1988 of bribing a federal inspector to overlook asbestos-removal violations.... Three years later he pleaded guilty to mail fraud in a bid-rigging scheme involving other contractors.

Captalism = Organized Crime

It's as simple as that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not many Communist entities volunteered to take down this building if you didn't notice. Saying all of Capitalism is organized crime based on an investigation that is still pending on two execs from a company is painting with quite a broad stroke.

Accidents happen everywhere. The accident that killed those two firefighters on saturday could have been prevented pssibly...by a GOVERNMENT agency, namely the FDNY, whose responsibility it was to inspect that site regularly for safety violations. The bureaucrats that are so quick to pass the buck off to the private sector don't see how ironic it is that the firehouse that could have saved the lives of those two men is situated directly across the street! The very same firehouse that fell victim to a much sensationalized ACCIDENT awhile back, a piece of debris from the building falling to the roof of the firehouse. They had quite a vested interest in safety level of that site wouldn't you agree? you would think that perhaps there would have been a fire and hazmat protocol in place and perhaps a site inspector on hand daily, considering the close proximity of the damn fire station. alas there wasn't, two more firefighters died, victims not of capitalism, but of the same bad government that allowed 9/11 to happen in the first place. Blame the government for these horrors at 130 liberty street, not the capitalist ideal that has propelled this country to greatness, while all other ideals have remained stagnant and even MORE corrupt than capitalism ever could be.

Dale Carrico said...

Blame the government... not the capitalist ideal that has propelled this country to greatness, while all other ideals have remained stagnant and even MORE corrupt than capitalism ever could be.

Mmmmm.... Kool-Aid.