NY's 9/11 Memorial: When Did Honoring the Dead Become an Occasion for Fleecing the Living?

“NY’s 9/11 Memorial: When Did Honoring the Dead Become
an Occasion for Fleecing the Living?” written by Jim Epstein and
Nick Gillespie, narrated by Kennedy, and shot and edited by
Epstein, with help from Anthony L. Fisher. About 2
minutes.

Original release date was September 10, 2012 and original
writeup is below.

More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, a new World Trade
Center is finally rising, along with a memorial, museum, and a
transit hub.

When the projects are slated to open they’ll supposedly
symbolize America’s strength, determination, and refusal to cave
in. But they really tell a different story about taxpayer rip-offs,
public-sector incompetence, and union and corporate greed.

One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower,
will be the most expensive office building in American history by a
long shot. Cost overruns
have driven the price tag to $3.8 billion. The Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, the public agency that’s running the show, is sticking
commuters with part of the tab
by hiking tolls across the Hudson River to $12.

The new complex will dump
3-million square feet of office space into a soft rental market
meaning Condé Nast, the flush publisher of The New Yorker,
Wired, and Vanity Fair,
got beau coups subsidies to move in. And who-other-than the
federal government signed on to fill up five floors at a cost
of $351 million over 20 years?

Even The New York Times‘ stimulus-pimping columnist Joe
Nocera
has called World Trade Center rebuilding an “example of just
about everything wrong with modern government,” asking, “where’s
the Tea Party when you need them?”

Just down the street from the Trade Center, a federally-financed
transit hub is a billion dollars over budget, now
coming in around $3.4 billion. Construction costs for the
September 11th Memorial and Museum
have climbed to $700 million, with taxpayers footing a portion
of the bill.

New York’s
politically connected construction industry has benefited the
most from 9/11 largess, but the city’s real estate and banking
cartels have gone whole hog at the taxpayer-funded trough, too.

The Bush administration gave New York $8 billion in tax-free
Liberty Bonds, only
to see a big portion of that gift go for projects that have nothing
to do with September 11th. Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards benefited
from subsidized bonds, as did a midtown Manhattan office project.
Even Goldman Sachs, which has nearly a trillion dollars in assets,
got almost two million dollars towards its new headquarters.

Since when did honoring the dead become an occasion for fleecing
the living?

After September 11th, small townships in New Jersey and Long
Island
quickly built modest but moving memorials to pay tribute to the
loved ones they lost in the attacks. In Lower Manhattan, something
else completely is being built: an overdue, over-budget monument to
the ease with which politicians, bureaucrats, and opportunists
spend other people’s money.

Written by Jim Epstein and Nick Gillespie, narrated by Kennedy,
and shot and edited by Epstein, with help from Anthony L.
Fisher.

About 2.30 minutes.

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