-Caveat Lector-
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north207.html
Eminent Remains: The Buried Legacy of the Original Ground Zero
by Gary North
by Gary North
Which looks proper to you: "twin towers" or "Twin Towers"? For most people, "Twin Towers" looks proper. We rarely see "twin towers" in uncapitalized mode. That was what was wrong with the Twin Towers from day one.
We read of "Ground Zero." That phrase, too, is capitalized. The empty space where the Twin Towers once stood has become a symbol of lawless destruction, as indeed it is. Some people speak of Ground Zero as sacred space or holy ground. I am not one of them.
What I have never seen written is what should be obvious to anyone who defends the free market as an outworking of the idea of private property: the Twin Towers were conceived in sin and leased in iniquity.
The Twin Towers stood as of emblem of what has long been a great weakness of British common law: the law of eminent domain. That law is an outworking of what I, as follower of John Calvin, identify as the modified eighth commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." Catholics and Lutherans would identify it as the modified seventh commandment. However men number that commandment, it is the modification which condemns them.
The Twin Towers began with acts of legalized theft.
A ROCKEFELLER PROJECT
The Twin Towers were the product of many factors, but the sine qua non were the Rockefeller brothers, David and Nelson. The Rockefeller family had long become interested in real estate development in New York City. There is even a book based on a 1986 middle-of-the-night bicycle tour of Rockefeller-related properties, Rockefeller New York.
John D., Jr. in 1946 donated $8.5 million to the United Nations to buy property for its headquarters. The land was then turned over to the member nations as sovereign property. This removed the land from the jurisdiction of the United States. It was a symbolic gesture.
Symbols have always meant a great deal to the Rockefellers, as they do to everyone else. The key questions are:
Symbols for whom?
Symbols of what?
Symbols managed by whom?
The Twin Towers project was a combination of four crucial factors: (1) David Rockefeller's desire to raise property values in lower Manhattan; (2) Gov. Nelson Rockefeller's appointees, who controlled the Board of the Port Authority; (3) taxpayers' credit, which was used to underwrite bonds to build the Twin Towers; (4) exemption from all New York City building codes and taxes. Brian C. Anderson provided a good summary in the November, 2001 issue of City Journal. This story is known to very few Americans, let alone Islamic terrorists. I quote it at some length.
It's cruelly ironic that the terrorists who attacked New York on September 11 targeted the World Trade Center as a symbol of American capitalism. For, from the moment it opened its doors in the early 1970s, the center, owned and operated by the publicly funded Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was really a grandiose monument to the ills of state capitalism, where government substitutes its bureaucratic and politically motivated thinking for the wisdom of the free market's invisible hand. Indeed, the WTC offers a case study in why government should not be in the business of developing and managing commercial property. As New York state and city officials move toward setting up a new public entity to oversee the rebuilding of lower Manhattan, the center's history provides a cautionary tale for everyone involved starting with Governor George Pataki. . . .
The idea for the World Trade Center first took form in the late 1950s, as a group of well-connected businessmen led by Governor Rockefeller's brother David, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank sought some governmental means of pumping economic life into a lower Manhattan that had been in steady decline since the Depression. A government-created and government-run state-of-the-art office complex, they felt, would attract tenants from the world of international trade to replace the financial firms that had left lower Manhattan, and thus it would spur additional economic development throughout the neighborhood and give a boost to the area's struggling ports. The complex would also boost downtown development at a time when the Rockefeller family was making a big financial bet on the area with the construction of Chase Plaza.
Enlisting Governor Rockefeller's help, the group turned to the Port Authority to own, develop, and manage the property. Three reasons made the bi-state agency attractive: it was bursting with money and had the ability to float bonds; it already owned some of the land in the neighborhood; and the governor controlled half of its board. The authority was enthusiastic from the outset. Its powerful director, Austin Tobin, wanted to expand the agency's reach beyond its traditional, profitable bailiwick of managing the area's ports, airports, bridges, and
