Re: [Marxism] The Politics of Larry Silverstein

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Tony Lawless:
> To deal with the second of your assumptions first: there IS a cabal 
> within the US government. Its
> name is the Project for a New American Century.

Tony, do you really think that PNAC is a cabal? Cabal means secret. 
The aims of PNAC are advertised on their website. Also, American 
foreign policy has not been captured by an ultraright cabal. There 
are no significant policy differences between the two parties. On 
some issues, the Democrats are attacking the Republicans from the 
right--especially on Iran.

> And wasn't the World Trade Centre a money-loser? What was the 
> rationale here for Silverstein buying the buildings? Or for for the 
> New York and New Jersey Port Authority selling? Does anyone know?

Daily News (New York), August 3, 2001
Rents seen going sky-high at WTC
By ERIC HERMAN DAILY NEWS BUSINESS WRITER

Office rents at the World Trade Center are destined to go nowhere but 
up - at least 40% for many tenants.

That was the message yesterday as Larry Silverstein's mammoth $3.2 
billion deal for the World Trade Center got a clean bill of health 
from a major debt-rating agency.

Standard & Poor's delivered the news that much of Silverstein's 
mortgage on the Twin Towers earned a 'AAA,' the highest credit rating.

"It's extraordinary, in my opinion, because every concern we had they 
mitigated very well," said Matt Sharp, the Standard & Poor's 
associate director who evaluated the deal. "You could almost say it's 
better than fully investment grade."

Sharp said the upside potential in rents and Silverstein's ability to 
cut expenses made the securities a safe bet for investors.

"The in-place rents on the building are [on average] about $33 a 
foot. The market rents for the property, if a space became vacant 
now, would be about $46 a square foot. So there's a big margin 
there," Sharp said.

This means rents hikes for tenants like Empire Blue Cross and 
Deutsche Bank if they elect to stay.

Both have big blocks of space at the complex, and currently pay 
below-market rates.

Even without the rent hikes, Silverstein and his partners stand to 
make money right away, Sharp said, adding the World Trade Center will 
generate profits of nearly $40 million this year.

Last week, Silverstein closed a deal to lease the World Trade Center 
from the Port Authority for 99 years.

> Finally, your third assumption is simply wrong: it is more likely 
> that CIA or Mossad operatives
> penetrated Al Queda and thus learned of, and perhaps encouraged, the 
> possibility of a major attack
> against the United States. The jihadists, as you call them, were 
> real enough, in my opinion.

Well, this would be a first. The scholarly consensus is that the CIA 
has not been able to penetrate jihadist circles. Of course, from your 
perspective, the blows directed at the WTC (on both occasions), the 
African embassies, the USS Cole might be interpreted as proof of CIA 
involvement since they all resulted in a heightening of war fever. 
This kind of analysis can of course not be answered--by the same 
token, it does not really need to be answered.

> The major evidence for the plausibility of this assumption is the 
> August memo entitled "bin Laden
> Plans Major Attack on the US" or words akin. Someone in the US 
> intelligence service wrote this memo.
> Where did the evidence for this warning come from? Why was the 
> warning apparently ignored?

Who knows. Someday we'll have access to top-secret files after 
capitalism has been overthrown in the USA. I myself will be just as 
interested in finding out who all those peculiar people were in the 
Houston branch of the Socialist Workers Party, especially the guy who 
used to wear a hard-hat at branch meetings. My old girl friend Debby, 
who used to work as a stripper, once went up to him and knocked on 
the hard-hat as if it were a door, and asked, "Is there anything in there?"


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