NEW TWIN TOWERS FOR A NEW AMERICA
When we at the Twin Towers Alliance created WTC2011.com at the end of 2007 to showcase Ken Gardner's "Twin Towers II" plan, the projected timeline to completion by 2011 was manifestly feasible. When we met with the new Port Authority Executive Director Christopher Ward in September of 2008, it was still manifestly feasible.
Anyone who bothered to scratch the surface of the project would have found it was pure gold. The claim that making the transition to "Twin Towers II" would have saved billions of dollars and years of time was not an idle promise. And it was not one that could be responsibly ignored, because it added up in every way.
The shocking fact is that it still does — as we will be establishing beyond a doubt at The Twin Towers Alliance website — while the current project makes less sense all the time. The recent challenge brought by the AAA of New York and New Jersey that is now pending in Federal Court is just one example of that.
The preliminary findings of the audit that the Governors of New York and New Jersey called for in response to those toll hikes, which determined in early February that the agency is "a challenged and dysfunctional organization" is another.
What we want to impress upon everyone who comes to this page in 2012 is that the sorry history at Ground Zero was not inevitable. No one has ever been able to justify why we got what we got — a half-baked, incoherent development with less likelihood everyday of being finished or living up to the memory of what was stolen from us. We believe it is a profound insult to who we are and to those we lost.
In fact, our Freedom of Information requests have given authorities ample opportunity to back up all their misleading claims over the years and they have failed — beginning with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's inability to produce a shred of documentation to support the contention that their project was the result of a democratic process.
Now that 2011 has come and gone, we have reduced the site to this one page, which we will leave up in 2012 as a rallying point, while we bring the connection between new Twin Towers and a new America into sharper focus in the year ahead.
Polls show that almost everyone agrees that our politics are broken. Those we hire to run our government so that we as a nation can prosper have run it into the ground. They do not serve or protect us. From citizens on the right, the left, and the center, the complaint is always the same: Our representatives do not represent us.
There is no clearer proof of that than in the corrupted skyline of New York, which is what makes the WTC the natural and best place for us to rise above our differences and join forces to exert our control. Illegitimate means do not justify the end — they only contaminate it. The Merriam-Webster definition of "corruption" explains so much of what has gone wrong at Ground Zero:
a: impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle: depravity
b: decay, decomposition
c: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means
d: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct
The corrupt, dishonest process that saddled us with the bogus project and its promotion as a proper replacement for the majestic Twin Towers was and is the result of "an impairment of integrity". And the logical end of following that course is inevitable "decay" — not because we say so, but because things without integrity fall apart.
The current breakdown at the site, with Mayor Bloomberg announcing that the 9/11 Museum will not open on schedule, is just the latest in a long string of delays and only the tip of an iceberg made up of layers of lies and connivance. That is why we encourage those who come to this site to continue on to The Twin Towers Alliance and to follow our efforts and activities there.
If we as a people can't find a way to do the honorable, sensible, and profitable thing at the World Trade Center — raising extraordinary Twin Towers beside the 9/11 Memorial — then we have lost effective control of our government. But we really do have a golden opportunity to restore the balance of power and dramatically change the way our country operates.
This is the time and this is the place for people of good will to take a stand that will put arrogant, out-of-control officials in their place — and spectacular Twin Towers back where they belong. It is certainly NOT too late to do the right thing. How could it be, with the character of our country in the balance?