Tuesday, March 29, 2016

More on that "great businessman" thing

John Stossel's recent column about one of the things The Combover has done indicates a very interesting thing; one of his signature accomplishments, so to speak, is the Central Park skating rink.   Apparently the city's management of the project was so bad that one part of the rink--which from Google Maps appears to be little bigger than a standard hockey rink-- was six inches higher than other parts of the rink. 

In other words, his signature accomplishment was to replace the city's contractors with someone who had mastered very, very basic surveying.  We are talking high school shop class with equipment from Home Depot, really.  Apart from the chillers for making ice, the technical difficulty of this task really isn't beyond the ability of most small town pavement contractors, who do projects this size for farmers all the time--specifically the long barns whose stench is the bane of rural living, if you catch my drift.  Moreover, most towns of any size north of Chicago have a facility like Wollman where the local hockey team practices and plays. 

But he did replace a group of corrupt builders with his own builders, and would have learned that in numerous places, deliberately shoddy work had been done, and reports had been falsified, in what is one of the easiest places in the world to build due to wonderful bedrock.  And yet there is no record of reports being made to prosecutors.  Why?

Perhaps had he done so, the accused would have pointed out how he got them fired, and how he managed to use illegal immigrant labor for Trump Tower while violating OSHA regulations.  In other words, he's not a successful businessman at all, but rather someone with the flexible moral and ethical commitments needed to prosper in what was then a deeply corrupt city--as Ivana and Marla might tell us.  It is very interesting that the decline in Drumpf's fortunes--bankruptcies in 1991 and 1992--coincided with Rudi Giuliani's cleanup of the city as a federal prosecutor.

No comments: