MB Civic

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 7:49 PM and filed under Articles. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Skip to the end and leave a response. Trackbacks are closed.

One Response to “The Carlyle White House”

1. Ian Alterman said:

   Forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but I have been asking – screaming! – for over five years about the blatant conflict of interest in having James Baker involved in ANYTHING in DC, given its connections to Bush, and its enormous defense and telecomm contracts with the U.S. government. Baker was lead counsel for Bush during the 2000 Florida debacle; he was head of the reconstruction finance group in Iraq; and now he is heading up the Iraq Study Group.

   When will someone in the mainstream press simply ask the question: “What about Baker’s conflicts of interest?”

   As an aside, Carlyle’s NY real estate arm – Extell – has become an increasing presence, and a quite unwelcome one. It began by buying the real estate underlying the Trump South project for $1.3 billion, and has been building residential and office buildings at an alarming rate. In addition to two outrageous, non-contextual eyesores on the Upper West Side (among a dozen other buildings it has built or is building), Extell is putting up a huge building on 47th Street – in the “Diamond District” – and, despite their promise not to do so, is wooing businesses from the street, which will have a severely negative impact on the district as a whole. The entire street is up in arms about it, and even the City is at least a little concerned about what is happening. Still, it is likely that Extell will get their building, and that the Diamond District as we know it may end up with many boarded up storefronts in the next couple of years.

   Ultimately, Extell is as greedy, rapacious and despicable as anything else having to do with The Carlyle Group.

   Peace.

   Posted on 15-Nov-06 at 2:01 pm | Permalink