Who Is John Galt?

You may already know that recently there was a fire that killed two NYC firemen, and later a scaffolding collapse that injured two more, at what's left of the Deutsche Bank Building 130 Liberty Street in New York. The New York Times is reporting that an "obscure" demolition company was used to take down that building in the wake of the WTC collapse. It's prompted Geoff Manaugh at Bldg Blog to offer some conspiracy/movie ideas:

[T]he John Galt Corporation "has apparently never done any work like [this]," the New York Times reports. "Indeed, Galt does not seem to have done much of anything since it was incorporated in 1983."

Public and private records give no indication of how many employees it has, what its volume of business is or who its clients are. There are almost no accounts of any projects it has undertaken on any scale, apart from 130 Liberty Street. Court records are largely silent. Some leading construction executives in the city say they have never even heard of it.

[...]

[T]here are so many potential novel plots in this set-up, I can hardly believe it.

There's the Nicolas Cage/National Treasure 3 version: the John Galt Corporation is actually a front for some rogue group of foreign archaeologists – because there is something inside the building... and they need to recover it.

There's the Loose Change version: 130 Liberty Street contains far too much chemical evidence that thermite really was used on 9/11 – and so the John Galt Corporation was brought in by Langley to clean up the job...

There's the Ghostbusters/Grant Morrison version: the building is not a building at all... it is a valve, built directly above the Pillar of Manhattan, and it is only there as a way to vent subterranean steam. The John Galt Corporation is really a team of Columbia-trained paranormal investigators...

And Keach Hagey at CBS leaves us with this note:

Who is John Galt? I mean, besides the shadowy male hero of the Ayn Rand novel "Atlas Shrugged", which manages to convince thousands of teenagers every year that greed is good?

The New York Times leads with an exhaustive investigative piece revealing that the John Galt Corporation, hired by the city to demolish the 9/11-contaminated Deutsche Bank building where two firefighters died on Saturday, is every bit as shadowy and nearly as fictional as its namesake.

[...]

The Galt corporation was fired yesterday for safety violations, according to the New York Post. The firefighters died as an out-of-control fire grew to seven alarms while they waited nearly an hour for water to arrive.

John Galt is one of the main characters in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. An engineer by trade, Galt is the male hero of the story; his actions include withdrawing his talents, 'stopping the motor of the world', and leading the 'strikers' against the 'looters'.

The question "Who is John Galt?" is asked repeatedly throughout the story.

[...]

The phrase becomes an expression of helplessness and despair at the current state of the world.

  Wikipedia

Very interesting.