Free Republic

Earlier this week, seven Brooklyn residents filed a federal lawsuit against Bruce Ratner, the developer of the Atlantic Yards basketball arena, accusing him of committing a grave injustice. The plaintiffs, however, arenÂ’t opposed to injustice; in fact, they had hoped to benefit from it. For the wrongs that theyÂ’ve suffered, Bruce RatnerÂ’s latest useful idiots have no one to blame but themselves. Ratner has spent eight years using the power of New York City and New York State to injure people who donÂ’t have the arbitrary power of the government backing them. Starting in 2003, Ratner garnered the support of...

New York’s eminent domain policies rob the vulnerable to reward the powerful.In November, New York’s Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, upheld the use of eminent domain to take homes and small businesses to make way for wealthy developer Bruce Ratner’s so-called “Atlantic Yards” development: 16 mammoth skyscrapers centered around a basketball arena. The court accepted the Empire State Development Corporation’s contention that the area was “blighted”—based on a study that Ratner paid for himself and which wasn’t even initiated until years after the project was announced. The court didn’t go so far as to embrace the reasoning of...

Saul Alinsky, the author of Rules For Radicals, once said this. In the politics of human life, consistency is not a virtue ... It’s true I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers. ... The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father

Here's one genuinely welcome casualty of the Bush-Obama recession. Gothamist brings word that Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards project is floundering: Starchitect Frank Gehry really stepped in it during a recent interview with industry journal The Architect's Newspaper, admitting he doesn't think developer Bruce Ratner's $4.2 billion plan to build a Nets basketball arena, office towers and thousands of apartments in Brooklyn will become a reality. In an interview on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Gehry dropped the bombshell when asked about unrealized commissions he most wishes had been built: "The Corcoran Gallery in DC, the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn—I...