[Pen-l] Ratner, Botstein and Gehry: birds of a feather

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I read the Bardian, my Bard College alumni magazine, in the same spirit 
that I check in on the Militant newspaper online, to see the latest 
affront to decency that Leon Botstein and Jack Barnes, the cult leaders 
of these two institutions from my youth, have cooked up. Based on the 
evidence of the spring 2009 Bardian, they are running neck-and-neck.

In a tiny announcement, the magazine informed its readers that “Bruce C. 
Ratner, director of Forest City Enterprises, was appointed to the Board 
of Trustees.” Right off the bat, I had to assume that Ratner was cut 
from the same cloth as Asher Edelman, Susan Weber (George Soros’s 
ex-wife), and Charles P. Stephenson Jr. He was likely to have made his 
money through some ill-gotten gains or to have come by it through 
marriage as Susan Weber and fellow board member and ultra-Zionist Martin 
Peretz did. Edelman, a Bard graduate who the Gordon Gekko character in 
Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” was based on, used to be a business partner 
of corporate raider Stephenson before the threat of arrest for insider 
trading forced him to relocate to Europe and out of the securities business.

George Soros, who is a major donor to Bard College particularly when it 
comes to spawning colonial outposts of the college in South Africa and 
Eastern Europe where the benefits of free markets can be sold to budding 
scholars especially those who are hard-up economically, has been found 
guilty of insider trading in France and his firm is now being sued in 
Hungary for $2.2 million for manipulating the share price of the 
country’s largest bank.

Bruce C. Ratner breaks with tradition to some extent by his connections 
to the real estate industry instead of the hedge fund business, the 
preferred base of operation for the other crooks on the board of 
trustees. As N.Y.’s most active real estate developer in the 1990s, he 
is best known for being the owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team 
that he had intended to bring to Brooklyn as part of an ambitious real 
estate project based in the Atlantic Yards development targeted for the 
Prospect Heights and Park Slope neighborhoods. The granola-eating and 
Obama-voting residents had about as much use for as they would for a 
nuclear power plant so it switched locations eventually to downtown 
Brooklyn. Although the financial crisis seems to have put the kibosh 
temporarily on Ratner’s plans, there is also the possibility that 
neighborhood resistance also had an effect. The website 
http://www.nolandgrab.org/ lists links to over 30 other websites hostile 
to Ratner’s aims. It also links to “The Simpsons” episode that was to 
Bruce Ratner what “Wall Street” was to Asher Edelman:

"When Mr. Burns wins the Boston Celtics in a poker game, he decides to 
build a new sports arena in Springfield for them, but Lisa is against it 
as it would destroy the last bee colony in Springfield; Homer tries to 
solve the problem by mating the bees – with 'killer' Africanized bees."

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/24/ratner-botstein-and-gehry-birds-of-a-feather/
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