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Bruce Ratner is a New York real estate developer and owner of the New Jersey Nets of the National Basketball Association. For five years, he’s been trying to move the team to a new arena in Brooklyn that he hopes to build, relying on New York’s powers of eminent domain to move hundreds of homeowners and businessmen out of their quarters. The Brooklyn arena project, known as Atlantic Yards, is on life support. It is only being kept alive by an investment of Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Prokhorov, who is reportedly worth more than $13 billion. He is investing $200...

Prokhorov NBA Bid Gets Scrutiny; ACORN-Funder Ratner Needs Russian Billionaire to Build Brooklyn Arena Bruce Ratner is a New York real estate developer and owner of the New Jersey Nets of the National Basketball Association. For five years, he’s been trying to move the team to a new arena in Brooklyn that he hopes to build, relying on New York’s powers of eminent domain to move hundreds of homeowners and businessmen out of their quarters.The Brooklyn arena project, known as Atlantic Yards, is on life support. It is only being kept alive by an investment of Russia’s richest man, Mikhail...

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...

Following the courageous expose by two young investigative journalists released on the pages of this very blog, there were widespread calls for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the criminal enterprise that is ACORN. One would think there would be swift, decisive action from the administration that promised to be the most transparent in history. Despite the urging of some in congress and action on the regional level, and an internal investigation into funding, terrorist sympathizer U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to oversee a criminal investigation of ACORN. There’s no evidence that any...

Already facing the loss of federal government funding, the community-organizing group Acorn also has run afoul of one of its big corporate partners, Bank of America Corp. In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the banking company said it has "suspended current commitments" to Acorn Housing, an affiliated group, and "will not enter into any further agreements with Acorn or any of its affiliates," pending assessments by the bank of the organization's operations. Acorn, officially the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been under fire since the recent release of secretly recorded videos...

The relentlessly sanctimonious Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now may not deserve its carefully cultivated image as a defender of the poor. That's because the group has become the leading cheerleader for a controversial real estate development that is slated to use eminent domain to remove the poor people it claims to represent. ACORN, which has long prided itself on fighting the so-called gentrification of neighborhoods as rising property values force the poor to move, has also taken money from the project's developer and signed a binding agreement forcing it to stand behind the project no matter what. In...

ACORN's new Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis was named one of Crain's 100 Most Influential Women in NYC and the article was just as colorful as Ms. Lewis. “Ms. Lewis, 56, started down the road almost 20 years ago, fighting successfully for everything from squatters' rights to a higher minimum wage. In 1998, she helped found the union-allied Working Families Party. The WFP is as much a lobbying group as it is the choice on a ballot line; politicians of all stripes routinely seek Ms. Lewis' endorsement. 'Once a year, I'm a popular girl,' she says. 'These are people that otherwise...

The reports started to leak last week with Tom Lauria appearance on the Frank Beckman show where he claimed that the White House threatened to sic the WH Press Corps on the non tarp investors if they didn't go along with the plan to give primary investors much less than their share, and the UAW much more than their share of whats left of Chrysler. Earlier this week a different participant in negotiations said that the administration's tactic was to present what one described as a "madman theory of the presidency" in which the President is someone to be feared...

NOTE: Yes, folks. Steve Ratner is the Obama thug mentioned in this incident: An attorney representing several Chrysler bondholders accused the Obama administration of intimidating his clients by issuing threats of public humiliation if they opposed their brokered deal to resolve the automaker’s debts. Speaking to WJR, Thomas Lauria said that the White House called the bondholders “vultures” for insisting on their rights as senior creditors and told them that the Obama administration would use the White House press corps to attack them in the media. =================================================================== Mayor Bloomberg defends friend, car czar Steven Ratner, amid pension scandal probe By...

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...

have to congratulate my friends who’ve somehow convinced themselves that “Eric Holder is the right man at the right time to protect our citizens in the critical years ahead.” They’ve proved what I wouldn’t have thought possible: that Barack Obama is exactly the unifying figure he claimed to be. After all, by choosing Holder, he’s managed to put a Who’s Who list of former top Republican Justice Department officials on the same page with Michael Ratner. Ratner is the head of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a Marxist, rabidly anti-American organization. When it is not representing al Qaeda and suing...

Was Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden serious last week when he said that an Obama administration would be willing to prosecute Bush administration officials for their supposed crimes? According to a video posted on YouTube, an audience member at a Florida campaign event asked: I'm not going to say 'yes we can,' I'm going to say 'yes we will,' OK, and when we do, I'd like to know if you guys are going to pursue the violations that have been made against our Constitution by the present administration and restore the Constitution to its rightful place in our society?...

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects. Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins's former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed...

Michael Ratner (above, holding document) of the Center for Constitutional Rights rants against the country he hates most: the United States.* * * * * Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court's lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush that gives America's terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen.* The nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is deeply enmeshed in the politics of terrorism (take one guess on whose side)...

Supreme Court Denies Eminent Domain Petition From Owners & Tenants Facing Property Seizures for Atlantic Yards 11 Property Owners and Tenants Will Take Their Case to NY State Court To Challenge the Improper Use of Eminent Domain Under New York State Law BROOKLYN, NY--The United States Supreme Court denied the petition to grant a hearing (cert petition) to eleven property owners and tenants who asked the court to hear their appeal on the Second Circuit Court’s dismissal of their challenge to the use of eminent domain for Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards development proposal in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The petition...

Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court's lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush, the ruling that gives America's terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen. (You can't miss the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin's idiotic, ahistorical ballad in which he grossly misrepresents the views of the Founding Fathers.) The Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is jumping for joy, hailing the decision handed down this week as a great triumph for...

Bush's War Monday, March 24 and Tuesday, March 25, 2008 9 P.M. (check local listings) From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge-for six years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence. Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush's War, airing Monday, March...

A US human rights group says it is suing private security firm Blackwater for unspecified damages for war crimes and wrongfully killing Iraqi civilians. The Center for Constitutional Rights is acting on behalf of an injured survivor and three families of men killed by Blackwater guards on 16 September. The Iraqi government said the incident in which 17 people died was unprovoked. Blackwater denies firing without cause. The case has put a spotlight on private military contractors in Iraq. BLACKWATER USA FACTS Founded in 1997 by a former US Navy Seal Headquarters in North Carolina One of at least 28...

Exclusive: Charges Sought Against Rumsfeld Over Prison Abuse A lawsuit in Germany will seek a criminal prosecution of the former Defense Secretary and other U.S. officials for their alleged role in abuses at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo By ADAM ZAGORIN Just days after his resignation, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and...

by Mark Finkelstein July 1, 2006 When America marches off to war, do we want lawyers on the front line? OK, I can already hear the thunderous response: 'Yes! Put those tassel-loafered shysters out there as cannon fodder!" But Jim Pinkerton, conservative columnist at Newsday and TCS, was making a more profound point this morning when he and Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News made their 'Long & Short' appearance on Fox & Friends Weekend. The subject was the recent Supreme Court ruling that it is impermissible to subject Gitmo prisoners to military tribunals. In fairness, short-'n-liberal Ellen Ratner did...