Ratner Nefaria

The Brooklyn Papers, as have other publications, have been running articles about the various means by which Mr. Ratner is buying influence and his place in the spectrum of Brooklyn's political firmament. Though apparently a sore loser in some deal with Ratner, even developer Henry Weinstein is pointing out the web of collusion that Ratner and FCRC are creating to smother local opposition.

Some might say, "Well, that's politics NYCstyle, and only the strong survive, so fuggedaboudit." They would have a point. The Brooklyn Bridge, Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center, and sundry other projects on that scale were all done by the well-heeled leaning that heel on the opposition until it shut up. The lucky small fry were bribed to stay that way and things have not changed in this century.

On the other hand, the very things that clear the way for this greedy behavior are the things that at this time should be the primary cause for concern. It's NOT eminent domain that is wrong. We need that to conduct society. What is wrong is its use for something between a landgrab, a boondoggle and tax evasion, all of which we have here being presented with a boyish grin of self-satisfaction by the perpetrators.

When organizations like BUILD and ACORN get on board for these adventures in creative accounting with the public funds, it is depressing for they are the people who should be protecting the interests of those who are otherwise voiceless. They should not be getting on the gravy train.

When political leaders either take no position are paint the whole affair as a sort of vague economic benefit about which we should not ask questions, one asks, "Well then who is supposed to ask because I thought that was your job?" Worse still when you get the Pataki smirk, or the Markowitz two-step, you cannot even tell which party is supposed to be watching. That is because party politics is irrelevant here as the parties now exist.

Ratner is engaged in public graft. He hides it by doing it in the open on such a grand scale that his audacity dumbfounds the rational. Each time he gets caught, he simply goes, "Aw shucks" and one of his minions comes up with some preposterous unrelated argument as an explanation. Everyone nods and goes home.

The problem with Ratner is that we are in a period of unfettered license that enables criminality to call itself enterprise if the perpetrator has enough money, dresses right, and hangs out at the right golf course. Voters are partly responsible for this in helping to foster the craziness of deregulation even as they were being fleeced by Enron, Verizon, and others. The majority of the blame lies with the fact that we have abandoned the idea that wealth created in the nation is partly the nation's wealth, and hence the graduated tax system which maintained a balanced constraint on how much money wound up in a very limited number of hands.

The Bush Administration has pressed to fill those hands further on an annual basis and the Democratic Party has done absolutely nothing whatever to maintain balance. So Mr. Ratner is a problem. He is a big, fat, hungry problem about to be left on our doorstep to solve, but he is not THE problem. The problem is that we need to restore a balance between public and private interests, or between the public at large and the rich. First, however, we have to get general agreement that the pursuit of happiness is not exclusively the pursuit of wealth, and that the moral standard of the nation should not be set by ranking highest those who can get the most rich by any means they can imagine and pursue in the dark of the night.

If Mr. Ratner is just "a smart business man protecting his interests," we should not just follow his lead. We should see to it that he is not the precedent against which the standards of the nation are set be they ethical, economic, or social.