FCR AT THE TROUGH

If anyone is still under the delusion that Forest City Ratner is not already well and truly on corporate welfare, I note this item from Crain’s New York Business.com. In the three brief paragraphs that appear at the end of this article, we learn that the Bank of New York is being subsidized to cover 9/11 losses by giving FCR 113.9 million of your public dollars to build the Atlantic Terminal and provide them with office space.

More importantly we learn that the newly merged New York Mellon Corporation will have assets of 16.6 trillion dollars and be the largest asset manager in the world. That would hardly seem to make the new banking entity one of New York’s neediest. The 9/11 losses were I guess sustainable.

In other words we are subsidizing banks with trillions (trillions!) of dollars in assets with our tax dollars by plumping up FCR so they could build the architecturally dubious Atlantic Terminal.

I invite you to think about that because we are about to give FCR billions of dollars from our pockets to create the Atlantic Yards enterprise. One wonders why those with trillions of dollars could not simply lend Bruce the dough instead of weaseling it out of the public in the form of property taxes, income taxes, and sales tax subsidies?

If the new Democratic Congress is to be any different than the old Republicans, this is the sort of scraping and grinding from the public coffers that has to stop. To hell with bridges to nowhere, and other piddling earmarks, we need to shut off the conduit of the nation’s wealth set up from our pockets into the corporate world’s “venture capital.” In fact this is the sort of bold entrepreneurial spirit that only Karl Marx could possibly support.

The material from the Crain’s Website is below.


“Bank of New York was hard hit by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The state and city helped keep bank jobs in the city by issuing $113.9 million in Liberty Bonds to Forest City Ratner Cos., which developed a tower over Brooklyn's Atlantic Terminal. Bank of New York became the anchor tenant, moving about 1,500 jobs there. The bank currently occupies 320,000 square feet in the building, Forest City says. Bank of New York received the grant as part of the same economic development package. The merged company, to be called Bank of New York Mellon Corp. will create the world's leading asset servicer, with $16.6 trillion of assets under custody. It will also rank among the top 10 global asset managers with more than $1.1 trillion of assets under management.”