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April 15, 2011
Most politicians, Michael Ratner claimed, are "corrupt assholes;" he joked about having prosecutors evicted from Bruce's building
Atlantic Yards Report
You just don't get these kinds of finds anywhere other than Norman Oder's Atlantic Yards Report.
Developer Bruce Ratner's brother, and ally, appears in Brandt Goldstein's 2006 book Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Sued the President--and Won, excerpted below:
[Law student] Lisa [Daugaard] met [Professor] Harold Koh in the spring of 1991, as a second-year student in his international business transactions class, known as IBT...
After the IBT class, she'd seen enough: Koh was of the system, by the system, and for the system. She would never have dealt with him again had it not been for a radical New York lawyer on campus named Michael Ratner. To Lisa, Ratner was the anti-Koh. Bearded, bald, and fond of quoting Che Guevara, he'd represented everyone from inmates in the 1971 Attica prison rebellion to Nicaraguan citizens attacked by U.S.-funded contras. Ratner had come of age at Columbia Law School during the Vietnam War, and he considered most politicians "corrupt assholes." Along with his colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights, he'd even sued to halt the president from sending U.S. troops into battle. Twice. "What's the purpose of going along with the status quo?" Ratner would ask. "The government has enough paid people to do their dirty work."
(Emphasis added)
Mr. Ratner, meet Mr. Kruger.
Read on for another telling excerpt.
NoLandGrab: As Norman Oder goes on to point out, the Atlantic Yards-investor Michael Ratner went on to bestow some quite lavish campaign gifts on a good number of "corrupt assholes" (Ratner's words, not ours).
Posted by eric at April 15, 2011 11:34 AM