Ten Little Indians Style: Wings Aflame, Moths Around The Flame of Eminent Domain Abuse Find Themselves Crashing Out Of The Picture In Succession

(Above, a bobble-head Bruce Ratner indian joins those of the 1965 film: "Ten Little Indians."  Why?  Keep reading.)

. . .  It is happening in real life: They are dropping like flies!  Remember the many “Ten Little Indians” films . . . quite a few remakes were made of the beloved yarn, derived from the Agatha Christie’s classic mystery tale?  You remember the plot: A select little club of invitees (enticed for a frolic to a mysterious island) get picked off one by one and swiftly the ominousness and inevitable direction the scheme unfolding is understood by everyone, audience together with the crew of characters in the story itself: Pretty soon the group’s population is going to be brought to zero by the death-dispensing machinations of an unseen hand.  Hence the other well known title for the story, “And Then There Were None.”

Spoiler Alert!: A key feature of the plot is that all of the doomed visitors had it coming, they all had previously been complicit in the deaths of others but escaped notice or punishment.

So it is with the cast of Atlantic Yards perpetrators.  In real life they seem close to replicating what, although it was fun, seemed like a preposterously contrived plot!

I alluded to this march into the abyss of the disgraced, in July, when I wrote about the fall from reputational grace of Mayor Bloomber's friend Bob Diamond, the former the chief executive of Barclays Bank, forced to resign (abruptly) at that time in disgrace over the rate-rigging scandal for which Barclays has been fined £290m ($450m) for manipulating LIBOR rates. (See:Tuesday,  July 24, 2012, No Sparkle In Barclays’ Bob Diamond: Societal Mores Unmoored, What And Who We Honor Today- That Which We Used To Shun.)

(Above: Barclay's Bob Diamond as one of the symbolically toppling Indian statuettes losing its head in “And Then There Were None” made in 1945.)

I promised back then that I would revisit to write another Noticing New York article about how a growing list of Atlantic Yards supporters and perpetrators have been falling ignominiously by the wayside.  Here is what I said:

Add Mr. Diamond’s name, Robert E. Diamond Jr., to the lengthy roster of individuals involved in bringing into existence the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards and the Ratner/Prokhorov basketball stadium who have exited the scene in ignominy. Mr. Diamond is by no means the only individual involved in the perpetration of Atlantic Yards to wind up besmirched but we’ll save going into an enumeration of that long list for another day and another Noticing New York article.

Well, attending the alternative ribbon-cutting orchestrated by community opponents of the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” arena last week reminded me that I still needed to come back and fulfill presentation of the enumeration I earlier promised.

The alternative ribbon-cutting ceremony (as can be seen and heard in the video above) began with these remarks of Daniel Goldstein:

    Before we start we’d like to have a quick moment of silence for all of those who weren’t able to make it to the Broken Promise Land:

        •    Former Atlantic Yards executive Jim Stuckey, who last we heard is being sued for sexual harassment.

        •    Atlantic Yards cheerleader Sen. Carl Kruger, convicted and sentenced to nine years for corruption.

        •    Ratner’s Atlantic Yards Lobbyist Richard Lipsky, convicted of bribery.

        •    Atlantic Yards cheerleader and head of the Carpenters Union Local Sal Zarzana, indicted for extortion.

        •    Too many MTA & ESDC executives to count.

        •    The world’s most talked about starchitect, Frank Gehry.

        •    Former Forest City Ratner Executive and Political Fixer Bruce Bender, who left the firm and can’t be here today to F*[ck] The Bridge.

        •    And of course Barclays former Chief Officer Bob Diamond, forced to resign because of Barclays LIBOR interest rate-fixing scandal. Although there is no doubt he got his wish to USE Brooklyn to spread the bank’s global brand.

    Welcome Members of the Press. It is an honor to have you with us. We are lucky today to have for you local theater troop, The Land Grab Players. And what is even luckier for you, is that their ribbon cutting will only take about ten minutes, before you gotta go inside that building and spend 3 hours in hot air.

    This array of cronies present: the LIBOR FIXER CENTER RIBBON CUTTING Take it away Land Grabbers!

Goldstein’s list could obviously have been longer: In his willingness to keep things short Mr. Goldstein left out two other prominent non-attending politicians who were driven out of office after sullying themselves, perhaps because those politcians did stand right behind him at that moment in bobble-head effigy form: former governors Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson (see photo below and video above).

My July promise of an article with a roll-call of those departed in disgrace preceded the Vito Lopez/Shelly Silver sexual misconduct cover-up scandal that has now caused Atlantic Yards-supporting Lopez to resign his postion as Chair of the Kings County Democratic Party.  That scandal has so far not yet taken down Assemblyman Silver from his postion of speaker of the New York State Assembly but it gives some inkling of how Mr. Silver's political demise might come to pass.  (See this latest episode in the unfolding story about how one of Silver's staffers went into blogging drag to defend Silver's role in the coverup: Assembly Staffer Defends Speaker Silver By Posting Web Comments as a Woman, Monday, September 24, 2012.)

If Sheldon Silver left his office in ignominy it would knock out the last elected politician of a very short list of politicians who gave Atlantic Yards the only official approval it received from any elected officials: The approval came from only four elected individuals and the other three have already left in disgrace.

This sole approval to which I refer was the approval of Atlantic Yards by the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB).  The approval was required by a vote of three individuals, the aforementioned Governor Eliot Spitzer and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver together with senate leader Joe Bruno.  The approval then had to be accepted by State Comptroller Alan Hevesi.

We all know about the hypocritical scandal involving use of prostitutes (a crime Attorney General Spitzer once prosecuted) that forced Spitzer out of office.  Spitzer did not comport himself admirably with respect to Atlantic Yards.   Joe Bruno was convicted of corruption although he will need to be retried because the federal “honest-services” law he was found to have violated (which law makes it a crime “to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services”) was ruled to be insufficiently specific.  Alan Hevesi was forced out in scandal two days after he reviewed and accepted the PACB’s approval of Atlantic Yards.

The recital of names could be sounded out to a melody as a calumnically cynical Leonard Cohen-style march.  Instead of “Everybody Knows”* the refrains might be: . . . “Everybody gets . . . In- . .  dited;  Everybody gets . . . Be-- . .  Smirched.”

(* In part because of “Everybody Knows” Mr. Cohen has been asked why he has agreed to perform at the “Barclays” Center.)

What is it that draws such individuals, like moths, to the flame of eminent domain abuse?  One thing to remember is that eminent domain abuse is basically a subset of a bigger category of abuse: Crony capitalism.  So we are really looking at the question of what draws these moths to the flame of crony capitalism.  That being understood it is probably not so surprising that their wings ultimately wind up aflame for one kind of selfish conduct or another.

How absurd it is that politicians thought it was justifiable to abuse eminent domain to give Forest City Ratner a mega-monopoly over 30+ acres of Brooklyn sitting astride its most important subway lines?  The purpose of the mega-monopoly was to wipe out competition for Ratner and also, perhaps more important, to ensure that government officials would never have any negotiating power with the developer/subsidy collector to enforce promises, to demand quality of product or to keep costs in check.  In other words no ability to procure for the public any of the things that negotiating leverage can produce.

Atlantic Yards could not have happened had the Kelo v. New London, Connecticut case not paved the way for such abuse.   Kelo is the case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court that made eminent domain abuse legal.  Bad as the Kelo case was, the New York State courts have gone even further in legalizing such abuse in Kelo's wake.

The abuse of eminent domain didn’t work out in New London (it was focused on benefitting pharmaceutical firm Pfizer).  And it didn’t work out for for those perpetrating the New London scheme either.  I wrote about it here: Monday, December 21, 2009, Eminent Domain Abuse: The Gifts That Keep On Giving and the Gifts That Don’t.  Where once there were homes and a neighborhood there is now an expanse of empty lots.  Pfizer, the firm being catered to when the scheme was concocted, left town without any envisioned benefits materializing.

(Above, 36 Franklin Street, in New London, Connecticut, the bulldozed site where Susette Kelo's Little Pink House no longer stands.)

Meanwhile, as I wrote back then, cribbing from and quoting Jeff Benedict, the author of  “Little Pink House,” a book about the Kelo case, this is what happened to folks that brought the world the Kelo case ememinent domain abuse:

    • Former Governor John Rowland of Connecticut “pled guilty to felony conspiracy and was sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison.” (Rowland was charged with an extensive array of schemes to get kickbacks from contractors doing business with the state. After prison he was thrown a lifeline by a political pal and became the city of Waterbury’s economic development coordinator.)

    • Peter Ellef, former chief of staff to Gov. John Rowland, “was sentenced to thirty months in prison for his part in the scandal” (Mr. Ellef’s involvement with Rowland’s scandal involved taking some of his own kickbacks from contractors in the form of gold coins).

    • “The head of Pfizer who was behind this project is out.” The head of Pfizer from January 2001 was Hank McKinnell, who is not mentioned in Mr. Benedict’s book so Mr. Benedict was likely referring to George M. Milne (see below), president of Pfizer’s central reaserch who was very much involved. Mr. McKinnell, having come up through the Pfizer ranks where he was involved in strategic planning for the corporation, resigned in 2006 after an unpopular tenure presiding over declining stock prices that were attributed to an expansionist agenda where Pfizer acquired and merged into itself smaller companies unwisely bought for too much. Ultimately it was the board that was dissatisfied but “Yank Hank” was a refrain with employees. Ironically, while Pfizer trampled property rights in New London, Mr. McKinnell was reputedly a very aggressive defender of Pfizer’s own patents and intellectual property rights.

    • “The woman who ran the development agency that directed the bulldozers to knock the houses down [Claire L. Gaudiani]: Over 70% of the faculty members at Connecticut college signed a petition to have her lose her job as president, and she did.” (The New York Times ran a puff piece upon her departure full of praise, including from a Pfizer representative involved in pushing for the benefits Pfizer walked away from: “George M. Milne Jr., a college trustee who is also senior vice president at Pfizer Inc. and a member of the New London Development Corporation, of which Dr. Gaudiani is also president.” According to “Little Pink House” Mr. Milne is now a “venture capitalist and adjunct lecturer at Harvard and MIT.”

    • As Mr. Benedict makes the point, “So all the power brokers behind this case are out by the time the Supreme Court decision comes down.” He noted that the new governor of Connecticut, Jodi Rell, who replaced Rowland when he was forced to resign ultimately “takes the policy of open-checkbook” to clean up after her predecessor and reach a settlement with the homeowners . Not included in Mr. Benedict’s formal epilogue is information Tom Blumer provides about why that the 2006 deal was brokered:

    • “. . . infuriated city residents mounted what from all appearances was a successful petition drive to put the question of the city property takeover of the Kelo and Cristofaro properties on the ballot in just three weeks.”

    • “. . . a new party, One New London, whose express purpose was to prevent the New London Development Corporation from carrying out its Supreme Court-sanctioned actions, came out of nowhere and won two seats on the seven-seat City Council, losing out on a third seat by 19 votes”

    • At Columbia Mr. Benedict did make this related point: “But perhaps the most important thing in all of this is that if they hadn’t have stood up and lost the case you wouldn’t have the situation you have today which is that 44 states have either passed legislation or constitutional amendments to ban the kind of taking that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2005. Now if that’s not victory, I don’t know what is. If they had won the case that wouldn’t happen. . . . That’s what happens when one person stands up.”

    • “Every plaintiff from the eminent-domain lawsuit has left New London, vowing not to return.”

    • “Their houses get knocked down all except for the Pink House which is saved, is taken down board by board, and moved to another part of the city and rebuilt. It sits there today as a landmark and a testament to the case.”

    • Mr. Benedict ends where we began: “The former Fort Trumbull neighborhood is a barren wasteland of weeds, litter, and rubble.”

It should be noted that eminent domain abuse is considered to be technically legal.  Were that not the case the takings of property it permits would simply be considered abject examples of theft.

Daniel Goldstein’s list of  ne'er-do-wells to whom good riddance has now been said probably evolved from this earlier Develop Don’t’ Destroy Brooklyn-supplied starter list of seven indicted, disgraced, sued, or criminally guilty perps (politicians, political fixers, and political gamesmen) that includes supporting links to the relevant background stories of anti-social behaviors coming home to roust: A Ratner's Gallery of Cronies, Friends, Partners, Fixers and Shrill Supporters.

When I wrote the above referred to December 2009 Noticing New York article about the Kelo eminent domain case I included a longer list of those who have left the Atlantic Yards scene without giving a good account of themselves, (that started with a list DDDB had put out six months before).  Since 2009 the list has grown.  The list I have set forth below reprises names already mentioned in this article.  It also fills in the names of some of the government public authority officials that Mr. Goldstein referred to at the alternative ribbon-cutting as being too numerous to count.  It isn’t expanded to include the names of the Westchester politicians who were federally prosecuted for their interactions with Forest City Ratner in connection with the Ratner Ridge Hill project.

To be fair and clear, the list below is only the extensive list of those whom the eminent domain-abusing Atlantic Yards mega-project did not embrace very long or lovingly.  It is not necessarily or exclusively comprised of individuals who got their comeuppance or departed in disgrace for unseemly behavior although it does include such individuals of that character focused on at the beginning of this article.   . .  Still, it includes such people as Starchitect Frank Gehry: He was not forced from the scene for misdeeds but his reputation suffered in connection with his shilling association with Atlantic Yards and the cavalierly ignorant arrogance he displayed proclaiming that he viewed himself as “building a neighborhood practically from scratch.”  It also includes such people as ESDC head Marisa Lago, who seemed to think it was just fine and dandy that she believed that Atlantic Yards could easily take forty years to build even though her agency's environmental assessment documents represented that it would take no more than ten years to build.  Virtually by definition no one on this list came away from their dealings with the Atlantic Yards mega-project with clean hands.

Here is the long list:

    •    Starchitect Frank Gehry
    •    Landscape architect Laurie Olin

    •    Governors:

    •        George Pataki
    •        Eliot Spitzer
    •        David Paterson

    •    ESDC Heads:

    •        Charles Gargano
    •        Patrick Foye
    •        Avi Schick
    •        Marisa Lago
    •        Bob Wilmers
    •        Dennis M. Mullen

    •    MTA heads:

    •        Peter Kalikow
    •        Katherine Lapp
    •        Eliot Sander
    •        H. Dale Hemmerdinger (shortly after an ignominious Atlantic Yards approval)
    •        Jay Walder

    •    PACB Approvers in addition to Eliot Spitzer (Sheldon Silver is the only one not yet booted):

    •        PACB Approval member Joe Bruno.
    •        State Comptroller Alan Hevesi       

    •    Other culpable elected supporters:

    •        Kings County Democratic Party Chair Senator Vito Lopez
    •        Assemblyman Roger Green
    •        Senator Carl Kruger

    •    Team Ratner:

    •        Jim Stuckey
    •        Loren Riegelhaupt
    •        Randall Toure
    •        Richard Lipsky
    •        Bruce Bender
    •        Sal Zarzana

    •    “Team Nets”:

    •        Vince Carter
    •        Jason Kidd
    •        Richard Jefferson

    •    And, of course, the sparkling Mr. Robert J. Diamond, the former the chief executive of Barclays Bank, the LIBORously scandalous bank after which, thanks to our politicians, subway hubs and a city block with an arena have been named.

(I am not even sure this list is complete.  I am particularly not sure about the “Team Nets” list as I am not much of a sports fan.) 

I do not think that the answer in explaining why so many on this list have crashed and burned is simply to believe that all politicians and developers are corrupt.  I think the answer is that the ones attracted to eminent domain abuse and crony capitalism are.

(From the 1964 "Ten Little Indians" film: The diminishing group of specially privileged invitees unhappily contemplate the ominous information from the Judge that they are to be held accountable for crimes the law itself would blithely overlook.)

In the “Ten Little Indians” story the unseen hand of the murderer (a judge) was dealing out his version of justice to guilty individuals he deemed to have escaped their just desserts, those he proclaims “to be guilty of certain crimes which the law cannot touch.”   In real life, the eminent domain abuse theft at the core of Atlantic Yards went unpunished, treated as if it were legal. While there is no sentence-dispensing judge contriving it as in the Agatha Christie plot, it does seem as if comeuppances have a way of coming up for those individuals complicit in that land grab which, but for treating eminent domain abuse as legal (notwithstanding all its faux pretext), is the grandest of recent civic crimes.

Without the plot device of an unseen judge contriving the result these individuals seem to get lured to their justice-delivered fates by their own character: What drew them to eminent domain abuse and crony capitalism draws them also to the other selfish improprieties and illegal maneuvers for which they were ultimately punished.  This suggests a simple shortcut: What if theft by eminent domain abuse were made illegal again?  The way it should be.  Then we would not have to sit around, as if in a suspense novel, waiting for the unseen hand of fate to deliver fitting justice!

As for the suspense of who might be next little indian to meet comeuppance read the breaking story about about how as an extension of the Senator Kruger persecution, Richard Lipsky, former lobbyist for Bruce Ratner, is “spilling his guts about `numerous other persons’ under investigation by the feds ” with the prediction that his revelations will “send tremors through City Hall and the Albany statehouse.”  (See: September 25, 2012, Crooked Kruger lobbyist names names for feds: Court docs.)

Alternatives To The Scandalously Spawned, Scandalously Named Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” Center: Protest & Locally Nurtured Concerts

The kleptocratic story of how the Forest City Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov “Barclays” Center Brooklyn basketball arena was spawned and inflicted through to its imminent completion is an ugly one.  And then there's the name. . . The arena could have been named after any corporation ponying up some advertising dollars. .   and whatever name the arena, squeezed into its Brownstone Brooklyn location ultimately brandished, it was likely to be deemed an irksome synonym for ignominy.  Nevertheless, the demon gods overseeing the project’s incubation managed to short-cut more directly to ensure that result: This public-paid-for piece of Brooklyn sports the name of “Barclays,” the bank whose association with the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal appropriately evokes the arrogant primacy our society puts on having the interests of the 1% supersede those of the 99%.

There Are Alternatives!

It's good to know that there are alternatives when the onslaught of publicity for the arena makes it seem almost obligatory for every citizen to celebrate the arrival of this first slice of the Forest City Ratner/Mikhail Prokhorov mega-monopoly conceptualized as "Atlantic Yards," nominally 22 newly-bequeathed acres but actually a monolithic total of 30+ developer-controlled contiguous acres.  No, Not so . .  There are clearly superior alternatives to feeling obligated to join the celebration or start attending arena events: The arena’s arrival can be protested, and in preference to the arena’s plans for what sounds like some overgrown concert performance confections there are enticing homegrown local alternatives that offer the more intimate embrace of time spent with performers who may actually be more moral and truer to their roots.
   
Protesting the Arena Crime Scene

First, with respect to the protests: The initial opportunity comes up with a series of protesting events coinciding with the arena’s unveiling, emphasizing that the arena is a “Crime Scene.”  The events will run from a Wednesday, September 26th showing of the “Battle For Brooklyn” documentary, and a 7:00 PM  Thursday evening candlelight vigil through to Saturday, September 29.  Subsidy collector Ratner and his kindred spirit Mikhail Prokhorov, a politically-favored Russian oligarch, will want that weekend’s publicity to focus instead on the Jay-Z concert unveiling the arena at 8:00 PM, Friday, September 28th.  Jay-Z has been rewarded for his promotion of the arena and sell-out of the community with a 1% partnership interest in the developer’s deal.

More about the events at this website and this Facebook invitation page and as written about by Norman Oder at Atlantic Yards Report here:  Friday, September 07, 2012, "It's a Crime!" New web site targets Atlantic Yards failures, announces vigil, protests geared to arena opening weekend and Wednesday, September 12, 2012, An Occupy protest coming in response to Jay-Z's comments, but will it be just before his Sept. 28 concert?, and Tuesday, September 18, 2012, Atlantic Yards protesters list demands: new plan, reformed oversight, more developers, environmental review, new regulations.

Mr. Oder takes issue with whether Atlantic Yards can be technically described as a “crime,” suggesting that, more accurately, it is just part of the “culture of cheating,” the rubric under which Mr. Oder has been running a series of articles summing up how the mega-project has, across the board, been based upon strategies of deception and bad faith.  But denying the crime here overlooks how the government, itself, was used as an instrument of theft which is, after all, the definition of “kleptocracy,” where a politically connected elite steal from the less advantaged.

Those keeping careful score as to what defines a “crime” will tell you that in these situations the real crime isn't what is technically illegal, it is what gets redefined as legal in order to permit such behavior.  To give just two examples: That kind of redefining is what happened when the state and federal constitutional prohibitions on seizing private property for private benefit (including constitutional protections recently voted upon by New Yorkers) were rewritten out of existence by state agency skulduggery supported by judicial fiat (meaning that property that neighbor and senator Charles Schumer clearly knew wasn’t “blighted” was pretextually deemed to be so by collusive government officials so it could be taken by Ratner).  And that kind of scrapping of laws on the books is what happened when the MTA decided that it didn’t have to comply with recently enacted public authority reform legislation designed to prohibit its rigged deal with Ratner because it was sure no one was going to make them follow the law.

Alternative Concert Going

As for alternative concert going, (if you want to be distracted from such serious subjects by entertainment) about this time every year I have started publicizing the upcoming concert roster for First Acoustics concerts. (See: Wednesday, September 28, 2011, Getting Near to Holly Near: Performing This Saturday at First Acoustics (with John Bucchino and special guest Linda Tillery)- Plus Notes on Empire and Wednesday, February 25, 2009, Adding Something Off Topic: A Few Notes.)

This year’s season will premier Saturday (September 22nd at 8:00 PM) with Roosevelt Dime (fast banjo, thumping washtub, blaring brass- "Steamboat Soul") on a double bill with Honor Finnegan (a Bluesy soloist). . . I think I'm going to love Saturday night.

Here is the complete season line-up through to the culminating June 1st concert, (All dates are Saturday evenings at 8:00p.m. except for December 9 which is a Sunday afternoon at 3:00):

    •    September 22, 2012: ROOSEVELT DIME with Honor Finnegan

    •    October 6, 2012: BUSKIN & BATTEAU and FREEBO

    •    October 27, 2012:  RED MOLLY with Union Street Preservation Society

    •    November 3, 2012: SUZIE VINNICK with Friction Farm

    •    November 17, 2012: ANNA DAGMAR, ANTHONY DA COSTA and CAITLIN CANTY

    •    December 9, 2012 (This is the one on Sunday at 3:00 PM): BROOKLYN WOMEN OF SONG (Meg Braun, Jean Rohe and Carolann Solebello)

    •    March 23, 2013: BARNABY BRIGHT and DENI BONET

    •    April 20, 2013: SPUYTEN DUYVIL with Karyn Oliver

    •    May 18, 2013: PESKY J. NIXON with Kara Kulpa

    •    June 1, 2013: JONI MITCHELL'S BLUE: A 40th Anniversary Celebration

Based on my own past year's prior attendance of First Acoustics concerts, I especially, especially recommend the harmonies of Red Molly, and probably my favorite song that they perform is “May I Suggest” by Susan Warner.  Attending, you should have an opportunity to have the performers personally sign purchased copies of the group’s CDs.  Each of the Red Molly performers also has individual solo performance CDs.

You never know exactly what surprises might be in store: The last time I heard Red Molly they were on a First Acoustics double bill with the absolutely superb Pat Wicter.  Pat Wictor sang with Abbie Gardner, one of the Red Molly trio, “A Little Love Is Gonna Do” a song Mr. Wictor wrote that in my estimation is worthy of addition to the Great American Songbook canon.

Once when I had occasion to talk with Pat Wictor he told me that he considered it important to sing other people’s songs, to sing the classics, and to sing songs from the American Songbook; “It’s the only way you learn.” he told me.  Listening to his “A Little Love Is Gonna Do” I believe exactly what he said.  You see, First Acoustics is kind of environment where you might wind up having these kinds of thoughtful exchanges with the performers.

Speaking of learning by singing the classics, Abbie Gardner, Wictor’s singing partner for “A Little Love Is Gonna Do,” has a solo album of American Songbook classics, “My Craziest Dream.”  The album wasn’t there for me to pick up the night I heard Red Molly but I found it later on emusic.  It includes Milton Ager’s “Happy Feet,” a song I cherish which ought to be performed more.  The album was done working with Ms. Gardner’s father, pianist Herb Gardner, and those with a Noticing New York sensibility may want to note that it includes a song written and performed by Mr. Gardner that fills a critical NYC gap, a rollicking anthem in praise of the borough of Staten Island.

Everybody Ought To Know, But Do They?

Last year when I covered the First Acoustics line-up I gave special attention to Sloan Wainwright, and in that regard I noted that she is pedigreed via familial interrelationship with, it seems, an entire universe of famous musical performers, including not only the constellation of those who are Wainwrights, but also the McGarrigle Sisters and the Roche Sisters.  It turns out that her web of relations also connect her to singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, who with improbable incongruity was one of the first performers announced to be performing at the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” Center.

Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” one of his very most famous songs, has an inherent relevance to the “Barclays” Center saga, including lines like, “Everybody knows the fight was fixed- The poor stay poor, the rich get rich-That's how it goes-Everybody knows.”  Everybody ought to know, but is Mr. Cohen among those who actually do?

It might be suspected that Mr. Cohen did not know the history of corruption and government malfeasance when he signed on for his gig at the “Barclays” Center and, in fact, last May after the announcement, Develop Don’t Destroy wrote an open letter to Barbra Streisand and Leonard Cohen respecting their scheduled performances at the arena, holding open the possibility that “as artists with a history of philanthropy, social justice and civil liberty advocacy, and protest lyrics” Streisand’s and Cohen’s acceptance of performance dates at the arena might mean that they had yet “to learn about the history behind the venue” with which they were associating themselves.

Streisand and Cohen have yet to respond to DDDB’s letter.  I have reached out independently to Mr. Cohen for a Noticing New York article on the subject and have similarly received no response.  I reached out through the obvious official channels first.  Because of Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” special relevance to the “Barclays” Center saga I also reached out to Sharon Robinson with whom he co-wrote that song, including when I was in her home town of Los Angeles.  I received no response.  Mr. Cohen’s multiple familial connections to the musical universe afford other possible opportunities to elicit a response that I have begun to follow up on.   I have received no response.

I don’t know what Mr. Cohen and Ms. Streisand may ultimately do with respect to performances at the “Barclays” Center.  Their ducking of the issues presented to them make it seem somewhat more likely that they and/or their booking staff may have considered and discounted the issues of disreputation associated with the arena prior to signing commitments.

Some say that since the arena has arrived it somehow must now be accepted as a fact of life.  I don’t think so.  There may come a time when a sufficient aging of the sins may be curative or ameliorative.  Perhaps some will shun the arena permanently, but it does seem that, no matter what, there should be a period of time when performers and potential patrons alike would pledge out of conscience to eschew the arena. . . perhaps for five years, or maybe the biblical seven years, as in seven lean years?

To make sure that during those seven years the agents booking performers into gigs don't inadvertently book them into a place like the "Barclays" Center, principled performers can start including a clause in their engagement contracts protecting themselves.  Clauses that protect the principles and reputation of the performers have, to date, been referred to as "reverse morals" clauses.  Perhaps in the future they will be better known as "Barclays Center" clauses.

Not everyone will stay away from the arena, and I am not even suggesting pursuing obtaining such a pledge from performers who obviously give little apparent thought to matters of conscience.  Still, mightn’t such a pledge and a persisting consciousness of the arena’s history have just enough negative effect on the arena’s financial health, on Ratner’s and Prokhorov’s ability to pay off their bonds and to make their presumed profit, enough negative effect on Barclay’s promotion of its disreputable name to start settling some of the scores that need to be settled?

In the meantime, as we give the "Barclays" Center a wide berth, we will have more intimate venues for entertainment that are superior anyway, like First Acoustics . . . .

What?  You say I did not address an alternative for sports fans?  Well, I have consistently suggested it is better to get out and enjoy some exercise than to be a voyeur to the questionable business of professional sports.  (And that sets aside the fact that Brownstone Brooklyn was the wrong place into which to squeeze an outsized sports venue and that it was wrong to use it to spearhead and distract attention from an eminent domain-abusing land grab of vast proportions.)  For more of my thoughts on the travails of sports start with these articles on sports fandom.