ERROL LOUIS’ COLUMN IN THE DAILY NEWS:

I didn’t think it was possible, but the already bitter public fight over Brooklyn’s $4 billion Atlantic Yards project has turned even nastier.
Opponents of the plan to build housing and an 18,000-seat professional sports arena in Prospect Heights – led by deluded hotheads who have lost every regulatory, legal and political attempt to halt the project – have decided to play what they no doubt imagine is a devastating racial trump card. Upon discovering that the British bank Barclays plans to pay hundreds of millions for the right to have its name on the arena, the opponents have dragged out the bank’s past financial connections to the slave trade, the Holocaust and South African apartheid.
"BLOOD MONEY: Nets arena to be named after bank founded on slave money," screamed the headline of The Brooklyn Paper, a free weekly that publishes a compendium of complaints about Atlantic Yards. "Bruce Ratner has stabbed his black supporters in the back," the paper’s editorial page said. "Naming an arena after a slave-trading family is a slap in the face," the paper said, urging politicians "to stand up for blacks, for history, for integrity and, indeed, for all of Brooklyn and urge [Atlantic Yards developer] Bruce Ratner to find another corporate partner."
City Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents the area, called Barclays "a bank with blood on their hands" and was quoted by the paper as calling black supporters of Atlantic Yards "just tools used by Ratner to get this project passed."
Gimme a break.
I readily concede, and have no doubt, that Barclays – like many companies with household names – profited from an untold number of monstrous crimes over the centuries.
But Barclays is hardly alone – and the people and newspapers trying to claim moral ground by throwing around terms like "integrity" and playing politics with horrors like the slave trade and the Holocaust know this. Or they should.
JPMorgan Chase, for instance, has multiple, shameful connections to the slave trade and the Holocaust. According to historians and activists who have filed federal lawsuits seeking reparations, Wachovia, Aetna and CSX, the railroad company, all benefited from the slave trade.
I hope The Brooklyn Paper, which raised this issue so self-righteously, will now practice what it preaches and publicly renounce any advertising dollars from Chase, Wachovia – Barclays, of course – and other institutions built on "blood money."
And since we’re on the subject of names, it’s worth noting that The Brooklyn Paper is headquartered on Washington St., and Washington Ave. runs right through the middle of James’ Council district. Both streets are named after our first President, a well-known slavemaster, so maybe James – if she’s serious – should invoke the Council’s power to scrub that name from public view.
Better still, everybody posturing on the links-to-slavery issue should take a deep breath, get off their high horses, and join the current fight to pass a strong law in Albany to stop human trafficking – a modern form of slavery that is going on in New York City right now.
Unlike Atlantic Yards, it’s a fight they might actually win.

Originally published on January 25, 2007

FROM GERSH AT THE BROOKLYN PAPER:

Errol:


I enjoyed reading your column today. You made a lot of points that are
certainly worth debating (too bad our side in that debate was ignored).

But, most important, I’d be remiss if I didn’t criticize one small point in the column. You wrote that The Brooklyn Paper publishes "a compendium of complaints" about Atlantic Yards.


I’m appalled that you, as a newspaper employee!, would liken good,
old-fashioned, shoe-leather investigative reporting on Brooklyn’s
largest real-estate development — one that involves hundreds of
millions of public money — to mere whining. This award-winning
newspaper has come up with scoop after scoop about misinformation and,
yes, lies, told by our public officials — the very people who should be
protecting us from boondoggles — but your intellectually dishonest
phrase ("compendium of complaints") reduces all that hard work to the
level of bloggers who merely whine about traffic. How would your
paper’s investigative reporters feel if a columnist read their fine
stories, but dismissed their findings in such an off-hand way? Oh, I
forgot, your paper hasn’t DONE any investigative work on Atlantic
Yards, so I guess we’ll never know.

As I said, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that bothered me.

Gersh Kuntzman
Editor in chief
The Brooklyn Paper
http://www.brooklynpaper.com

Gersh Kuntzma