Yes, he's here. Scott Turner with his unique and interesting take on the world. Brought to you by Miss Wit, the t-shirt queen of Red Hook.

Greetings Pub Quiz Foreign Investors…

 

Wow — the weather turns cooler and the weirdness comes out to
play.  It's like the full moon's bought a condo in the skies above our
fair city.

 

Sources say that by the time you've read this, the announcement will come down: Bruce Ratner is selling the New Jersey Nets to Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian oligarch and that country's richest man.

 

 

The deal could — could –  go like this: Prokhorov buys the team for a ceremonial price, likely $1.  He'd then loan Ratner $700 million to build the Atlantic Yards basketball arena.  That would help Ratner beat the IRS's December 31st tax-free-bonds deadline, saving him hundreds of millions of dollars on the taxpayers' dime.

 

Brooklyn would then have a basketball team owned by a
mercurial playboy Russian oligarch who was arrested in the French alps
and charged with prostitution and pals with Vladimir Putin.

 

It continues Bruce Ratner's running theme: BROOKLYN CAN'T GET IT DONE. 
The sad fact is, Bruce Ratner is skint.  He doesn't have the dough for
Atlantic Yards, can't get more public funding, the banks aren't lending
to him, and his only choice is a Russian oligarch — a class of
business practitioners with reputations in the company of robber barons
and Sham-wow pitch men.

 

Himself from Cleveland and the Upper East Side…architects from Los Angeles and Indiana…landscape designers from Philly…construction
management firms also from Philly…corporate sponsors from all over
the country…and now a majority owner of the Nets from Russia.

 

 

It'll be interesting to see what the BUILD AMERICAN unions
in this town have to say about this.  If this boondoggle comes to pass,
they'll still be working for Ratner, but they'll be building a shrine
for Make Better of Russian Hoops Boys.

Prokhorov posted a blog today confirming the move.  His reason for the transaction?  To use the NBA to
further Russian basketball interests.  Affordable housing, jobs, the
rebirth of Brooklyn?  Mmm…not so much on Prokhorov's mind.  He ends
the blog by saying "I think that there will be many skeptics (among
them false patriots), but that will just make it more interesting as we
move forward."  (Full text here.)

 

 

Wow…maybe he does know what he's getting into here in Brooklyn.

 

This comes on the heels of the ACORN controversy, the one
where they were caught on video giving faux hookers and pimps business
advice.  ACORN is one of Bruce Ratner's I've Got Cred hirlings for the Atlantic Yards project.

 

When news of the latest ACORN controversy broke, Ratner kept
quiet, letting his friends stay thrown under a traffic jam of buses for
nearly a week.  Not until Michael O'Keeffe's I-Team blog at the New York Daily News did Ratner, via a cantankerous spokesperson, come to his allies' defense.

 

Make no mistake…the attacks on ACORN are the rusty tool of
today's reactionary stenchmachines.  Any
working-class/poor-persons/people-of-color/immigrant/grass roots group
is in the rifle crosshairs of politicians looking to score red-meat
points with their constituencies.  All this ACORN stuff is way overstimulating for Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk.  If they wore dark blue dresses, by now they're probably ruined from all the over-excitable couldn't-help-it Lewinskian stains.

 

Still, ACORN's machinations are another unseemly mark in Ratner's minus column.

 

Only in our present-day Bloombergian metropolis could a guy like Ratner stay shiny for this long.

 

Finally, there was an alien visitation this past weekend — in the
form of a mysterious conical light in the night sky over the East
Coast.  Authorities say it was a "weather rocket."  A weather rocket?!  That's what they said about Roswell in '47.  Weather balloon, actually.  You know how the U.S. government likes to roll — oldies but goodies. 

 

Hang on — it's gonna be a very bumpy ride this autumn here in Brooklyn.