Elsewhere: Hillary, Newtown Creek, Widget!

Since you give no context to Errols' pitiful quote, here is what Errol didn't write and you didn't provide. First from the Amsterdam News, then followed by the paper he writes for:

Barclays' apartheid past further taints Atlantic Yards project
by TANANGACHI MFUNI
Amsterdam News Staff
Originally posted 1/25/2007
http://www.amsterdamnews.org/news/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=75661&sID=4

The Atlantic Yards Nets stadium isn't the only controversial "Atlantic" project banking giant Barclays is affiliated with.
The British bank--which announced last Thursday it purchased the naming rights to the divisive Brooklyn arena--also invested in the trans-Atlantic slave trade 300 years ago, angry Brooklyn leaders say. Barclays also has a history of profiting from South Africa's apartheid regime and the Jewish holocaust.
"The reason why they are the largest bank in the world is because they financed slavery, supported apartheid in South Africa and took financial awards from holocaust survivors," charged Downtown Brooklyn Councilwoman Letitia James in a phone interview.

BLOOD MONEY
James and other elected officials including Councilman Charles Barron oppose the yet-to-be-built 20,000-seat Barclays Center. The naming rights that cost Barclays upwards of $300 million last 20 years.
"This is blood money...this is a slap in our faces," said Barron, vowing to protest the arena's naming.
The brouhaha is the latest storm in the ongoing fight between Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner and members of the downtown Brooklyn community. Community members complain that the 17 skyscrapers and stadium Ratner plans to erect as soon as 2009 will pollute and congest the neighborhood and price out residents and small business owners from the bustling community.
The Barclays deal marks a major setback for Ratner. Over the past two years the company courted the community's support, going as far as to sign an unprecedented Community Benefits Agreement with neighborhood leaders last year promising affordable housing, a community center and chapel among various perks for the diverse area.
The partnership with Barclays comes as a surprise and something of a smack in the face to many of Ratner's biggest Black supporters.
"I knew nothing about that," said Rev. Herbert Daughtry, minister of Brooklyn's House of the Lord Church. A vigorous supporter of Ratner, Daughtry for decades demanded reparations from companies that profited from slavery.
"I'm profoundly concerned about it because I know a little bit about the history of the Barclays brothers who started the bank and who were involved in the slave trade," said Rev. Daughtry speaking with the AmNews by phone. "The bank is definitely linked to the slave trade," Daughtry concluded.

BARCLAYS' DEFENSE
A spokesman from Barclays would not admit a direct relationship between the bank and the slave trade. However, Peter Truell explained in a phone interview that because of the ubiquity of the slave trade, many financial institutions at the height of the industry "had clients with companies that profited from slavery," including Barclays.
Truell maintained that during the 18th century the Barclays owners belonged to a religious sect that was anti-slavery. "Many of the original founders were Quakers," said Truell. The spokesman recounted the story of owner David Barclays, who in the 1770s released enslaved people he owned in North America.
During the 1980s Barclays also became the subject of protest because of its branches in South Africa during the apartheid regime.
"We got out of South Africa when we chose to. We had pressure on both sides," said Truell. Barclays served both the pro-apartheid Boar government and later following the enforced regime change, the anti-apartheid African National Conference (ANC). In 2002, a group of South African apartheid survivors called Khulumani Support Group filed a lawsuit in a New York district court demanding reparations from Barclays. Though as recently as November 2006, the group suit was dismissed, they continue to appeal.
To date the bank has not formally admitted to wrongdoing nor made reparations to people of African descent, Truell said. However, Barclays has diligently sought to return millions of dollars worth of assets to Holocaust survivors frozen by the bank during World War II.

LET BYGONES BE BYGONES?
Some local community leaders have pooh-poohed concerns by Barclays' Brooklyn opponents. "This is nothing more than a cynical attempt to block a project of critical importance to Black families," said New York ACORN head Bertha Lewis in a statement. The activist, who negotiated thousands of affordable housing units be included in the Atlantic Yards project, suggested that Barclays' history is water under the bridge.
"Today's civil rights agenda is about building more affordable housing so that our families can have a place to live in Brooklyn, not about the wrongs of a corporation decades or centuries ago," said Lewis.
Councilwoman James couldn't disagree more: "I reject the notion that the past is the past." The councilwoman wants Ratner to "rescind the contract [with Barclays] and go with a local bank like Carver," she said, speaking of the Black-owned American bank. Other opponents would like to see Barclays pay reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans living in Brooklyn.
"If you're guilty morally you have to pay a debt," said Rev. Daughtry. "They're still drawing down interest on the business they started on the blood of our people," he said.
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Bank on a Barclays controversy
BY MICHAEL O'KEEFFE
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/story/490632p-413265c.html

Steak and fish were the entrees for the business and political leaders who attended Thursday's luncheon at the Brooklyn Museum to hear Nets executives announce that Barclays will pay more than $300 million for the naming rights to the Nets' proposed 18,000-seat arena.
For dessert, Mayor Bloomberg served up great big bowls of praise for the London-based bank. Bloomberg announced that Barclays had agreed to spend an additional $2.5 million to renovate Brooklyn basketball courts and sponsor youth hoops clinics. Then he applauded the company as "a good corporate citizen."

Outside the museum, opponents of Ratner's $4 billion Atlantic Yards project braved snow flurries and biting cold to tell a different story: Barclays, they said, has spent the past 250 years profiting from the slave trade, South African apartheid, and other chapters of human misery.

City Councilwoman Letitia James, a vocal critic of the Atlantic Yards plan, was outraged by the Nets' deal with Barclays. "This is more than just a checkered past," James said in a phone interview. "This is a bank with blood on their hands. The mayor of New York should hang his head in shame."

The Nets' deal with Barclays may be one of the most profitable naming-rights deals ever, but it also illustrates the pitfalls these deals can bring for sports franchises. Enron, for example, agreed in 1999 to pay the Houston Astros more than $100 million to name their new ballpark Enron Field; three years later, after Enron became the largest corporation in history to file for bankruptcy, the Astros bought back the rights.

Barclays, one of the oldest and largest financial institutions in the world, is hardly a stranger to controversy. Critics say the company, which dates back to the 1750s, was founded on profits from the slave trade. More recently, Barclays was the target of countless protests by antiapartheid activists who claimed Barclays provided important financial support for the South Africa apartheid regime, a government that was scorned for decades by the international community for human rights abuses.

Barclays spokesman Peter Truell says it is unfair to claim that the bank was born from slave-trade profits. One of Barclays' founders was a Quaker at a time when the sect's abolitionist views were considered radical; if Barclays did profit from the slave trade, he added, it is only because slavery was an integral part of the British economy in the 18th century.

The company pulled out of South Africa in 1986 under fire from human-rights groups, Truell acknowledged, but it was warmly welcomed back a decade later by the nation's post-apartheid government. Barclays, Truell added, has made a significant investment in South Africa that will lead to improved standards of living for that nation.

But Washington, D.C., attorney Michael Hausfeld, who is representing South Africans who filed a federal lawsuit in 2002 that claims Barclays and dozens of other corporations provided support for the apartheid regime that tortured and imprisoned them, said time hasn't healed all wounds.

"I commend Barclays for being part of the resurgence of South Africa," said Hausfeld, whose case was dismissed by a Manhattan federal judge in 2006 and is now being considered by an appeals court. "But there are people today who are still suffering the effects of what happened three, four, five decades ago. Why should they be swept under the carpet because a bank says it happened long ago?"

Has Atlantic Yards risked losing some of its strongest supporters by signing a deal with a bank that has long been accused of profiting from centuries of African suffering?

Rev. Herbert Daughtry of the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, one of the black community's most prominent supporters of the project, says he is troubled by the team's association with Barclays.

"I'm very profoundly concerned about it," Daughtry said last week. "They kept it secret and I didn't learn about it until I read about it in the paper yesterday. I am planning on having a conversation about this with Mr. (Bruce) Ratner (the Nets' owner)."

Other African-American supporters of the project say Barclays' past should remain in the past. "Today's civil rights agenda is about building affordable housing so black and Latino families can have a place to live in Brooklyn," said Bertha Lewis of ACORN, "not about the wrongs of a corporation decades or centuries ago."

Originally published on January 21, 2007