NYU's Michael Steinhardt, Wall Street and Golan Heights Oil Connection: Part 11

NYU’s Land Grabbing Project and Steinhardt’s Cuomo Campaign Contribution

Coincidentally, besides being funded by a Wall Street speculator who has collaborated with an Israeli power elite that continues to gobble up and exploit Palestinian land in the West Bank for new settlements and Syrian land in the occupied Golan Heights for Genie Energy to exploit, the NYU Administration, itself, plans to continue to gobble up and exploit neighborhood land in Downtown Manhattan in a big way in the 21^st-century. As the Village Voice noted in a Feb. 20, 2013 article: 

“Some neighbors are still bitter about NYU's previous fits of expansion in the 1960s and again in the '90s; in both periods, the university earned its reputation as an insatiable beast swallowing entire neighborhoods. But the current proposal goes much, much further…Dubbed `NYU 2031,’" the plan calls for…new construction…in the two blocks bound on the south and north by Houston and 3rd streets and on the east and west by Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place. The construction would…entail the demolition of the historically significant 1959 Washington Square Village Garden…It would also renege on promises it made 50 years ago, when it built the existing residential towers, to not further crowd the area…”

Yet the Democratic Administration of former Democratic New York Governor Mario Cuomo—Andrew Cuomo—has apparently not been that eager to pass state legislation which would prohibit or block tax-exempt and “non-profit” NYU from gobbling up more land in New York state for private, institutional expansion purposes. Nor was New York Governor Cuomo II apparently that eager to criticize the militaristic, right-wing Netanyahu regime in Israel/Palestine for ordering an Israeli military attack on people in Gaza between July 7 and Aug. 26, 2014 that killed 1,662 Palestinian civilians, including 519 Palestinian children and 297 Palestinian women, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

One reason might be because NYU Trustee and “Birthright Israel” founder Steinhardt apparently made a big campaign contribution to Andrew Cuomo’s re-election campaign fund in 2014. As the New York Times observed in its July 15, 2014 issue, “Mr. Cuomo…drew individual donations from a variety of real estate, financial and entertainment elites, including $40,000 from Michael Steinhardt, a hedge fund expert…”

(end of part 11)