Wonders never cease, likely because neither do lies.

Bruce Ratner's become the poster child for bait-and-switch prevarications the last five years. FFFP readers know that. So do the wide-ranging communities who've been fighting Ratner's Atlantic Yards project the last five years.

Ratner's latest p.r. stunt, offering Nets tickets to the jobless, continues his shoddy and increasingly frantic plays for sympathy, manufactured good will and all-American publicity.

The conventional wisdom says there's no such thing as bad publicity. Bruce Ratner is discovering that publicity that backfires is something else altogether.

The New Jersey Nets' plan is to offer free game tickets to job seekers. The Nets would pass on the hopeful applicants' resumes to the team's official sponsors. In return, the applicants get those tickets. This isn't the first time Ratner's played on peoples hopes and fears.

Offering Nets tickets as an inducement is a lot like paying someone with Monopoly money. The team, gutted of star players in a desperate bid to land LeBron James two years from now, is mediocre at best. Pre-season prognosticators don't have New Jersey even making the playoffs.

If this scheme were offered by someone without Ratner's dreadful track record, it could well be a good thing. Create an opportunity, say thanks with a small gesture. But Bruce Ratner, as usual, has ulterior and very malfeasant motives having nothing to do with helping the unemployed lose the "un."

This ticket scheme mirrors the strategy Ratner has deployed in Brooklyn, where he's exploited peoples' fears over affordable housing and jobs to gain support for the Atlantic Yards project. AY would provide neither jobs or affordable apartments in near the numbers being thrown at low- and middle-income communities throughout the borough.

It gets worse. The Nets' tickets-for-resumes scheme is cheap, stingy and laughable. It offers 1,500 tickets over the next two months. Starting with Tuesday night's tilt against Cleveland, that's 18 games.

Bruce Ratner's big helping hand to the tri-state region's unemployed masses is a scant 83 tickets per game.

Eighty-three tickets per game.

..in an arena with a capacity of 19,968.

For just the next two months.

Attendance is so bad at the Meadowlands that the Nets have been forced to hire Play By Play, a service that helps fill empty arenas. Subscribers to the service pay little more than service charges for Nets tickets. Even then, a subscriber has to actually want to attend a Nets game. No amount of discounting can lead a horse to the fetid pool of talent at the Izod Center if it doesn't want to.

Astonishingly, Ratner's getting good-guy props from the local media for this callous and exploitive stunt. Every local paper and a lot of blogs have written glowingly.

Ratner's not a tiger that changes his stripes. Knowing his m.o., and a simple act of arithmetic, pulls the curtain back on Ratner's latest not-what-it-seems machination.

The Nets do say they're not guaranteeing job-seekers will end up with a job. But, you know, that's not in the first paragraph either. Just like Atlantic Yards' famously hyped "Jobs Hoops Housing" doesn't mention how few jobs, how expensive the hoops, how luxury and unaffordable the housing..

New Jersey's unemployed will soon discover what Brooklynites have come to know, the hardest of ways -- Bruce Ratner offers cheap, disposable trinkets to get people on board. Even before the new converts are judged expendable, the benefits evaporate like dwindling rivulets in a dry, barren desert.

In this season of hope and change, some things remain insidiously hopeless and never, ever change.