I see this as old school liberalism shifting power to a favored class.
Posted on 06/25/2005 8:17:22 AM PDT by snowsislander
Contact: Rhonda Spears, 202-861-6766 or rspears@usmayors.org; Elena Temple, 202-861-6719 or etemple@usmayors.org, both of the United States Conference of Mayors
WASHINGTON, June 24 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a statement of the United States Conference of Mayors Executive Director Tom Cochran on Supreme Court ruling on City of New London Vs. Kelo case:
"The United States Conference of Mayors policy states that the nation's mayors support the right of local governments to retain eminent domain to promote economic development in their individual cities.
"City officials continue to act in a most judicious manner as they exercise fair and balanced judgment in protecting the rights of property owners while planning for the city's overall economic viability.
"The Supreme Court joins with The United States Conference of Mayors, as well as the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties, the International City/County Management Association, the National Council of State Legislators, the Council of State Governments, and the International Municipal Lawyers Association in recognizing that without the use of eminent domain, cities cannot make the changes necessary to sustain healthy economic and demographic growth.
"The power of eminent domain provides elected officials at all levels of governments one of the basic tools they need to ensure the growth and well-being of their communities."
No, I am not in favor of such FDI taking advantage of our newly weakened ownership positions as citizens (please take a look at my profile to see what I think of our massive sale of debt to foreigners, and I am just as unpleased about seeing our assets as well going to wide foreign ownership), rather I think it is a factor that we should recognize.
I would say state and county politicians are equally empowered by this ruling.
OK, it seems we are not in contention- and yes, I suppose it is worth recognizing, however, I do think that the benefit from any foreign investment- if any- are greatly outweighed by the negative consequences of this decision, and I suspect you agree with me.
ping
"Perhaps for domestic investors, but as the poster Vicomte13 astutely pointed out yesterday, this will likely spur at least some international investors to give more consideration to such investments since obviously there is now a large advantage given to investors over small owners of property."
What I wrote applies to domestic investors in real estate as well, so long as they are associated with LARGE development enterprises.
What the US Supreme Court did does indeed make title to land in the United States subject to local political control. Local governments may now shift the ownership of land between private owners in order to secure what is, in the opinion of the local government, the best use of land. Private owners who are expropriated must be paid "fair value", which is generally based upon tax assessment rolls, which are themselves generally rather outdated and do not reflect the true market value of the property. However, since people pay their property taxes based on these assessed values and do not complain that, no, they should be paying more in taxes because their land is worth more, it is difficult to argue that the city has undervalued the property when a taking comes. All of the OTHER reasons to contest the taking have been removed by this decision. Before, cities had to fight legally to justify doing as they did. Now, the burden is on the individual expropriated landowner to prove that the city acted irrationally or unfairly in doing as it did.
This is American federalism at its finest. The decision is pressed down to the very lowest level: a town's planning and zoning board, which is generally composed of appointees who themselves are part of the real estate profession (this is why they seek out these position). The federal government has been eliminated from the process by the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has said that there is no constitutional issue involved here. They have put everything on a rational basis. If the local zoning and planning commission says, in their judgment, that your house is better served as the property of a higher user, then the property is condemned, you are paid based on the assessed value on the assessor's rolls (and have to prove that the assessment is wrong and undervalued: the burden of proof is on the land owner being expropriated, and if he does not prove his case, the town wins), and the higher-use developer obtains the property from the town at a negotiated price, probably higher than what you are paid as the legal "fair value", since this is a different transaction between different parties.
Now, the clear winners in this arrangement are the private investors and developers with the most money. Money in America means strong political connections, especially at the local level where there is generally no outside economic interest and so the largest pool of money that takes an interest dominates. The Supreme Court has eliminated federal oversight or care in this area. It's a local issue, just as the American Founding Fathers envisioned, at least by some arguments.
In such an arrangement, the developer always wins, and in a competition between developers, the high bidder always wins. Clearly, the biggest corporate interests and developers will prevail in such competition, and it is in the interests of capital investors, foreign or domestic, to place their money with the largest development organizations.
Indeed, it is almost biblical. Jesus said that to those who have, more shall be given, while to those who have little, such little as they have shall be taken from them and given to those who have. Of course, Jesus was not referring to US land law.
What this decision did, from my own perspective of dealing in real estate investment with international capital pools, is make the US a more desireable place for large development projects. The biggest fish now have no federal barrier to being able to make large developments more quickly, local officials are always easy to persuade with promises of larger tax revenues and profits and development, and individuals - who always are the problem when they resist, can be more easily swept aside than elsewhere.
Historically, we should remember that England's rise to the economic prominence which resulted in English power that most English and American people are proud of, historically, started out as an agricultural revolution with the Enclosure Acts, whereby the British Crown used its power of eminent domain to sweep away all of the petty yeoman farmers and peasants from the land, enclose it into large estates for the merchant and noble grandees, and thereby make the English agricultural economy much more efficient.
The large pool of disaffected and displaced agriculturals were then available to be transported to America to increase the imperial wealth, or impressed into the Navy or the Army to improve British power vis a vis her continental rivals.
The Supreme Court decision of the US is redolent of the old Enclosure Acts of England, and is quite in the Common Law tradition. It offers an excellent climate for the more-rapid amassing of land by large developers and the elimination of the problem of local resistance by mere small landholders, thereby making investments in American development projects more likely to produce a quicker and favorable return for international and domestic investors who choose the larger investment houses.
Of course it is not so good for the property security of small stakeholders and individual homeowners in areas that are middle or lower class, and their property values may well be negatively affected. But this merely makes such land, if desired, even cheaper for the large developers who might desire it.
The ideal situation, from a commercial developers perspective, is booming values in large commercial development projects and deeply sagging individual residential property values, with ease of removal of single residences and conversion of cheap residential land into higher-margin commercial land or high-end residential land.
It is quite cruel, but the beauty of capitalism, when it is not interfered with by government regulation, is that profits are maximized and idiosyncratic individual desires are not permitted to stand in the way of profitability, because market forces overwhelm them. The Supreme Court of the US just made the US a more desireable place than it was before for the top developers, their investors and professional service people who profit from servicing them.
I see this as old school liberalism shifting power to a favored class.
Or Fascism.
Thank God I live outside city limits. Way outside.
This SCOTUS has come up with some of the worst decisions in history. Not all the worst ones, but some very very bad ones. The Lawrence sodomy case, and the no death penalty for "child" murderers under 18 come to mind.
If this disgusting decision isn't somehow undone, I can't even imagine the future.
Here is a copy of the letter I sent to the Conference of Mayors:
RE: New London v Kelo
To paraphrase the immortal words of John Paul Jones, "We have not yet begun to fight!"
While the concept of eminent domain powers for public use is well established in our country, the use of eminent domain powers to transfer land from one private citizen to another while the city, county or redevelopment agency collects a commission for the transaction in the form of increased tax revenues is an outrageous twisting of the Founders' original intent.
The American citizens of this Nation will not sit still for this egregious usurpation of power. You are on public notice that we will litigate your collectivist entities into the ground, and vote elected officials out of office until this right is wronged.
Contemptuously yours,
K.W. Myers
Sparks, Nevada
What this means is that the citizens have to take an interest in what their elected officials and their staff are doing. The Mayors and City Managers like this. The Citizens elect the Mayors and elect those who appoint City Managers. Ultimate power resides in the People. But, the People need to get off their country estates and come to town for City Council meetings now and then.
Thank goodness for Justice Thomas, documenting the fall of the Republic one dissent at a time.
Very good news for the U.N. and those who are implementing communism, you mean.
http://www.americanpolicy.org/un/main.htm
UN’s Agenda 21 Targets Your Mayor
"What this means is that the citizens have to take an interest in what their elected officials and their staff are doing. The Mayors and City Managers like this. The Citizens elect the Mayors and elect those who appoint City Managers. Ultimate power resides in the People. But, the People need to get off their country estates and come to town for City Council meetings now and then."
You underestimate the collective action problem.
I agree that IF people all over America were to take a deep interest in local government and uniformly move forward, in large numbers, to assert political control over local government, that this US Supreme Court decision would be vitiated by the unwillingness of any local government to actually use the power.
But the reality in the United States is that there are two organized parties, and Americans ridicule any effort to establish any party organization, or political effort outside of the national parties. It is in the interest of the national Republican and Democratic parties, for different reasons, to uphold this Supreme Court decision.
Parties extend to the local level, and local Republican and Democratic politicians dream of rising in their careers to be national politicians. Nobody aspires to be a zoning and planning board commissioner as his final political position. The national parties will not encourage any sort of Democratic or Republican Party local opposition to the eminent domain power. They will discourage local politicians who try to make it an issue, and local politicians, solicitous of their careers, will not (most of them) buck the national party.
And so there will be a steady but firm pull from the national Republican and Democratic parties to let this issue go, local politicians will mostly respect that pull, and in a few months' time, people will forget about this decision. Particularly since MOST people's property will not be threatened any time soon, it will all fade into an abstraction. There will, of course, be SOME people who are harmed by the decision, but they will be localized here and there, there will be no national disclosure of it, and the new law made by the Supreme Court will simply stand.
Local politics are still Republican and Democratic, neither party is going to permit its locals to truly oppose the expanded eminent domain power, and Americans will continue to ridicule any effort to organize politically outside of the two political parties.
What will happen, instead, is that Americans will adjust their thinking over time, and come to see the eminent domain power as natural, necessary and inevitable. There was no revolution in England when the Enclosure Acts drove hundreds of thousands of peasants off of their traditional lands and into the military, wage labor or immgration. England got wealthier as a whole on account of the sufferings of these few, and became more powerful. Some Americans will indeed be screwed and suffer on account of this, but not enough to cause people to break from the party molds or organize something new at a local level.
Too many people are too deeply psychologically invested in the current system, parties and belief in business capitalism to leave those tents to do something new.
The collective action problem will prove invincible once again. Nothing can ever really be changed from the grass-roots up. It's a pretty myth. Even the American Revolution happened because the aristocracy stepped forward and declared independence, and the commoners followed.
That right there is my biggest problem with this ruling, and believe me I have many problems with it. What this gang of five has done is opened up all manner of opportunity for unlimited graft, corruption, cronyism and get-evenism, and blessed it. As long as they're smart enough to stay on the good side of the local media, corrupt local officials will be able claim that even the most outrageous examples fall under the purview of "the common good."
Almost no one turns out to vote in local races - turnouts of ten percent or less are the rule. It's very easy for local pols to roll out enough union goons and other granola-crunchers to ensure an easy re-election, no matter how outrageous and brazen they are in their corruption. I'm not dumping on all local elected officials - there are plenty who are fine upstanding citizens. But there are also plenty who are shameless whores who see their offices as nothing more than opportunities to line their pockets and settle grudges.
Translation: "Eat up before it gets cold!"
I'm not disputing your very valid statements, just pointing out that our society is made up of individuals, and exists for individuals- not money or profitability.
As you rightly point out, this profitability is going to the big investor or corporation and many may think this is a benefit, but not if it's at the expense of the local populace.
The large pool of disaffected and displaced agriculturals were then available to be transported to America to increase the imperial wealth...
If there were a new and freer land to which to move, I would. These projects are actually a result of the very suppression of freedoms domestic and abroad:
I doesn't matter that you live outside the city. See this site and look at the map that shows the amount of property the Federal Government already owns.
http://www.freedom21.org/alternative-2/chapter2.htm
I agree - we need to determine the strategy of the conservatives that will NOT make government TOO big, big brother me thinks! I support Bush but want to see some real justices making good interpretations of the law NOT creating LAW! May our coup actually be the taking back of America!
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