To be added or removed from the VK/ZOT list, FReepmail Darkwing104.
Posted on 04/23/2011 7:05:23 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Don’t be fooled by the Donald. Take it from one who knows: I’m a South Jersey gal who was raised on the outskirts of Atlantic City in the looming shadow of Trump’s towers. All through my childhood, casino developers and government bureaucrats joined hands, raised taxes, and made dazzling promises of urban renewal. Then we wised up to the eminent-domain thievery championed by our hometown faux free-marketeers.
America, it’s time you wised up to Donald Trump’s property-redistribution racket, too.
Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run — first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea-party event in South Florida. He touts his business experience, “high aptitude,” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard bearer of conservative values, limited government, and constitutional principles than the cast of Jersey Shore.
Too many mega-developers like Trump have achieved success by using and abusing the government’s ability to commandeer private property for purported “public use.” Invoking the Fifth Amendment takings clause, real-estate moguls, parking-garage builders, mall developers, and sports-palace architects have colluded with elected officials to pull off legalized theft in the name of reducing “blight.” Under eminent domain, the definition of “public purpose” has been stretched like Silly Putty to cover everything from roads and bridges to high-end retail stores, baseball stadiums, and casinos.
While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private-property rights. In the 1990s, he waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City that stood in the way of Trump’s manifest land development. The real-estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limousine parking lot — Coking’s private property be damned. The nonprofit Institute for Justice, which successfully saved Coking’s home, explained the confiscatory scheme:
Unlike most developers, Donald Trump doesn’t have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property, because a governmental agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority or CRDA — will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell. Here is how the process works.
After a developer identifies the parcels of land he wants to acquire and a city planning board approves a casino project, CRDA attempts to confiscate these properties using a process called “eminent domain,” which allows the government to condemn properties “for public use.” Increasingly, though, CRDA and other government entities exercise the power of eminent domain to take property from one private person and give it to another. At the same time, governments give less and less consideration to the necessity of taking property and also ignore the personal loss to the individuals being evicted.
Trump has attempted to use the same tactics in Connecticut and has championed the reviled Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court ruling upholding expansive use of eminent domain. He told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto that he agreed with the ruling “100 percent” and defended the chilling power of government to kick people out of their homes and businesses based on arbitrary determinations:
The fact is, if you have a person living in an area that’s not even necessarily a good area, and government, whether it’s local or whatever, government wants to build a tremendous economic development, where a lot of people are going to be put to work and make [an] area that’s not good into a good area, and move the person that’s living there into a better place — now, I know it might not be their choice — but move the person to a better place and yet create thousands upon thousands of jobs and beautification and lots of other things, I think it happens to be good.
Like most statist promises of bountiful job creation, government-engineered redevelopment math rarely adds up. Trump’s corporations have backed casino-industry bailouts and wealth-redistributing “tax-increment financing” schemes — the very kind of taxpayer-subsidized interventions we’ve seen on a grand scale under the Obama administration.
Championing liberty begins at the local level. There is nothing more fundamental than the principle that a man’s home is his castle. Donald Trump’s career-long willingness to trample this right tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea-party sideshow.
Trump bought off the local CRDA board members, literally bought them off. In the years between 1998 and 2006 it was exposed in the atlanticcitypress.com , asburyparkpress.com , and philly.com newspapers at the outright corruption of the eminent domain process and New Jersey’s regional development Authority laws and eminent domain laws.
That’s why Coking was able to go directly after Trump after she won the lawsuit in my prior post where she was represented by Zeitz.
DC government is a federal agency. End of story.
Right?
As far as Jersey having corrupt systems this is not news anywhere ~ I am surprised you'd even mention that aspect.
Which means Coking had already been a beneficiary of a corrupt system and sought to become an even larger beneficiary.
Guess Guccione and Trump had the wrong affiliations.
When it comes to the Supreme Court, the mindnumbed, kneejerk, robotlike Liberal majority that voted to give the rich a key to the property of every poor man in America should be dragged from their homes (or vice versa), and tossed out on their behinds to someplace like France which is more fitted to their temperaments.
Yet now you are on this thread, and apparantly have discarded YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES to try and downplay Trump's absolute support of Kelo.
Man, I had no idea you were that far around the bend. You may have the last lie word, as there is no point debating someone who tosses their own principles aside in such a blatant manner.
Such is the magic of Trump, apparently.
CT, as a sovereign body, can decide they can steal stuff, so they did (although the amount of payment they offered appeared to meet the "just compensation" standard set in the 5th.). The issue concerned who would benefit from the transaction ~ the state/public at large, as in a public project, or some industrial development.
CT won the right to continue interpreting things just as they'd been doing since before the United States existed.
In other places concerned persons looked at Kelo and set about changing the situation in their own states to conform to what they felt to be a higher moral imperative.
Kelo didn't prevent other states from acting. CT, however, didn't act. That's because public corruption has simply been so deeply incorporated into the way they run things they no longer see it as corruption ~ without Connecticut, New Jersey would have to bow its corporate had in shame.
BTW, it is possible to argue every issue on both sides.
Seriously, please just debate yourself. I don’t care to waste any more time with someone as unprincipled as yourself.
You might well think the Fifth limits the use of eminent domain to situations involving government projects ~ but it doesn't. That's one of the reasons the federal interstate highway system was designed and built by the states ~ the states even condemned the land for the roads. That way there was no question that all the land was perceived to have been taken according to local standards ~ whatever they might be.
The issue in Kelo had been around forever and a day ~ it wasn't new.
BTW, USPS is prohibited by federal law (as is the rest of the US government) from acquiring land in advance of planned need for the construction of new postal facilities. They cannot engage in land-banking. Most states prohibit state agency land-banking. Some allow it. That's to avoid downstream ripoffs by speculators who will jack up the price of land to make the government pay more than market value. Land banking helps the government avoid expensive and devisive condemnation actions too.
So, what would you like the government to do uniformly? Buy ahead to avoid getting ripped off? Or, leave it to the speculators and just pay what they ask? Or maybe adopt some other federal wide standard?
Unless you are able to understand these basic government land use questions you have no business in this debate. Besides, as you just found out, I was not out of agreement with Justice Scalia. I was quoting him on Heller.
Nice. I am sure that you are a wonderful person.....kinda went nuts over nothing.
Trashing my conservative friends Levin, Coulter and Malkin on FR will earn you the coveted zot award.
zot
Right on! Levin, Coulter, and Malkin have done good things for conservatism. They’re on our side.
Michelle and my conservative FRiends:
Stop taking Trump seriously. This is an elaborate practical joke he concocted as a publicity stunt. Like a practical joke. Don’t be the last person who hasn’t figured it out.
It’s like the old poker room saying...
If you are sitting around the poker table wondering who the sucker is...you’re it.
To be added or removed from the VK/ZOT list, FReepmail Darkwing104.
iavfz (in after veteran freeper zot)
Perhaps a tiny stroll down Perot Got Clinton Elected Avenue would do...
I'm beginning to think of referring to it as the Federal Feral Government.
Cheers!
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