In 2005, Kelo v. City of New London made eminent domain infamous. The widely reviled Supreme Court ruling gave the go ahead for the city of New London to use eminent domain for taking private property in order that it be given to a private company for “economic development.”

The public response was one of outrage. Facing the potential wrath of voters,  politicians across the country moved to add new protections against such abusive seizures. But that wasn’t enough to save the homes of the folks in New London, whose property never would be developed. Pfizer, the intended beneficiary of the land theft, walked away years ago from their development plans.

Now, to add new insult to injury, the vacant lot is a dump. Literally.

Following hurricane Irene, the city designated the site as a place to dump storm debris, and citizens can be seen doing just that in this video on the local paper’s website.

Doesn’t that make you feel all warm inside? The Supreme Court reassured us in Kelo that the government orchestrated theft “would be executed pursuant to a “carefully considered” development plan.” What they forgot to mention is that careful consideration from politicians is worth about as much as the city’s new debris dump, which is to say: diddly squat.

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With Texas Governor Rick Perry now leading the race for the Republican nomination for President, only days after jumping into contest (according to Rasmussen Reports – full disclosure, I have endorsed Perry) – we can expect a withering response from President Obama and his allies on the left.  As John Podhoretz noted in Commentary, comparing Perry to Ronald Reagan, “The conservative boogeyman is back.”

Since the Republican Party’s natural constituency is conservative, more so in this tumultuous Tea Party era, most attacks on Perry will be from the right – the attacks from the left will come after Perry wins the nomination.  That the machinery of the left will aid in the early attacks from the right is a given; it’s all part of winning for them.
The Trans-Texas Corridor is one such emerging line of criticism against Gov. Perry.  First proposed by Perry in 2002, the north-south running road would have also included a railway, petroleum pipeline, power lines, and communications cables.

Some conservatives have linked the planned Texas road with the feared, but as yet theoretical, North American Union or NAU and NAFTA, dubbing it the NAFTA Super Highway.  That Perry would have proposed such a thing is yet more proof to them that Perry is somehow the “Establishment” candidate (never mind his comments about the Fed, the Tenth Amendment, and the fact that the same “Establishment” ran Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison against him for governor last year).

So, what’s the deal with Perry’s proposed superhighway and should conservatives be worried?

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The Battle For Brooklyn, a documentary about one man’s fight to stop a private developer from using eminent domain to take his home, recently opened in select theaters in New York City after a successful film-festival run.

In 2003, billionaire real estate developer and New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner decided to move the team to Brooklyn, with the intention of building an arena, an affordable housing project, and bringing desperately needed jobs to the borough of Brooklyn. Ratner’s friend and fellow billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, enthusiastically put the weight of top-down government planning behind the project. That included using the city government’s extensive powers of eminent domain, despite the fact eminent domain is supposed to be used only in cases where development is for public uses such as schools and roads. And despite the fact that the construction of what became known as the “Atlantic Yards” project would displace many thriving businesses and homes.

Graphic designer Daniel Goldstein fought for nearly seven years to keep his home out of the hands of Ratner’s company, Forest City Ratner. Goldstein’s quixotic struggle is the centerpiece of The Battle For Brooklyn.

Reason.tv sat down with co-directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley to discuss eminent domain abuse and political perceptions of their film. Galinsky and Hawley insist their film is not a polemic, but rather an all-too-common story of a single person fighting an injustice against figures whose power and influence drawf his own.

Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. About 4.40 minutes.

Go to http://reason.tv for downloadable versions, and subscribe to our YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.

Related video: Billionaires vs. Brooklyn’s Best Bar: Eminent Domain Abuse and the Atlantic Yards Project.

In a state where thousands of properties have been threatened and continue to be threatened, California is in desperate need of meaningful eminent domain reform that will respect the rights and property of its residents. The preceding legal overview in California demonstrates just how difficult it is for private property owners to defend themselves against California’s redevelopment machine, which siphons billions and billions of dollars into a closed economic system that benefits private parties and hurts not only property owners, but all taxpayers as well.

You really have to see this one to believe it:

The video above was just released by the Institute for Justice. It begins with an elderly woman lamenting:

When my son came back from Kuwait he couldn’t believe it.  He said, “Mom, what’s going on?” And I said, well they want to get rid of us and they’re finally doing it.  He was upset.  He said, “I’m sorry, I’m halfway around the world to help other people and I can’t even help my own mom keep her own home.”

For the past ten years, township officials in Mount Holly have been destroying a close-knit community called the Gardens.  They’ve been recklessly bulldozing select individual row-houses — even when they are attached to occupied homes — to make way for fancier homes for richer people.  The current owners have never been offered a place in the new redevelopment, or enough money to buy comparable home nearby.

A new Institute for Justice study, available here, shows that this redevelopment project may result in a loss of one million dollars every year, one tenth of the township’s budget.

Despite these terrible conditions, the community never gave up hope.  They continued to fight against all odds for their cherished neighborhood.   And on Wednesday, a federal court came to their defense.

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It seems fair to ask, when one uses standard liberal catch-phrasing, volunteers for an organization like the NAACP, becomes party to an eminent domain lawsuit to take property from a small business on behalf of the government and is linked to the solicitation of government stimulus funding, just how conservative is said individual?

Given that the individual in question is Reince Priebus, currently seeking the RNC Chairmanship and talking like a conservative, how is it that he seems to have so walked the walk of a typical liberal over the years?

This was only ten years ago, after all. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with exposing oneself to different peoples and locations and I’m all for the Republican Party reaching out more to minority communities. But whether we do that as stock-in-trade liberals, or present a genuine conservative alternative to the liberal policies of Democrats makes a big difference. So, when one invokes stock phrases like diversity and aligns himself with the NAACP, just what kind of outreach is it Reince Priebus had in mind by attending the University of Miami? Or, just as he talks the talk of conservatism now, is he more a chameleon who says what he has to say to be popular at the time? That’s hardly the type of principled leadership needed for the RNC, especially at such a pivotal time in American history in which the Right and Left are battling to determine the future course of the nation.

In addition to reputation and placement record, Reince chose Miami because he wanted the opportunity to experience living in a diverse community … He was also a law clerk for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Los Angeles the summer before his third year.

That would be the same NAACP, by the way, that recently tried to malign the tea party movement as racist. Going from the NAACP to the RNC is quite a leap in ten short years. And the years in between weren’t very conservative, either. As recently as 2003, Reince Priebus was using his legal skills to confiscate land from a small business through the power of eminent domain.

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California’s progressive-era experiment in direct democracy was supposed to elevate the voters above the special interests, allowing voters make law themselves through the statewide initiative process. That this process is now virtually owned by the special interests is yet another example of the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences in government.

A brief perusal of the California Secretary of State’s initiative campaign finance disclosure website shows that some $120 million dollars has been raised by 53 groups supporting or opposing California’s nine November ballot initiatives. By comparison, California’s two major candidates for governor have raised or given to their campaigns $176 million to date, exclusive of independent expenditures and political party spending on both sides.

Initiative spending

What’s common about most of this spending is that it is fairly transparent in that we know the identities of the people, the labor unions and the companies writing the checks. Sure, there are cut-out committees that ship money to each other in an attempt to obfuscate their spending, but, with a spreadsheet and enough patience, a person can figure out who is funding whom.

For instance, you can crack open the disclosure page for the biggest No on Prop. 23 committee and see that they’ve raised more than $23 million. This includes $1 million from Hollywood director James Cameron, $700,000 from America’s richest man, Bill Gates, millions more from rent-seeking Silicon Valley venture capitalists who hope to grow wealthier off the economic pain of average Californians. You can also see that the National Wildlife Federation gave $3 million. Sadly, here is where campaign disclosure gets weak, because the National Wildlife Federation doesn’t have to disclose its donors since contributions on an initiative are considered nonpartisan and thus, not subject to the stringent disclosure rules as money destined to directly influence a partisan campaign.

This oversight is especially egregious when it comes to Prop. 22, a densely written amendment to the California constitution (already the third-largest in the world) that consumes eight pages of fine print to accomplish its purpose: constitutionally lock in redevelopment agency protections to protect them from pressure to reform.

California’s redevelopment agencies are supposed to target so-called “blight.” What they often do instead is use eminent domain to take property from one set of owners and give it to another so as to increase the tax base for a city.

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Carla Main wrote an outstanding book called Bulldozed.  A veteran journalist, she brought to life a heart-wrenching, true-life tale of eminent domain abuse in a Texas fishing town.  She told the truth.  And for that, she’s being sued.

Today, Carla is fighting back.

This morning, Carla asked a Texas appeals court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against here by a developer involved in the Texas case.

Some background:

The Texas developer behind this abuse project is H. Walker Royall.  As the video makes clear, millions of taxpayer dollars later, the project is now an epic debacle.

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55 years ago, Rosa Parks helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

Today, the government is bulldozing her old neighborhood.  Here’s the real kicker:  The homeowners are forced to pay the cost of demolition.

Nobel prize-winning libertarian economist F.A. Hayek famously wrote that “the great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.”  There is no better example of this fundamental struggle than Rosa Parks, known today as The Mother of the Freedom Movement.

She refused to be treated as a second-class citizen.  But her hometown of Montgomery, Ala., segregated blacks on public transits.  Minorities were forced to sit in the back, forced to give up their seats to whites, and sometimes were left standing on the side of the road after paying their fare.  Rosa stood up to the Big Government Bullies and said enough is enough.  Her demand for equality before the law forever transformed America.

Rosa once said:

I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free . . . so other people would be also free.

Indeed, she made the world a better place.  So how despicable is it that today officials in her old hometown are forcing people to give up their homes?  The government is tearing down houses against the property owners’ will and then sticking them with the bill.

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You’ve probably heard about eminent domain abuse.  That’s where the government takes your land and hands it over to another private party….one that is more politically connected.

But you may not have heard about civil forfeiture.  And yet, today, it could very well be the most egregious abuse of private property rights in America.

We all know that one of the many beautiful things about the United States is that citizens are innocent until proven guilty.  But civil forfeiture turns that fundamental principle on its head.

This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.

Consider the case of Margaret Davis.

As a 77-year-old woman living alone with multiple medical problems, Margaret left her Pennsylvania home unlocked so her neighbors could regularly check on her.  One day while the police were chasing alleged drug dealers through her neighborhood, they all ran through Margaret’s house.  The dealers dropped some of their stash on Margaret’s floor, in plain sight.

Instead of apologizing to Margaret for the traumatic experience, the government seized her house.

Under civil forfeiture laws, Margaret’s property—her house—was guilty until she could prove it innocent to get it back.  And that’s not all.  As it turns out, most state and federal laws allow the government to keep the property they take through civil forfeiture.  So authorities have a big incentive to pursue property over justice.

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There’s a new site to add to your blogroll:  Congress Shall Make No Law.

The site, which has the address makenolaw.org, empowers grassroots activists from around the country that are standing up and saying no to unconstitutional attacks on free speech coming in the guise of campaign finance reform.  The site explains all the latest news and events going on in this increasingly complex area of law.  All of the writers are First Amendment attorneys and experts at the Institute for Justice (IJ)—the libertarian law firm dedicated to striking down campaign finance laws in state and federal courts.

The unfortunate reality is this:  Campaign finance laws are a way to regulate speech and silence speakers.  And they have seriously negative impacts on everyday Americans.

Consider Karen Sampson of Parker North, Colorado:

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The Little Pink House that changed America still stands strong.

Five years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued what would soon become one of the most despised decisions in its history.  In a controversial 5-4 opinion, the Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that governments could take your home—or business, farm or church—and hand it over to another private individual, provided the new owner promised to generate more tax revenue with your property.

The Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm that litigated Kelo and cases like it around the country, just released this video announcing that, while they lost the Kelo battle, they are winning the eminent domain war:

Simply put, the backlash to Kelo has been unprecedented.  In the past five years:

• 9 state high courts have limited eminent domain powers
• 43 state legislatures have passed greater property rights protections
• 44 eminent domain abuse projects have been defeated by grassroots activists
• 88 percent of the public now believe that property rights are as important as free speech and freedom of religion

The U.S. Supreme Court typically leads the state courts, which usually adopt its rulings and interpret state laws in a similar manner.  But with Kelo, the exact opposite happened.  In January 2006, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously to reject the Supreme Court’s eminent domain analysis. The Oklahoma and South Dakota supreme courts soon followed in expressly rejecting the high court decision.  So far, Kelo has prompted nine state high courts to limit eminent domain powers.

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The New York Times reported today that long-suffering Brooklyn homeowner Daniel Goldstein has finally been forced out by the state’s eminent domain abuse in the Atlantic Yards case. And the paper turned to ACORN chief Bertha Lewis for some gloating commentary:

Bertha Lewis, a housing advocate who supported the project, bid Mr. Goldstein “good riddance.”

“Low- and moderate-income people had to wait years for housing while he obstructed the Atlantic Yards project,” she said.

Of course, Lewis is much more than just a “housing advocate who supported the project,” she was the CEO of ACORN, a group that signed a contract with Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner “to publicly support the [Atlantic Yards] Project by, among other things, appearing with the Developer before the Public Parties, community organizations and the media as part of a coordinated effort to realize and advance the Project.” In return, Ratner pledged to include a certain amount of “affordable housing” in the project, units that ACORN stood to make a fortune from marketing and managing. As the New York Post reported, “Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN official-turned-whistleblower, estimates the anticipated deal could bring the group $5 million to $10 million annually over multiple years.”

And the money didn’t stop there.

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Freddy’s in Brooklyn is a happening place that has been named one of the city’s best bars by the Village Voice, Esquire, and The New York Times.

Unfortunately, Freddy’s—and the surrounding neighborhood—is smack-dab in the footprint of the Atlantic Yards project, a multi-million-dollar, 22-acre development that is intended to create “an urban utopia” in the language of developer Bruce Ratner, and a new, publicly subsidized home to Ratner’s Nets, who currently play NBA basketball (if you can call it that) in New Jersey.

But don’t mistake Atlantic Yards as one more instance of the market-driven transformations for which New York is rightly famous. It’s actually the latest case of eminent domain abuse, where private property is seized by the state on dubious grounds and then immediately handed over to private interests for private gain.

In this case, the Empire State Development Corporation has designated the thriving area as blighted to facilitate the taking of privately owned houses and businesses without having to pay full market value. Ratner, whose partners in the venture include rapper Jay Z and the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, stands to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars on the deal, all thanks to the brute force of the state.

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Does the government’s power of eminent domain include seizing the rights to the wind that wafts over your property? That’s the controversial question swirling around an 8 megawatt wind farm proposed by the southern Minnesota city of New Ulm and opposed by several farmers in rural Lafayette Township who refuse to grant their “wind rights” to the city utility.

“This is merely an evolution of principles that have been evolving since the sovereign rights of eminent domain were determined to exist,” according to Hugh Nierengarten, New Ulm City Attorney.

“Eminent domain is basically like a nuclear bomb,” said Clete Goblirsch, a farmer who refuses to sign an easement. “The repercussions would be long lasting and widespread, not just for us, but for the wind industry.”

While public utilities have fairly broad powers to use government authority to force property owners to sell to meet their needs, the New Ulm plan involves an unprecedented move to expand eminent domain authority to include the seizure of air space on private property for power generation.

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Tens of thousands of TSA screeners to receive government bonuses, including millions of dollars paid to more than 10,000 who have been rated poorly

Government bailout watch: Despite receiving $5.5 billion in stimulus funds, Government Services Administration’s backlog of deferred maintenance projects now totals $8.8 billion and the agency is proposing billions of dollars in new projects

As stimulus money doubles Wisconsin’s weatherization budget, a review finds weatherization work done on hundreds of low-income homes failed to meet federal standards; Inspectors found projects done in a way that could threaten the safety of residents or did not save enough energy

Stimulus funds pay to replace “unattractive” streetlights; The new lights “aren’t especially energy-efficient, and the old ones work”

Federal Reserve tries theater ads to improve its image

Las Vegas’ $4.1 million housing plan built on federal stimulus money stalled over squabbles about how to hand out the money and to whom

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Last month, New York’s highest court heard oral arguments in the case of Goldstein v. New York State Urban Development Corporation. At issue was the state’s controversial seizure of private property on behalf of a 22-acre development project known as the Atlantic Yards. Situated in central Brooklyn, this taxpayer-subsidized boondoggle was the brainchild of real estate tycoon and New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner, who wants to build an “urban utopia” complete with more than a dozen office and apartment towers, a 180-room hotel, and a fancy new basketball arena for Ratner’s Nets to call home.

Real Estate Tycoon Bruce Ratner and ACORN's Bertha Lewis

To get his way, Ratner turned to his buddies in big government, specifically the Empire State Development Corporation, a controversial state agency with the power to bypass zoning laws and seize private property via eminent domain. In other words, this is a classic case of eminent domain abuse. Ratner isn’t building a bridge or a tunnel or any other legitimate public project that might justify the forceful taking of private property by the state. He wants to build a basketball arena, sell tickets to the games (not to mention broadcast rights, concessions, and luxury boxes), and collect a big fat profit.

So what in the world is ACORN, a self-described champion of “social and economic justice” and “low- and moderate-income people” doing in bed with a shady corporate powerbroker like Bruce Ratner? Let’s follow the money.

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