Your house would be a great location for a Starbucks. YOINK!
Thanks to a Supreme Court decision, your local government can sieze your property for private developments because, supposedly, your mayor or governor knows what's best for your community, though it's not your community anymore because you just got kicked out of it.
Other than O'Connor, the dissenting votes were Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, which makes sense. Seizing private property for private development for the purpose of reinvigorating a community smacks of socialism, doesn't it?
But it puts regional and local governments in the pockets of private industry at the expense of citizens.
But it creates jobs.
But it hurts families.
FUCK, my head hurts!
Governing is hard.
All kidding aside, I actually do have an opinion on this. A ruling like this will need some restrictions, like siezing property only to eliminate blight, as some lower judges ruled, according to the article. Call your alderman. I'm sure Daley's itching to just take something for someone, and this decision may give him the go-ahead. Miegs Field, anyone? CTA Brown Line? Or do we already have something like this on the books in Chicago?
2 Comments:
Go back and read your last post with this new ruling in mind. Interesting, isn't it? Real estate is, after all, just one type of property, and given the history of property rights in America – including the "personhood" of corporations and the copyrighting of genetic material and even micro-organisms – it's not hard to envision that eminent domain will now be used by private industry to seize intellectual property as well. The logic holds up to scrutiny when judged against the language in the majority ruling. Wouldn't a killer design or memorable riff create more wealth (and therefore more jobs and corporate industrial parks with fountains and so on) if it were in the hands of a large corporation with the means to market and distribute it more effectively? Certainly many artists have seen the irrefutable logic of this themselves and have willingly (and sometimes, as in the case of U2's iPod, without compensation) surrendered their work to larger corporations for the sole purpose of acquiring massive distribution through advertising. It's a fair guess that we'll see some rather funky court cases in the coming years.
The irony of my previous post is not lost on me. As I see it, it's all fair game for large corporations, but when an individual tries the same shit, we're stopped in our tracks.
By the way, this post is dropping all the way below the right-hand column in Firefox. Wierd.
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