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Reply With QuoteHoly crap. When did Robert Mugabe get elected to the New London City Council?
-dale
And the hits just keep on comin'.
This is from Captain's Quarters blog:
Sometimes, you almost have to laugh. But it's a nervous sort of laugh, like when your next-door neighbor launches into a tirade about the interstellar aliens who have taken over all the PTAs in the county.
It seems... well, I'll let Jonathan O'Connell of the Fairfield County Weekly have the floor:
The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that the [City of New London's] original seizure of private property was constitutional under the principal of eminent domain, and now New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit and owe back rent. It's a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.
Not only that, but according to O'Connell, the New London Development Corporation (NLDC) is offering compensation for homeowners at the real-estate appraisals of the year 2000! Since there has been a considerable rise in the value of real estate in the last five years, this means that the residents will not only lose their homes, not only be charged rent for the time they were fighting this bizarre interpretation of the Takings clause (now embraced by a slim majority of the Court), but they will probably be paid less in compensation than they are assessed in rent... and far too little to buy a new house to replace the one seized.
Oh, did I remember to mention that the article claims that the NLDC also insists that all rent collected from tennants of the people who thought they were the owners of their own property actually belongs to the City of New London, and must also be forked over, forthwith? This, too, could amount to tens of thousands of dollars that the hapless home(less)owners now owe the city... for having had the temerity to object to being treated like Mediaeval serfs, ousted at will by the local lord.
These erstwhile owners are in the process of having their lives utterly destroyed by the city in which most were born.
And thank God for Anthony Kennedy! If it weren't for him, these poor saps might have had to shuffle on through life laden down with all these, you know, dwelling places and such.
I'm not exaggerating about the devastation, by the way. One defendant, Matt Dery, owes the NLDC, according to its own estimate, $6100 per month, or $73,200 per year that he dared to try to hang onto the house he lived in and the house his mother was born in and lived in all of her life. It comes to over $300,000. He lost his home, his mother's home and two other buildings; and he may well end up owing the city a fortune, rather than the other way around.
I actually hope it will turn out this is all a mistake (perhaps a nightmare), that O'Connell just misunderstood. I have seen this in several blogs; but so far, it has not been picked up by any MSM outlet (the source I use appears to be an activist webzine that localizes for different areas). I'm not sure if that means it isn't true... or if it's just one of those stories that breaks first somewhere other than the New York Times or the Washington Post.
If it turns out not to be true, I will be happier to correct a post than I ever have been before (which would actually be easy, since I normally hate having to correct a mistake!) Barring that, I hope the NLDC comes to its senses and realizes that a city (or even it's quasi-public strongarm corporation) should not be in the business of bulldozing its citizens for a purpose so ignoble: simple unbridled greed.
But until one of these two saving graces eventuates, I would have to agree with O'Connell's conclusion:
Susette Kelo, who owns a single-family house with her husband, learned she would owe in the ballpark of 57 grand. "I'd leave here broke," says Kelo. "I wouldn't have a home or any money to get one. I could probably get a large-size refrigerator box and live under the bridge."
States cannot outlaw this barbaric and despicable abuse of power soon enough. Faster, please.
UPDATE 16:35 17 August 2005: USA Today now carries an editorial supporting the O'Connell story; but it clearly uses O'Connell as its main source, and I don't see any corroborative reporting other than that. (The quotation from Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell does not specifically refer to the rent issue but only the eviction itself.) So I still want to see independent corroboration. Anybody out there find any independent reporting on this issue in the MSM? (Hat Tip: Patterico's Pontifications, which mentioned the USA Today editorial in an update to a post from yesterday; also, SpaceNeedleBoy posted a comment here noting the editorial around the same time I posted this update.)
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
Holy crap. When did Robert Mugabe get elected to the New London City Council?
-dale
No kiddin'. This is AMERICA, dammit!Originally Posted by dalem
If this won't make you want to join a militia...
This has absolutely GOT to be overturned. It is WRONG, and no narrow legalistic argument will ever make me accept it.
If those people wanted to defend themselves, their families and YES, their PROPERTY, I would back 'em. If they choose to fight with force, I'd say they are now justified, because the legal system has completely failed them.
It is WRONG. There can be no justification for this.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
I wouldn't move. They'd have to come get me...
Well, the way I see it the USSC properly tossed it back into the laps of the States. Now my old stomping ground Connecticut (and the other 49) need to get off of their butts and redefine eminent domain in a hurry. Casual land redistribution should be verboten.
-dale
Seriously. Who would blame them if they shot dead the first law enforcement officer that came onto THEIR PROPERTY and attempted to evict them?
Who could blame a law enforcement officer that was assigned the duty to refuse?
It is NOT RIGHT, and I never thought I'd see this happen in the United States of America.
I used to be in favor of extremely limited uses of the legal concept of Eminent Domain. If we had not had ED during the critical stages of this country's development, we would likely be the world's biggest economic case, if we managed to make it at all.
The Intercontinental Railroad, the TVA, interstate highways, airports and a hundred other legitimate uses of Public Domain have made the growth that was essential for this country's greatness possible.
But THIS? THIS is an OUTRAGE, and to have it upheld by the highest court, with no appeal now possible, with every rational observer capable of seeing the sheer iniquity of denying the bedrock core principle of freedom - Right to Property -
Words fail me. There are still good reasons to be proud of the United States of America, but there is now one more reason to be ashamed of it.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
When words fail only one course remains.
Action.
It's a matter of degree and sheer baseness. A railroad? An Army base? A highway? No one LIKES the idea of losing to those, but at least they are of a scale that one can see the value of the sacrifice. But a strip mall? Condos? And then to be told that losing isn't enough, you're going to have to pay for the priviledge of having the process questioned? For TAX revenue? That's not the American way in my mind.
-dale
This is - not to put too fine a of a black-and-white point on it - EVIL. It should be resisted, and I daresay our forefathers would have us do no less.
Were they any less justified to resisting an unfair tax? Would we be any less justified in resisting unfair seizures?
It is interesting to me that the conservatives on the Court refused to be swayed by the clever and legalistic arguments made in favor of this ruling. It seems the conservatives ARE the defenders of freedom; liberals, despite sharing the root of that now-hated label, are enemies of liberty.
So, in their quest to strip words of their clear and established meanings, the Left would have us believe that a conservative is a grave threat to the Constitution, and promise to fight the nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States any but those that share their perverted view of what those glorious words of the Constitution of the United States really mean.
Well, I sure as hell know what it says, and what it means, and I've pledged to defend it even unto my own death. What is being done in New London is no more just, no more wise, and no more RIGHT than what was done in OLD London some 230 years ago to the ancestors of the very same people.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
The day they come to take my property, it will be resisted.
Apparently those being FUCCKED don't care enough to do something about it if it means their neck.
Until a victom feels it's worth his neck to make a point, the gov't will go right on ahead abusing us. Then one day- someone will have had enough, will do something about it- and then things will get really interesting.
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