Private capital using the power of the state in order to pursue it’s own business agenda. Though this crosses all political lines, it is an area where those on the right of the American political spectrum have been particularly misled. They have spent so many decades trumpeting private power over the role of the ‘evil government’, that so many of them (too many) are now at a loss as to how to deal with the fact that private power has now ascended to sovereign control over the government. A government that is supposed to be of, by and for the people, but is now of, by and for the governing minority elites, usually organized around wielding power through the dominate institutions of our time, the corporation. Private power now uses government in a way that is designed to do nothing but confer privilege on insiders. The very characteristic that was the prime animus behind the drive for the war of Independence in the 1770’s.

The U.S. Constitution states, “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The big bench wrongly ruled that “public use” could be whatever states want it to be — including private developments designed to expand the tax base. The ruling allowed the City of New London, Conn., to seize the land under Susette Kelo’s “little pink cottage” and hand it over to a private developer for a development featuring high-end waterfront homes.

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“The Kelo court said that any private use — like a hotel or big box store — that generates the public benefit of tax revenue could be a ‘public use,’ ” [Rep. Maxine] Waters noted. Like the Institute for Justice, she sees the unholy alliances that Kelo engenders — and the likelihood that tax-hungry governments will allow low-income homes to be leveled to make room for pricier projects.

As former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who dissented on Kelo, warned, “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.” Another dissenter, Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote, “Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not.”

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No government should be able to take your land to give it to a corporation. As Susette Kelo noted Thursday, “Our federal tax dollars shouldn’t be used to take away our homes and businesses so that developers can build shopping malls and condominiums.”

Citizens have an interest in a system that allows governments to take property — at a just price — for public projects. But when states and cities, in search of a richer tax base, can take your land and give it to a private developer — they have license to trample on everyone’s rights. And no one, except the very rich, is safe.

Actually this is a melding of both the ignorance of the right and left, coming together in a witch’s stew of overreaching government authority combined with unaccountable private power.

Can anyone still question the reality that we live in a corporate state?

Read The Full Article from The San Francisco Chronicle