Liberty
Matters News Service
August
6, 2008
Mortgage Bailout Bill Funds Eminent Domain
President Bush just signed another taxpayer-funded piece of constitutionally challenged legislation to bail out 400,000 home buyers who face forclosure in the failing Bush economy. The government’s latest intrusion into market issues, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, may have far-reaching ill effects on private property, however. Among other provisions, “it creates a new regulator for ailing mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and establishes a $300 billion program to expand the Federal Housing Administration’s ability to guarantee mortgages.” And, writes John Berlau, “of all the unintended consequences of the housing bill, one of the most ironic and far-reaching may be this: that whatever security marginal homeowners have from foreclosure, their homes will be far less safe from being taken by a bureaucrat through eminent domain.” Included in the package is $3.9 billion for Community Development Block Grant funds. Those funds will allow cities and counties to take private properties and then sell them to private developers, thanks to the 2005 Supreme Court Kelo decision. The Senate made an attempt to protect property owners from greedy governments by inserting a clause stating, “No funds under this title may be used in conjunction with property taken by eminent domain unless eminent domain is employed for a public use.” But, that clause disappeared from the House version after House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson got their heads together. The new language allows bureaucrats to use the billions in federal grants to seize homes for general economic development, as provided under Kelo, and then pull the old “bait and switch” by creating a new project to sell the land to developers, likely not a violation of the House bill. “All in all,” writes Berlau, who writes the Open Markets blog for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “this new language means that…there will be virtually nothing stopping states and localities from using the federal housing grants to help themselves to confiscate housing.” How ironic that a man who won his first Governor’s race by championing private property no longer believes in its importance to the future security of individual Americans or our nation.
‘Kelo’ Property
Rights Protections gutted from housing bill
Congress' bailout opens doors to eminent domain seizures
U.S. District Court Judge Orders Suspension of NAIS
On June 4, 2008, the
U.S. District Court, District of Columbia, ordered the Department of
Agriculture to suspend its plan to identify and document every animal
in the U.S. The National Animal Identification System
(NAIS) was to have been fully implemented by June 9, 2009. It is
now on hold indefinitely. The ruling came as a result of a lawsuit; Mary-Louise
Zanoni v. United States Department of Agriculture. Ms. Zanoni,
an upstate New York attorney has been a vocal and persistent leader in
the fight against the NAIS that opponents believe would lead to more government
regulation and less personal freedom. NAIS was never legitimized
by Congress. USDA just proceeded to shove it down an unwilling public’s
throat, much like President Bush and his Canadian and Mexican cohorts are
trying to do with the Security and Prosperity Partnership (North American
Union). Several state cattlemen’s associations have also accused
USDA of “registering premises without the consent of the owners,
helping themselves to states’ agriculture databases and harassing
young 4-H kids. These groups have formally requested leaders of the
Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the House
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to stop NAIS and hold oversight
hearings on USDA’s movements. The Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense
Fund filed suit July 14, 2008, in the same federal district court (with
the same judge presiding that suspended NAIS in June) to stop USDA and
the Michigan Department of Agriculture to cease and desist any further
implementation of NAIS. The suit also charges USDA has never published
NAIS rules, a violation of the Federal Administrative Procedures Act, has
never performed an Environmental Impact Statement or Assessment and is
in violation of religious freedoms guaranteed by the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act. Increasingly, federal and state bureaucracies
are blatantly trying to force unpalatable programs on citizens without
bothering to follow the laws. This victory should be a reminder
to the higher-ups that this is a nation of citizens, not subjects.
Farmers
and Ranchers Fight NAIS – and Win
Eco-Nuts Fire-bomb California Scientists’ Homes
Bombs so powerful they were like “Molotov cocktails on steroids,” according to Santa Cruz police Capt. Steve Clark, were hurled at the residences of two UC Santa Cruz biologists early Saturday morning. Professor David Feldheim and his wife and two small children were forced to climb out of a second story window after a bomb went off near his front door. The family was awakened by the bomb, but “the downstairs was so smoky that we could not see,” Feldeim said and they escaped through a window by using a fire-escape ladder. Another bomb gutted a car belonging to a second researcher just minutes earlier. A third researcher had received telephone threats, but no explosives were found at his home. Capt. Clark said the bomb at Feldheim’s house was similar to those used in other attacks by animal right extremists. “There are instructions on how to make it on their Web sites.” Attacks against animal researchers have escalated in recent months. In January, a Molotov cocktail was thrown on a RCLA biologist’s porch and in February “six people in masks tried to force their way into the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher and hit her husband on the head.” The eco-terrorists placed pamphlets in a stack of newspapers at a downtown Santa Cruz coffee shop last week that identified Feldheim and 12 other researchers by name and printed their pictures and addresses. The pamphlet warned; “Animal abusers everywhere beware.” UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal called the bombings “criminal acts of anti-science violence.” Jerry Vlasek, spokesman for the North American Animal Liberation Press Office stood up for the little cowards, saying, [the bombers] were “trying to send a message to this guy, who won’t listen to reason, that if he doesn’t stop hurting animals, more drastic measures will be taken.” Oh, that’s reasonable.
Santa Cruz firebombs look familiar
Global Poverty Act Headed to Senate Floor
A bipartisan bill,
the Global Poverty Act is headed for a full Senate vote. The bill is sponsored by Republicans Richard Lugar, and Chuck
Hagel and Democrats Barack Obama, Joseph Biden, Maria Cantwell, Chris
Dodd, Dick Durbin, Russ Feingold, Dianne Feinstein, and Robert Mendez. The
bill compels every American to sacrifice their security in a futile attempt
to eradicate world poverty. The House version, H.R. 1302, passed
last September by voice vote. The Senate version, S 2433, passed
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee also by voice vote. The bill
would require the president “to develop and implement a comprehensive
strategy to develop programs to spend more tax dollars on foreign assistance. It
would require the U.S. to implement the U.N. Millennium Development Goal
that calls for ‘the eradication of poverty’ by ‘redistribution
of wealth and land.’” Jeffery Sachs, a Columbia University
economist, in 2005, presented then- Secretary General, Kofi Annan with
a 3,000 page document detailing what must be done to cure the world poverty
problem. The United States, currently forking over $16.5 billion
on world poverty programs, he declared, must increase poverty spending
to at least $30 billion a year. Adoption of S 2433 could “result
in the imposition of a global tax on the United States,” says Cliff
Kincaid of Accuracy in Media. The measure would dedicate “0.7
percent of the U.S. gross national product to foreign aid, which over 13
years would amount to $845 billion ‘over and above what the U.S.
already spends.’” The bill would force the U.S. to accept
a multitude of U.N. treaties and protocols, including the International
Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming), the Convention on
Biological Diversity (Wildlands) and on and on. It would allow the
U.N. to charge license fees to use air, water and natural resources and
it would regulate all corporate environmental issues as provided in the
Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). It would ban “small arms and
light weapons,” a long-time dream of liberals. It would authorize
a standing U.N. army and require registration of all arms, if there remained
any, of course. It is not clear when this bill could face a vote.
Obama's $845 billion U.N. plan forwarded to U.S. Senate floor
Obama's Global Poverty Act