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07-11-2010, 07:12 PM   #76
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QuoteOriginally posted by gokenin Quote
SNIP for brevity, nothing more
It is strictly forbidden to private organisations and individuals to dispense medical treatment, to produce and trade in medicaments illegally, thereby damaging the people's health.

Article 40
It is the responsibility of the State, society, the family and the citizen to ensure care and protection for mothers and children; to carry into effect the population programme and family planning.well there goes Roe v Wade


Yes the constitution of Vietnam sounds nice but these are just a few things that make you pause for a second.
Ever here of the "power of eminent domain" and the police powers of the US???
How about where the "state" wanted to take land to sell it to a condo developer because it was "good for the community"..
Eminent domain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
QuoteQuote:
Condemnation via eminent domain indicates the government is taking ownership of the property or a lesser interest in it, such as an easement. In most cases the only thing that remains to be decided when a condemnation action is filed is the amount of just compensation, although in some cases the right to take may be challenged by the property owner on the grounds that the attempted taking is not for a public use, or has not been authorized by the legislature, or because the condemnor has not followed the proper procedure required by law.

The exercise of eminent domain is not limited to real property. Governments may also condemn personal property, such as supplies for the military in wartime or franchises. Governments can even condemn intangible property such as contract rights, patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. Even football teams may be seized by eminent domain.
Eminent domain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Protection is an illusion for those not rich enough to fight it........
something good from the Bush era.. sort of.. too many loopholes as usual...
QuoteQuote:
Bush executive order

On June 23, 2006 - on the one-year anniversary of the Kelo decision (see above), President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13406 which stated in Section I that the federal government must limit its use of taking private property for "public use" with "just compensation", which is also stated in the constitution, for the "purpose of benefiting the general public." The order limits this use by stating that it may not be used "for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken".[12] However, eminent domain is more often exercised by local and state governments, albeit often with funds obtained from the federal government.


07-11-2010, 08:22 PM   #77
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In other words, eminent domain is a corporate-friendly law often used by developers to make money. Commonly, it's one way corporate developers use their money to influence projects, like to take someone's house to put in access for a wal-mart or shopping center, too often. One reason it's often wildly unpopular where it's applied.

Sometimes there are valid needs for it to be used, but it's hardly 'free market.' Corporations make money, sometimes wreck town centers, blame 'big gummint.' Very tidy. On the other hand, sometimes for instance, a big company can buy up a strip of property to block development or facilities a town needs, but don't suit its purposes, etc. That's why there's judges involved.
07-12-2010, 05:18 AM   #78
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The Supreme's decision, (which in itself is unconstitutional in it's nature IMO), revolved not around a corporation being able to make money but rather the local authority being able to increase tax revenues by seizing a homeowner's property where they only got the residential tax and effectively handing it to a corporation to develop the property and pay the local authority a commercial tax rate. Not only is that horribly open to abuse and corruption but it also flies in the face of the concept of private property which, in turn, detrimentally affects the concept of "liberty".
07-12-2010, 06:04 AM   #79
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Yea, fun law. I see they actually took the land (waterfront property I believe).. charged the "new owners" $1 per year.......
QuoteQuote:
91-acre waterfront tract of land for $1 per year
QuoteQuote:
The redevelopment in New London, the subject of the Kelo decision, proved to be a failure and as of the early 2010 (over four years after the court's decision) nothing has been built on the taken land in spite of the expenditure of over $80 million in public funds. The Pfizer corporation, who would have been the primary beneficiary of the additional development, announced in 2009 that it would close its New London research facility. 2009.[9]
QuoteQuote:
The promised economic benefits fail to materialize

In September 2009, the land where Susette Kelo's home had once stood was an empty lot, and the promised 3,169 new jobs and $1.2 million a year in tax revenues had not materialized. The land was never deeded back to the original homeowners, most of whom have left New London for nearby communities.[2]

In addition, in September 2009, Pfizer, whose upscale employees were supposed to be the clientele of the Fort Trumbull redevelopment project, completed its merger with Wyeth, resulting in a consolidation of research facilities of the two companies. Shortly after the merger closed, Pfizer decided to close its New London facility in favor of one across the Thames River in nearby Groton by 2011; this move coincides with the expiration of tax breaks on the New London campus that also expire by 2011, when Pfizer's tax bill on the property would have increased almost fivefold.[17][18]

After the Pfizer announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle in its lead editorial called the Kelo decision infamous:

The well-laid plans of redevelopers, however, did not pan out. The land where Suzette Kelo's little pink house once stood remains undeveloped. The proposed hotel-retail-condo "urban village" has not been built. And earlier this month, Pfizer Inc. announced that it is closing the $350 million research center in New London that was the anchor for the New London redevelopment plan, and will be relocating some 1,500 jobs.[19]

The Chronicle editorial quoted from the New York Times:

"They stole our home for economic development," ousted homeowner Michael Cristofaro told the New York Times. "It was all for Pfizer, and now they get up and walk away."
Gotta love em........

QuoteQuote:
Many countries recognize eminent domain to a much lesser extent than the English-speaking world or do not recognize it at all. Japan, for instance, has very weak eminent domain powers, as evidenced by the high-profile opposition to the expansion of Narita International Airport, and the disproportionately large amounts of financial inducement given to residents on sites slated for redevelopment in return for their agreement to leave, one well-known recent case being that of Roppongi Hills.

There are other countries such as the People's Republic of China that practice eminent domain whenever it is convenient to make space for new communities and government structures. Singapore practices eminent domain under the Land Acquisitions Act which allows it to carry out its Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme for urban renewal. The Amendments to the Land Titles Act allowed property to be purchased for purposes of urban renewal against an owner sharing a collective title if the majority of the other owners wishes to sell and the minority did not. Thus, eminent domain often invokes concerns of majoritarianism.
Ahhh Japan's looking better every day..too bad about that debt

07-12-2010, 06:12 AM   #80
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There's a case, Ginge, where the problem is corruption via corporate money, rather than the existence of government itself. Sometimes there are real conflicts of interest between a community and a property-owner (who may not even be *part* of the community. )

Mere 'ownership' of, say, a block of near-vacant buildings, doesn't constitute the right to, for instance, impede revitalizing a livable town center because you're a developer who wants to sell a succession of strip malls:

It's not always used to forcibly buy out that heroic old lady who won't see the ancestral farmhouse bulldozed for a shopping center: sometimes it's cause the old crank (or absentee speculator) who owns a vacant shack who wants five million dollars from the town, because he's got the last piece in the way of clearing up the daily traffic jam or making a big enough high school.

There are proper uses of 'eminent domain,' ...'Liberty' doesn't just mean 'freedom from government coercion,' it also means freedom from exploitation by moneyed interests. Just being 'landed' doesn't mean you can have everyone around over a barrel.

Part of *how* we're all supposedly secure in our rights to property, if we're so lucky as to have any, is that merely *owning* stuff doesn't mean property-owners have the right to screw up the entire community, and thus *their* properties. The law is heavily in favor of property-owners, (or the money behind them, in practice) but that doesn't mean it's an absolute, or should be.
07-12-2010, 07:12 AM   #81
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QuoteOriginally posted by GingeM Quote
My, my... That's an astonishing leap... The entire constitution was set forth to limit government and it's power by enumerating the powers government has and denying them all others. The entire point of Socialism is to expand government and it's power. The fact that you can then make the leap you did shows that, for all your reading and quoting, you've lost the plot somewhere along the line.
I'm glad my little provocation got you to look up what a real Socialist constitution is like... so perhaps you won't go throwing out the Socialist curse at our Democrats and Obama quite so quickly.

To quote from ours once more:
"the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
. . .

To establish post offices and post roads;To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

As we've seen from the discussion that ensued, the US has been on a 'socialist' road for ages... only it is also on a 'liberal' road in that citizen's rights and personal freedoms are emphasized, and on a 'conservative' road in that the other citizen's rights and freedoms are also emphasized. While Big Government is here to stay, the tooth and nail figts end up being about tiny changes in emphasis or spending priority.

Don't be a reactionary... in the words of Theodore Roosevelt:
"The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead."
07-12-2010, 10:01 AM   #82
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Nesster:

QuoteQuote:
As we've seen from the discussion that ensued, the US has been on a 'socialist' road for ages...
There's nothing socialist about the parts you show - you seem to be confused.

RML:

The law provides very well for the prevention of an area being "screwed up"... Try not cutting your lawn for a few weeks in many neighborhoods, if the association doesn't get you the local Code Enforcement Officer will.

The thing you are most worried about, big business using government to effect it's aims through such things as eminent domain only becomes more likely with your suggested solution to all your perceived problems, namely bigger government. As you expend the government you expand it's power. As you expand it's power the more attractive it is for business to "get into bed with it". What results is the unholy joining of business and politics. The solution, limit government's size and reduce it's power over the people. Simples.

07-12-2010, 10:08 AM   #83
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QuoteOriginally posted by GingeM Quote
RML:


The thing you are most worried about, big business using government to effect it's aims through such things as eminent domain only becomes more likely with your suggested solution to all your perceived problems, namely bigger government.
Wrong again. I did not propose 'bigger government,' nor did I offer a 'solution' to alterations of eminent domain law.

I merely said that it there are valid reasons for it to be as it's been, and that corporate corruptions of government do not mean the answer is to remove the protections of *government* as though the problem is us having a government of, by, and for the people, instead of who insists they have the right to *buy* it.


You claim that not wanting to *remove* a right through our government is the same thing as wanting to 'make government bigger.'

This is untrue.


QuoteQuote:
As you expend the government you expand it's power. As you expand it's power the more attractive it is for business to "get into bed with it". What results is the unholy joining of business and politics. The solution, limit government's size and reduce it's power over the people. Simples.
Simple, but based on false premises. Again.

My clothes may not be brand-new, but do I *look* like I'm something you made of straw?

---------- Post added 07-12-10 at 01:17 PM ----------

I mean, hey, if the law's starting to look *bigger,* maybe it's just cause it ain't been seen so close up in your neighborhood for a while.


Last edited by Ratmagiclady; 07-12-2010 at 10:14 AM.
07-12-2010, 10:20 AM   #84
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QuoteOriginally posted by GingeM Quote
Nesster:



There's nothing socialist about the parts you show - you seem to be confused.

RML:

The law provides very well for the prevention of an area being "screwed up"... Try not cutting your lawn for a few weeks in many neighborhoods, if the association doesn't get you the local Code Enforcement Officer will.

The thing you are most worried about, big business using government to effect it's aims through such things as eminent domain only becomes more likely with your suggested solution to all your perceived problems, namely bigger government. As you expend the government you expand it's power. As you expand it's power the more attractive it is for business to "get into bed with it". What results is the unholy joining of business and politics. The solution, limit government's size and reduce it's power over the people. Simples.
The never ending cycle.. shrink gov and "business" gets bigger and more powerful... You NEED the balance. Today's problem is not the SIZE of gov. but who actually controls it and the SIZE of the big businesses. The Propaganda machine would like you to believe it's the gov.size since that is a natural threat (and possibly the only one) to themselves. It's the size of business. ......... Little guy still gets the short end and it's usually shorter......
America's History Of Monopoly-Busting - May 15, 1998
QuoteQuote:
WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, May 14) -- It was the "gilded age." Corporations had grown rich as huge "trusts" dominating oil, railroads, sugar, with their wealthy owners so powerful they rivaled the government itself.

They were too powerful for Sen. John Sherman (R-Ohio). "If we would not submit to an emperor," Sherman said, "we should not submit to an autocrat of trade."

Congress agreed, passing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, with only one vote against.

Republican President Theodore Roosevelt used it against J.P. Morgan's railroad trust, breaking John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil trust into 30 competing companies, and changing America.
Microsoft

For most of this century both political parties pretty much agreed: government should keep corporations from becoming too big and powerful.

In maybe the biggest anti-trust case of all, the AT&T telephone monopoly was broken up in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan.

But by then the tide had turned. Giant IBM survived an anti-trust suit, only to be brought low by newer technology and more nimble competitors.

A new breed of economists taught that big was not necessarily bad, and trust-busting waned. Mergers were allowed to flourish almost unchecked.

Today mergers are still multiplying, more than doubling since 1991 to 3,700 last year and heading to more than 6,000 this year. Included in the group are some big names: Citibank and Travelers, Lockheed and Northrup Grumond, Ameritech and SBC.

And just last week, Chrysler and Mercedes joined. "This is the largest and biggest industrial merger ever," said Daimler CEO Juergen Schrempp said,

But now the tide may be turning again, as the business tactics of software giant Microsoft are questioned by the Justice Department, state attorneys general and Congress.

Overall, there are more investigations and more lawsuits. A century after Sherman, trust-busting is coming back.
IF taken at it's face value.. the "lack of some good old fashioned busting" could be blamed for our current condition....

QuoteQuote:
Once again the trend to massive corporate structures has reasserted itself. A few farsighted titans, like Warren Buffet, are around but the depersonalization of most corporate organization has converted the shareholder into a mere stock gambler with little say over corporate policies. Boards of directors are too often incestuous, self-perpetuating tools of management. Multinational corporations are now such a familiar part of the landscape that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that they are like people, entitled to political self expression, strange for a structure that exists, absent a moral compass, courtesy of statutes, exclusively for profit.
Read more: http://www.adn.com/2010/07/02/1352025/unchecked-corporate-power-causes.html#ixzz0tUSuxbRi

Last edited by jeffkrol; 07-12-2010 at 10:31 AM.
07-12-2010, 10:24 AM   #85
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QuoteQuote:
IF taken at it's face value.. the "lack of some good old fashioned busting" could be blamed for our current condition....
Bingo.
07-12-2010, 11:12 AM   #86
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QuoteOriginally posted by GingeM Quote
Nesster:

There's nothing socialist about the parts you show - you seem to be confused.
No more socialist than the stuff you label as such, based on current right wing / US Chamber of Commerce / Fox talking points.


""the common defense and general welfare of the United States" - that's state ownership of defense and the Welfare state, my friend.


"To establish post offices and post roads" - that's state ownership again, and if proposed now by Obama you'd be purple in the face yelling Socialist!

Wheras, had you learned anything at all from the discussion here so far, you'd see that Obama is not about creating a Vietnamese socialist state. You'd have caught on that the Bush/Obama financial bail out specifically aimed to keep the troubled corporations private: Obama specifically took the bank take-over off the table, for instance.
07-12-2010, 11:35 AM   #87
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QuoteOriginally posted by Nesster Quote
You'd have caught on that the Bush/Obama financial bail out specifically aimed to keep the troubled corporations private: Obama specifically took the bank take-over off the table, for instance.
Giant international corporations have no problem at all with "big government" so long as it's their big government.
07-12-2010, 11:38 AM   #88
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QuoteOriginally posted by wildman Quote
Giant international corporations have no problem at all with "big government" so long as it's their big government.
That, as we say in the old neighborhood, is the scam.
07-12-2010, 11:45 AM   #89
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O/T just a bit

No need to start a new thread..... just though it was a funny juxtaposition.
Rand Paul: Obama's BP Jabs Could Harm Cleanup - CBS News
QuoteQuote:
Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul suggested Thursday that harsh criticism of BP by President Obama's administration could contribute to the oil giant's demise and harm its ability to pay for cleanup of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill
BP Cuts Payments to 40,000, La. Official Says - CBS News
QuoteQuote:
BP has decided to reduce payments to tens of thousands of people whose claim files are incomplete, the secretary of Louisiana's Department of Children and Family Services said.
"This action is irresponsible and in complete contrast to BP's repeated promise that they will 'make things right,'" the secretary, Kristy Nichols, wrote in a letter sent Friday to federal oil spill claims administrator Kenneth Feinberg.
07-12-2010, 11:54 AM   #90
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QuoteOriginally posted by GingeM Quote
......There's nothing socialist about the parts you show - you seem to be confused
It may be informative/educational to hear your description of what a socialist is and what animal it is, that you are describing, when you use this word. That way we will not be "confused" in the future.

Of course there are whole libraries of material on this subject but a few intelligent sentences can serve to give us some inkling of what is in your mind when you use this word.

Otherwise we can only assume that you are referring to some vague, unknowable type of bogeyman that is described by everything except for an extreme right wing bigot.
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