Eminent Communism

Imagine your dream home, taken from you by a communist government.

The irony is that there may be a scenario where this is the end result in some eminent domain cases.

The recent Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain (KELO et al. v. CITY OF NEW LONDON et al.) increased government's power to take private property by expanding the definition of “public use”.

Once your land has been taken and redeveloped, you will never get it back. But government property comes and goes, and can eventually be sold off. Developers and investment groups trade land constantly.

Imagine that your property has been taken for public use. The property at some point gets turned over to a developer. Maybe even passed from one developer to another. What if a developer is a foreign investment group? Perhaps even an investment group that is a front for the Communist Chinese government.

The end result: your private property has been taken, and placed into the hands of a communist government. Is this scenario impossible, or probable?

It would be an ironic turn of events, considering the original goal of communism is the “abolition of private property”. Could it be that some members of the Supreme Court really don’t agree with the idea of private property?

Notes on the Bush Speech

Anyone looking for an exit strategy in last night's speech by President Bush will be hard pressed to find one. Too many of the stated goals are open-ended.

What is our first and foremost enemy to defeat and outlast? According to President Bush, it's an ideology, and it was mentioned several times ("totalitarian ideology", "murderous ideology", "hateful ideology"). It's tough to outlast an ideology, or defeat it...and how or when does one claim victory? Who has to be captured, defeated or killed? It's a war that never ends.

We are also after the terrorists. Is that really a "mission" that can be completed? When does that end? Recent history shows that terrorists can lose most support over a long period of time, but individual, crazed murderers always exist. Once again, how do you claim victory, and who decides when it is over? Is there a minimum frequency of terrorist attacks at which victory can be declared? Some quotes from Bush's speech: "To complete the mission, we will continue to hunt down the terrorists and insurgents" and "The principal task of our military is to find and defeat the terrorists".

Bush says that "all they have to do is to wait us out", and that may seem an impossible timeline for the US to beat, as we will have to leave someday, but there really is a hard deadline when it comes to Bush. His term will be over, and then, if it is a personal battle of wills between Bush and some vague enemies, the game will be over. One side will be leaving the playing field, and perhaps the game can be called off. Maybe then, the troops will come home.

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There was one new and interesting quote from the speech:

"The other critical element of our strategy is to help ensure that the hopes Iraqis expressed at the polls in January are translated into a secure democracy. The Iraqi people are emerging from decades of tyranny and oppression. Under the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Shia and Kurds were brutally oppressed, and the vast majority of Sunni Arabs were also denied their basic rights, while senior regime officials enjoyed the privileges of unchecked power."

Now this is an honorable goal. Is Bush serious about this? It seems that the Iraqi people do have the same problems as the rest of the world: the "privileges of unchecked power". Perhaps this is the most important goal in Iraq. But why don't we include ourselves and our biggest trading partners in that goal, where the few take advantage of the many, and some enjoy privilege and unchecked power? Corruption, bribery, and the privilege of officials are rampant in some of the countries with the largest populations, and the cheapest labor. If this critical strategy is good enough for Iraq, how about for the rest of us?

No Exit on the Baghdad Loop

President Bush has concluded another speech on the Iraq war. Once again, there is nothing new to report, and there is no roadmap for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. The goals and missions for Iraq, as outlined by President Bush, have no end. We are fighting an ideology, and “we are hunting down the terrorists”. It doesn’t get any more open-ended then that.

But read between the lines and the essence of the President’s mission can be distilled to a single, essential point: He must win the battle of wills with Osama and any other enemy who tries to claim victory when the US withdrawals. This is a game of chess, and the simple logic of Osama’s starting move has been too much for the Bush team to unravel. It worked for Osama in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, and they are using the same tactic against Bush in Iraq. The logic is as follows:

a) Goad the US into an invasion.
b) Knowing that the US will have to leave at some point in the future (harassed or not), wait for the inevitable withdrawal.
c) Claim victory after the withdrawal.

As simple as this sounds, it is the essence of the current situation. Bush does not want to repeat the “mistake” of the Soviets in Afghanistan. If Bush leaves, he loses. Therefore he can not leave Iraq. He will not be forced out by any action of the enemies. Bush is trapped.

So how could Bush have avoided this? The obvious first choice is that he should have not invaded at all, but that is water under the bridge. There is hardly ever a good opportunity to get out of this trap. What is required is a decisive winning event, after which the US could declare victory, and start to extract itself from the quagmire. The enemies who attempt to claim victory would be discredited.

Interestingly, the perfect exit has come and gone. It was set-up by President Bush before the Iraq invasion, yet it was not used. If we recall the 48 hour deadline speech by Bush, he stated: “Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.”

To a reasonable person, this would mean that once the lawless men are eliminated, then the mission of the US would be complete. Of course, the lawless men we're talking about are Saddam and his inner circle. The victory and exit point were set. After Saddam’s sons were already killed, Saddam was captured on December 13, 2003. This would have been the perfect exit point. President Bush could have declared victory, stated that the tyrant was captured, and pulled back US military forces from direct interaction with the people of Iraq. It seems that this was what the people of Iraq were expecting. After all, President Bush had said that he only wanted to eliminate the leaders of Iraq before the war started. Remember, at this point, very few American soldiers had been killed. There was no full-blown rebellion, and the vast majority of the Iraqi people had not turned against the US. But this exit was not taken. Instead, on December 17, 2003, four days later, Operation Ivy Blizzard was launched, which left no doubt that the US forces were not done. Of course this also vindicated all of the Islamic conspiracy theories that this war was not what it seemed, and that the US was not going to leave. And we certainly did not leave.

As reference points, the infamous killing, burning and hanging from a bridge of 4 American contractors did not take place until April 1, 2004. This was over three months after the capture of Saddam. Another milestone was August 2004, eight months after the capture of Saddam, when Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers started to act up in Najaf. All of this took place long before US soldiers were killed in any numbers, and before any insurgency had truly taken hold.

The perfect exit had come and gone.

Once again, it is all water under the bridge. Will there be another exit point, when the US can withdrawal without terrorists claiming victory? Obviously, they will always claim victory at our withdrawal, but if the circumstances are right, we could exit gracefully on a positive and victorious note, and they will be taken for the loudmouth fools that they are. But judging from the President’s most recent speech, no exit is planned; just the inevitable turns around an endless loop of vague and unreachable goals, waiting out an endless battle of wills, while the American and Iraqi peoples both pay with their lives and resources.

Eminent Domain's Reverse Robin Hood

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing local government to take and redistribute private property to non-government entities is surprising on the surface. Yet, it follows a deeper, long-term trend, and is really no surprise. The powerful, the rich, the influential and the connected have simply tightened their grip on the property and rights of individuals, with the aid of a misguided court.

This decision really boils down to economics; i.e. buyers, sellers and supply and demand. When it comes to the so-called “free economy”, the rules continue to be tipped in favor of the powerful. We have watched as the corrupt and crooked have stolen from America (i.e. Enron), with reluctant prosecution focusing only on accounting fraud. What about the infamous ripping off of “Grandma Millie”?

Collusion and monopolization are everyday fare now. We have watched anti-monopoly and anti-collusion/anti-trust laws be discarded and ignored. The government and popular business media encourages trusts and mergers. And it is not to the benefit of the consumer, or the shareholder, only the elite executives and their friends. The foundation of a free and capitalist system is competition. Why has competition been removed from the equation?

When we return to the basics, supply and demand should set the price. In many cases, we don’t have any true competition or selection. The elite industries set the price, and it is final. The game is biased towards the powerful, not the individual.

If a consumer had a choice, they might add up the production costs, and decide that they would offer a fair market value of $1 per gallon for gasoline. Or they might offer $2 for a new music CD, partly based on the fact that the actual plastic materials are only worth pennies. Needless to say, it won't work. The consumer will pay the price set by the mega-companies. That is the power of monopoly, collusion and price fixing.

Now back to the real meat of this recent Supreme Court ruling. Let's put the shoe on the other foot. An individual is the “seller” (voluntary or otherwise). The powerful are now the buyers. They will buy that property at the "fair market value" price that they set. The seller has no choice, thanks to the Supreme Court. This is regardless of the fact that the demand for the property has obviously gone up, and thus the price should also go up. To really make this unconstitutional, the property is not going to the government, as is the basis for eminent domain. It is going to a more powerful non-government entity. A reverse Robin Hood, where we take from the poor, and give to the rich. And the basis for taking private property by force is a vague and dubious new interpretation of “public use”.

So in the end, the Supreme Court has followed the same trend that has been going on for years: a Constitutional interpretation that protects the rights of the elite, and removes the rights from the people. They will still claim it protects the common people, and swear on a bible to defend it. But to understand the new interpretation of the Constitution, you need to get out your Orwell, and learn to doublethink. Many of our leaders are certainly experts at it.


Doublethink - "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary." - Orwell