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Liberty Matters
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
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