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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (180223)	1/18/2006 1:35:30 PM
From: sylvester80	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Yeah right... Eminent domain or imminent cronyism? This morning's NY Times notes that a number of Western Republican lawmakers are a tad concerned about at least one particular provision in the Administration's energy bill: To conservative Republicans, especially those from the West, few things are more sacred than property rights. Their attitude is usually that the government, especially the federal government, should keep its hands off private land. But as they negotiate a new national energy policy, House Republicans and the Bush administration want to grant the federal government substantial new power to allow the seizure of property — even if it means overruling state and local authorities — to establish corridors for high-capacity interstate power lines. But, really, they have nothing to worry about; Bush is one of them, a former states' rights governor who would never misuse such overriding power for personal gain. Right? Cue Nicholas Kristof in an October 2002 Op/Ed piece for the Times [subscription]: I have a stack of court documents from Arlington that portray the ''sordid and shocking tale'' of the Rangers stadium, as one lawsuit puts it. Essentially, Mr. Bush and the owners' group he led bullied and misled the city into raising taxes to build a $200 million stadium that in effect would be handed over to the Rangers. As part of the deal, the city would even confiscate land from private owners so that the Rangers owners could engage in real estate speculation. ''It was a $200 million transfer to Bush and Rangers owners,'' complains Jim Runzheimer, an anti-tax campaigner in Arlington. William Eastland, a leading Republican in Arlington, is also outraged, and puts it this way: ''You're using public money for a private purpose.'' Mr. Eastland was a Bush delegate to the Republican National Convention in 2000 but still believes that the Bush group behaved shadily and against the public interest. Local voters overwhelmingly approved the deal, so maybe we shouldn't get so exercised by star-struck local officials giving $200 million to rich baseball owners. But the most unseemly part of the deal was that Mr. Bush and the Rangers' owners conspired with city officials to seize private property that would be handed over to the Bush group. ''A group of wealthy and influential people threatened and traded their way into an unprecedented takeover of government power and private property in an awesome display of greed and avarice,'' charges a lawsuit by the landowners, in what strikes me as a fair recitation of events. Another suit charges that the deal ''can only be described as astounding, unprecedented and blatantly illegal.'' A copy of the secret agreement among Mr. Bush and the other Rangers owners shows that they intended to make money not just by running a baseball club but also by land speculation. For example, one owner found a nice chunk of land and sent a memo suggesting that it ''sounds like another condemnation candidate if you want to work the site into your master plan,'' according to the court documents. Another of the owners' internal memos casts a proprietary gaze on a property and declares: ''We plan to condemn this land.'' For a group of financiers to go around town admiring properties and deciding which to seize through the government power of condemnation so that they can acquire free land and speculate on it is appalling. Even Kazakhstan would blush at such practices. I read of this deal back in 2000 in Molly Ivins' bestseller, Shrub, and was always surprised the issue didn't seem to come up in the campaign that year. Well, it appears that when it comes to money, Bush might just be as willing to screw his political friends same as his enemies. And for the House Republicans? How does the old saying go? When you lie down with rattlers.... wampum.wabanaki.net