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To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256606)	6/24/2010 7:58:47 PM
From: joseffy	Respond to of 306849

Five years after Kelo By Marc Scribner Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 dailycaller.com Today marks the five-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious Kelo v. New London decision. In a 5-4 ruling, the Court held that seizing private property in order to lease it to a private developer met the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause—“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”—“public use” requirement. Huh? The majority’s reasoning was as absurd as their ruling. Rather than expand the public use doctrine, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her dissent, the Court decided “to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property—and thereby to effectively delete the words “for public use” from the Takings Clause.” This terrible story began in 1998, the year pharmaceutical giant Pfizer started construction of a $300 million research campus in New London, Connecticut. The city had been in decline for decades, and was particularly hurt when the Navy closed its Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory in 1990. Desperate for jobs and tax revenue, the city came up with a redevelopment plan focusing on 90 acres in the Fort Trumbull area, adjacent to the new Pfizer facility. The plan called for a mixed-use development, including dining, shopping, and even a hotel near the Thames River waterfront. The city’s New London Development Corporation was able to purchase all but 15 of the properties required to complete the plan. The city moved to condemn the properties through eminent domain, and nine of the affected property owners filed suit. While the suit was pending, the city began negotiating a 99-year lease with developer Corcoran Jennison. In exchange for developing the land in accordance with the city’s development plan, Corcoran Jennison would pay an annual rent of $1. The majority opinion, authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, cited three primary cases that bore no resemblance to the facts surrounding Kelo. All were extreme—one regarded a blight condemnation in a Washington, D.C. slum in the 1950s, another involved redistributing private property in Hawaii when 47 percent of private property in the state was still controlled by 72 owners, and the last involved an intellectual property case in the chemical industry. Kelo involved a sleepy, non-blighted residential neighborhood threatened by an unholy alliance of Big Business and Big Government. What the Court sought to establish was that past precedent had broadened the interpretation of “public use” sufficiently to justify the New London takings. Unfortunately, as Justice O’Connor noted, the Court’s interpretation had rendered the protections granted by the Fifth Amendment meaningless. The outcry following the Court’s opinion was deafening. From across the political spectrum, the public was outraged that homeownership had taken a backseat to corporate welfare. According to polls, nearly 90 percent of Americans opposed the decision. The rest were presumably government officials and rent-seeking private developers. Municipal planners wrongly believe that they have some sort of predictive power regarding future economic conditions—and that they are able to better plan for the future than actual market participants. This is completely ridiculous. How can a career bureaucrat in local government be in a better position to evaluate economic investment decisions than actual investors who put their own money on the line? The poorly reasoned Kelo decision did do some good in galvanizing a nation-wide property rights movement, which resulted in the majority of states enacting additional property protections. These efforts are ongoing, with officials facing growing public scrutiny over their land condemnations. As one might expect, municipal bureaucrats and politicians do not possess economic crystal balls. In November of last year, Pfizer announced it was closing its New London research facility. The increased tax revenue and revitalized mixed-use river district promoted by city officials have yet to materialize, and the area formerly occupied by the Kelo petitioners’ houses is now a bleak landscape home only to feral cats. Marc Scribner is assistant editor and a land-use policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Read more: dailycaller.com

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256606)	6/24/2010 8:44:47 PM
From: saveslivesbyday	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

I have the perfect solution to the BP problem - US simply seizes all assets and nationalizes the company - in exchange for the 100 billion + they will owe in damages, fines, and civil/criminal claims ... That will assure there will be enough assets and cash flow to pay for the damages, and prevent our "foreign competitors" from taking over strategic wells - and can't use bankruptcy as the easy way out

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256606)	6/24/2010 10:11:31 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Tonight CNN's Anderson Cooper is asking some tough questions about the dispersants BP continues to use in the Gulf <eom>.

To: patron_anejo_por_favor who wrote (256606)	6/25/2010 3:08:52 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

BP’s Demise Would Threaten U.S. Energy Security By Stanley Reed June 24 (Bloomberg) -- Oil spill aside, U.S. energy security will suffer if BP Plc goes under or is significantly reduced in size. With public anger off the charts over BP’s role in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, there’s not much sympathy about the financial burden the London-based company faces from future legal claims and cleanup costs. BP says it’s considering asset sales to help cover the cost of a $20 billion escrow fund President Barack Obama demanded the oil producer set up to handle U.S. claims. The company’s survival may also be in doubt if the financial hit from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion approaches $100 billion, as some analysts suggest is possible. Such a scenario would have implications for U.S. energy policy at home and abroad -- and mostly bad ones, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its June 28 issue. Obama recognized as much when he said on June 16 that “BP is a strong and viable company, and it is in all of our interests that it remain so.” The company’s demise would be disruptive to the American oil industry, given that BP is the largest oil and gas producer in the U.S., with about 1 million barrels per day of production. Some 7,000 of BP’s 23,000 U.S. employees work in the Houston area, many in a suburban office park just off the Katy Freeway. ‘Highly Compensated’ From there the company runs its Gulf of Mexico offshore operations with a phalanx of engineers, geologists, and computer scientists. “These are highly compensated people,” says J. Robinson West, chairman of Washington-based consultants PFC Energy. Until the Deepwater Horizon accident, BP’s Gulf activities were viewed by the U.S. government as a big plus for U.S. energy security interests. Since the mid-1990s, the British company has been the leader in Gulf exploration, pushing into deeper water and drilling farther into the earth. Its projects were key to the 7 percent growth in production the U.S. achieved last year, reversing an 18-year decline in output. BP’s skill at negotiating access to new energy resources, especially in strategically important regions, has also served U.S. interests. The company opened up Azerbaijan, a major producer in the Caspian Sea region, for oil development. It has developed two oil and gas fields there, as well as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil pipeline through Turkey that opened in 2004 and offers a counterweight to Russian dominance in the region. Libya, Iraq In 2007, BP signed an agreement with the investment arm of the Libyan government to explore for gas along an offshore tract the size of Belgium. BP’s most daring move has been last year’s $20 billion deal in Iraq to add almost 2 million barrels per day in production to the country’s prized oil field in Rumaila. That attracted deals with other companies, greatly improving Iraq’s economic prospects. “BP was bold in going in first and opening up the way for the rest of them,” says Toby Dodge, an Iraq scholar at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. BP is starting to identify the $10 billion or more in assets it might sell to fund the costs of the Gulf spill, says Managing Director Robert Dudley, who has taken over day-to-day oversight of the cleanup from Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward. “We have to sharpen the portfolio to pace ourselves for what has happened in the U.S.,” Dudley says. Bankruptcy Risk A person familiar with BP’s investment plans says it may need to raise as much as $50 billion to cover costs related to the disaster. Oppenheimer & Co. oil analyst Fadel Gheit thinks BP could end up in bankruptcy if costs exceed $100 billion, a possibility if partners in the stricken well, such as Anadarko Petroleum Corp., manage to pin full legal responsibility for the oil spill on the U.K.-based producer. If so, BP may have to part with some prized assets, and Chinese and Russian oil companies less sympathetic to U.S. interests could step in as buyers and change the geopolitics of the oil industry. “Companies will be interested in buying assets in Azerbaijan, Angola, Brazil, and potentially also Norway,” says Gudmund Halle Isfeldt, an analyst at DnB Nor ASA in Oslo, Norway’s largest bank. To contact the reporter on this story: Stanley Reed in London at sreed13@bloomberg.net Last Updated: June 24, 2010 00:01 EDT