My last blast for the day since I'm overlimit. Doug's point on individual consumption choices is a goodun' My Mom used to carry around in her purse a book published by the Council on Economic Priorities. Once, driving around L.A. trying to fing parking for a movie, no decent resteaurants for miles, I said let's grab a McD. Out comes the book. Nope.Sigh. Had to buy the way overpriced food at the cineplex. It was a long movie too! Shoah by Claude Lanzman, isn't it 7 hrs. long? Rashomon is shorter. Salo by Pasolini is shorter. 8 1/2 is shorter.Juliet of the Spirits by Fellini is shorter. 1900 is shorter.The Battle of Chile is shorter. The Batle of Algiers is too. So is Burn with Brando... As for Merle Haggerd. He wrote many a fine w/c conscious ballad. I wouldn't say by any means he's an open socialist like Steve Earle, but the picking on him 'cuz of Okie from Muskogee gets tiresome.
Michael Pugliese, who for the first two yrs. of his life lived in a trailer park, gasp. See this piece in a South End Press anthology on Queers and Class. http://www.southendpress.org/books/queerlyTOC.shtml Jeesh, why didn't South End add the name of the authors of each piece? Anyway, it's the Allen Berube piece. He grew up in a trailer park till a much later date than I.
-----Original Message-----
: Thursday, January 18, 2001 11:58 AM
Subject: Fwd: FW: GALE NORTON'S RADICAL LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
>Subject: FW: GALE NORTON'S RADICAL LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
>Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 14:47:22 -0500 (EST)
>
> GALE NORTON'S RADICAL LEGAL PHILOSOPHY
> To Her, Private Property Rights Means Gutting Environmental and Community
Protections
>
> David Helvarg is a commentator for Marketplace radio, author of
> The War Against the Greens and the forthcoming Blue Frontier
> -Saving America's Living Seas (WH Freeman).
>
>
> Gale Norton, George Bush's nominee for Secretary of Interior is
> not only a long-time protégé of former President Reagan's
> controversial Interior Secretary James Watt ("We will mine
> more, drill more, cut more timber"), an advocate of
> self-regulation for polluters, and a former lead-industry
> lobbyist. She's also a leading "Property Rights" activist who
> favors a radical reinterpretation of the Fifth Amendment of the
> US Constitution that could compel the government to pay
> billions to wealthy property owners and wreak havoc on the
> environment.
>
> A follower of the legal theories of Law Professor Richard
> Epstein, Norton believes government should pay financial
> compensation to developers whenever environmental laws or
> regulations limit their real or potential profits. As Attorney
> General of Colorado this philosophy led her to oppose
> government (and voter) attempts to control sprawl and protect
> open space. "Economic rights are clearly not protected today.
> Land is owned subject to the whims of one's neighbors on the
> zoning commission," she has argued.
>
> The Fifth Amendment states, "No person shall be...deprived of
> life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law: nor
> shall private property be taken for public use without just
> compensation." Today, when the government condemns land to
> build a stadium or an airport for example, the Fifth Amendment
> guarantees that the landowner be paid market value for his or
> her lost property.
>
> When, in 1887 a Kansas beer brewer argued that a prohibition
> law in his state was also a takings under the Fifth Amendment,
> the Supreme Court ruled against him, stating that, "a
> government can prevent a property owner from using his property
> to injure others without having to compensate the owner for the
> value of the forbidden use."
>
> This "nuisance clause" is the basis on which the government has
> been able to establish health and safety regulations, labor
> laws, zoning, consumer and environmental standards.
>
> What more than a century of this precedent has tended to show
> is that for every form of regulatory taking, there are far more
> "givings" going on. The Clean Water Act that prevents a
> corporate hog farm from dumping manure into a river upstream
> from a National Seashore, can be seen as a "giving" by the
> coastal residents of the area and by the public who benefit
> from a clean and healthy coastline. But Norton has argued for,
> "a major shift in takings jurisprudence," away from this
> precedent. "We might even go so far as to recognize a
> homesteading right to pollute or to make noise in an area.
> This approach would eliminate some of the theoretical problems
> with defining a nuisance," she's argued in the Harvard Journal
> of Law and Public Policy.
>
> In 1985 Richard Epstein wrote Takings: Private Property and
> the Power of Eminent Domain, in which he insisted that the
> Fifth Amendment requires the government to pay property owners
> compensation whenever regulations or laws in any way limit the
> value of their property. He went on to claim that along with
> environmental laws, building permits and income taxes are also
> takings.
>
> Epstein's eccentric interpretation of the Constitution found a
> ready audience among the Reagan revolution's legal foot
> soldiers including Gail Norton, then a lawyer in the Interior
> Department, and Justice Department lawyers Roger and Nancie
> Marzulla who would later found the anti-environmental
> "Defenders of Property Rights" (on whose Legal Advisory Council
> Norton serves).
>
> "Extreme Libertarian Views"
>
> But even Charles Fried, Reagan's U.S. solicitor general from
> 1985 to 1989, was troubled by this view. In his book, Order
> and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution, Fried wrote:
> "Attorney General Meese and his young advisors... often
> devotees of the extreme libertarian views of Chicago law
> Professor Richard Epstein -- had a specific, aggressive, and,
> it seemed to me, quite radical project in mind: to use the
> takings clause of the Fifth Amendment as a severe brake upon
> federal and state regulation of business and property."
>
> Norton has argued that if using these formulations has a
> chilling effect on environmental regulation, "I view that as
> something positive."
>
> So do industrial polluters, developers, the mining, logging and
> oil industry all of whom have brought regulatory takings suits
> against the government, claiming that protection of wetlands,
> wildlife, establishment of wilderness areas, and requirements
> for double hulling of oil tankers are all regulatory takings
> for which the government must pay them billions of dollars in
> compensation.
>
> Industries certainly have every right (and enough high-paid
> attorneys) to argue this extreme takings position in attempting
> to protect their corporate interests.
>
> The question is does the United States want a Secretary of
> Interior, who is supposed to be the steward of America's
> natural resources and remaining wilderness treasures, who
> subscribes to this same extremist view?
>
>Copyright 1999-2000 The Florence Fund
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com