J. Tyler wrote:
> Eminent domain is supposed to be reserved for public uses
>(i.e., anything sans private profit). It's really that simple, isn't
>it? If private profit is the direct and immediate effect, it is a
>taking for private use, and therefore unconstitutional.
>
Well, yeah. You'd think.
I was watching French TV tonight. They had a very long documentary about the Spanish turning their mediterranean coast into retirement grounds for the Swiss, Germans, and English. This involved turning a lot of Spanish people out of their homes in order to build mile upon mile of retirement condos. It also involved refocusing a good part of their health care to providing geriatric care for foreigners. There are whole towns in which no Spanish is spoken and in which there is not a single item in the supermarket that is not labeled in English. (Some Americans were complaining on the web about Canada's proposal to give Canadians first go at their nationally subsidized prescription drugs. Imagine that!)
Why is this relevant to the eminent domain question? Because in this latest leg of capitalist expansion "eminent domain" seeks to make profit taking a universal right which, by definition, is represented as a universal benefit. Never mind that it's clearly NOT universal. Never mind that some people lose their homes, while others retire like kings. Never mind that the people being pushed out are always poorer than the people doing the pushing. This is being played out on so many levels that it starts to look completely natural. Think of the U.S.'s "natural" right to the world's oil and its right to wage war to secure control of that oil as a form of "self defense."
This latest extension of eminent domain is cut from the same cloth. I mean, the Supreme Court did not reject the case for not being an example of eminent domain (for the reasons J Tyler specifies above) -- it could have done that without imperilling the principle of eminent domain at all.
Joanna
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