Eminent Domain: We're All Indians Now (Expanded, 7/6)

Less destructive than corporatist politics: A funnel cloud looms menacingly over Peotone, Illinois.

Prior to the closing of the frontier in 1890, "Manifest Destiny" was the incantation used by the government when it gave itself permission to steal property it coveted. Today, the preferred conjuration is "eminent domain."

The phrase "eminent domain"reflects an assumption Karl Marx would find congenial: government is the default owner of everything, and that private ownership, however extensive, is merely a contingent arrangement.

Seizure of property through eminent domain is facilitated by one of several Hamiltonian-mercantilist Easter eggs covertly embedded in the Constitution -- specifically, the Fifth Amendment provision specifying that private property can be taken for "public use" when the government offers what it considers "just compensation."

The familiar civics class platitude describes this provision as necessary for the construction of bridges, hospitals, and other amenities that are supposedly "public goods" only government can provide. The inescapable reality is that eminent domain is a particularly vulgar form of plunder used to enrich the political class and their corporate cronies at the expense of the rest of us.

In his recent book Government Pirates (which is a useful read despite its tautological title), former real estate developer Don Corace offers a concise description of eminent domain operated prior to the onset of the current depression: 

"Arrogant and corrupt city and county official -- with near limitless legal budgets ... align themselves with well-heeled developers,  political cronies, and major corporations to prey on the politically less powerful and disenfranchised, particularly minority communities."

Owing to ongoing economic collapse, municipal and county governments no longer command "limitless" budgets for any purpose. They still wield the power of eminent domain, and still have large constituencies of parasites to tend -- and with real estate values bottoming out, the temptation to seize property at a vastly reduced "fair market price" may be irresistible. This is already being done by the government afflicting the State of Illinois, a junta legendary for its corruption. 

Propaganda for a boondoggle.

In recent weeks, the Illinois state government has begun the legal process of seizing a huge amount private property in and around Peotone, a small town in Will County, about forty miles south of Chicago. The land is being taken for the supposed purpose of building a third Chicago-area airport to complement O'Hare and Midway -- a project that has been discussed, studied, and debated since 1968. 


The proposed "South Suburban Airport" -- which would be three times the size of O'Hare International --  is impractical, unwanted, and unnecessary. It doesn't enjoy the support of any major airline or the approval of the FAA. 

Congestion at O'Hare is often cited as a rationale for a third airport. However, last year, O'Hare's traffic rate was the lowest it had been in 15 years -- a trend that will continue, given the ongoing economic contraction and the ongoing expansion of the nearby international airport in Gary, Indiana. 

Expanding the small international airport in depressed Rockford would provide additional runway space at a fraction of what would be spent on a third Chicago-area airport. But this would deprive the state's patronage pimps of an opportunity to lavish plundered wealth on their favored constituents. 


In the circulatory system of graft that sustains the "pay to play" political system in Illinois, the state department of transportation (IDOT) is the aorta. Last September, IDOT announced that it was filing condemnation suits against the owners of three parcels of land in the proposed Peotone airport site. This was done despite the fact that there is no existing plan to build an airport, and the proposal has not been approved by the FAA. 


Referring to the lawsuits, Susan Shea, IDOT's commissarina for aeronautics matters, declared: "It sends a message, a clear message." 


"It certainly does send a message," wrote local activist and sometime state legislative candidate George Ochsenfeld: "Our out-of-control government will use intimidation tactics to frighten citizens into giving up their property prior to being able to take it `legally.'"


Willis and Vivian Bramstaedt received Shea's "message" last April, in the form of a piece of paper disfigured with official graffiti announcing that the state government intended to take the land they have farmed since the 1950s. 

Peotone residents protest the corporatist landgrab.

"Our schools are failing, our health system is falling apart, the state is out of money, and this is what they're doing?" exclaims 72-year-old Vivian. 

"They" -- the corporatist interests served by the Illinois political class -- are moving as quickly as possible to condemn land around Peotone in order to capitalize on the town's depressed property values. 

Commissarina admits as much, commenting to the Chicago Tribune that (as paraphrased by the paper) "the timing couldn't be better for the state" to carry out condemnation efforts, now that "land values [are] in a historic slump."

When IDOT announced its intention to seize the Bramstaedts' land last April, they offered $9,500 an acre for roughly half of the family's 160-acre corn and soybean farm. This was "50 percent less than waht the state purchased neighboring land for two years ago and a quarter of the price some land sold for when a private company bought parcels there to build an intermodal site in 2006," notes the Tribune. 

Four Peotone-area condemnation cases are already working their way through the court system. Unless the land owners are successful in getting the cases dismissed outright, they will face a lengthy, protracted legal struggle in which their opponent -- the criminal junta dominating Springfield and Chicago -- will use money extorted from them as taxes to underwrite the effort to drive them from their land. 

What distinguishes the Peotone Landgrab from others like it is the fact that the underlying project is a palpable fraud.

 

"The irony is that the Peotone airport has never been deader," contents George Ochsenfeld. "There is no funding for building the airport or for the massive infrastructure -- roads, water, sewer, etc. All major airlines have said that they will not use Peotone." 

The most recently coined rationale is that the facility would be a cargo airport, but this would also be gratuitous, Ochsenfeld observes: "O'Hare is adding 750,000 square feet of cargo space and 18 additional parking spaces for freighter aircraft." (That expansion project, predictably, has become bogged down in graft and cost-overruns, prompting Mayor Daley to request a $15 billion federal bailout.) D.C. Velocity, an aviation trade journal, asked Gary Schultheis, vice president of air freight, North America for Deutsche Post DHL if another Chicago-area cargo airport is necessary. "Not really," he replied. 

Opposing the expropriators: Will Township Commissioner Bruce Hamman (left) and activist George Ochsenfeld protest eminent domain as the state demolishes a home on "condemned" land. (Courtesy of Carol Henrichs.)

 Dan Muscatello, managing director of cargo and logistics for Landrum & Brown -- a Cincinnati-based airport development firm -- told D.C. Velocity that the proposed Peotone cargo airport would find it very difficult to persuade airlines and freight companies to "pull up stakes and move down the road. He also believes that international airlines with all-cargo operations would be reluctant to divide their passenger and cargo flights between two airports. And it shouldn't be forgotten that both passenger and cargo volume will continue to decline as the economic slump deepens and accelerates. 

But it shouldn't be forgotten that the airport is merely a pretext -- and that seizing the land at a pittance is the point of the whole exercise. 

"Since the late 1980s, Illinois officials and their agents have tried every available means to push a huge public works project to fruition, with a keen eye toward ensuring their own political futures and continuing [the] cycle of self-enrichment," relates Peotone resident Carol Henrichs, former editor of the Peotone Vedette and long-time critic of the airport project.  

"Tax dollars have funded a multitude of government lobbyists who make regular trips to Washington, D.C. and Springfield ... to guarantee that despite its inability to gain traction of its own, this is the project that will not die," Henrichs continues. "Airport supporters have left tracks on campaign contribution lists and at political fundraisers for years."

The Peotone project "is the most `studied' airport project in America," explains Henrichs. "The word `study' intimates an investigation into factual learning. It is more accurate to say that reports have been written and rewritten -- massaged until they at least meet minimal federal requirements." 

To keep the process untainted by input from the taxpayers and property owners who would suffer the most, the deliberations leading to creation of the airport development district were confined to a handful of political insiders selected from Will County's tax-consuming class.

Between 1985 and 2002, three successive Republican state administrations in Illinois spent more than $100 million on "studies"; it has been an inexhaustible well of "study money." This liturgical exercise in public graft began as a Republican project, but also attracted the interest of Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Tony Rezko, Barack Obama's imprisoned pay-for-play patron.

In March 2003, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, one of the most adept practitioners of Chicago-style civic Keynesianism, dispatched bulldozers in the middle of the night to tear up a runway at Meigs Field, a 55-year-old commuter airport in the center of Chicago.

Daley insisted that destroying the runway -- for which his administration later was hit with an FAA fine and required to pay back $1,000,000 in misappropriated airport funds -- was a counter-terrorism measure, since Meigs was a general aviation facility "a second's flight time" from the supposedly imperiled Sears Tower. "We did it for public safety," maintained Daley after bulldozers had gouged out the runway.

This was a risibly transparent pretext. Daley's midnight airport raid was carried out in the interest of a separate landgrab: He and his cronies had targeted the property to build a park, another highly lucrative civil engineering project.

"Yes, I do want a park at Meigs Field," Daley admitted after the runway had been reduced to rubble. This was a dual-purpose demolition: In addition to clearing the way for a park, it was broadly comparable to New Deal-era initiatives intended to create artificial scarcity by plowing under crops -- or, in this case, runways. All the better to create a "need" to build the much-discussed third airport -- seizing as much land as "necessary" to do so.

Even though the money for pork-laden public works projects may soon evaporate, the Peotone Landgrab will leave the political class in possession of thousands of acres of prime farmland -- which, as Jim Rogers points out, may soon be the most valuable commodity on the planet.

There's nothing going on here that would be unfamiliar to a Lakota Indian facing expropriation in the late 1880s. And there's every reason to believe that the Peotone Landgrab -- if it's successful -- would be a template for similar acts of official larceny wherever fertile tracts can be seized by the political class at depressed "fair market value."

(Note: The original version of this essay did not include the material about Daley's demolition of Meigs Field. My sincere thanks to commenter "Mark" for bringing that facet of the story to my attention.)

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Quantum of Suffering: Economic Hitmen Target Main Street

You should know something about me, and the people I work with. 

We deal with the left and the right, dictators or liberators. If the current president had been more agreeable, I wouldn't be talking to you.

So if you decide not to sign, you'll wake up with your balls in your mouth, and your willing replacement standing over you. 

If you doubt that, then shoot me, take the money, and have a good night's sleep.

Dominic Greene, political acquisitions specialist for the secretive Quantum criminal oligarchy, explains to Gen. Medrano -- the organization's new pet Bolivian dictator -- how the world really works, as seen in the film Quantum of Solace.

If we were to suture a toupee -- preferably in a procedure not involving anesthetic -- to the scalp of Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs commissar would strongly resemble Dominic Greene, the reptilian villain of the most recent James Bond film, Quantum of Solace.

Blankfein already resembles Greene in ways that transcend mere aesthetics. The same can be said regarding the fictional Quantum criminal syndicate and the corrupt real-life oligarchy to which Blankfein belongs.

Although it was hampered with an undercooked script and an editing style that makes the action sequences all but impossible to follow (think of what Michael Bay would do in the editing bay following a two-day Red Bull jag), Quantum of Solace is the only Bond film to feature an entirely believable villain, and a surprisingly credible Evil Plot.

Dominic Greene is a composite of several real-life oligarchs. In addition to his resemblance to Blankfein, Greene -- an ersatz conservationist who plunders countries and overthrows governments behind a facade of environmental philanthropy -- also somewhat resembles Maurice Strong and George Soros.

Quantum itself is a tenebrous, Bilderberg-like Power Elite fraternity seeking control over the global economy. To that end, the group finances terrorism and revolution (which played a significant role in the previous -- and much superior -- Bond film, Casino Royale) with utter indifference to the ideology of its allies. It is the objective -- the consolidation of power -- that matters, rather than the doctrine used to recruit and motivate the cannon fodder.

At least one of the four people responsible for the Quantum of Solace screenplay appears to be at least superficially familiar with the writings of Carroll Quigley and C. Wright Mills.

A steer, not a bull: Gen. Medrano (Joaquin Cosio).

Dominic Greene's little lecture to Quantum's Bolivian rent-a-thug, General Medrano, brings to mind the following observation by Quigley:

"There does exist an international Anglophile network which operates in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists and frequently does so."

In the film, Greene and Quantum have recruited General Medrano to overthrow the leftist government of Bolivia. All the cabal seeks in return is a large tract of barren desert.

When the CIA starts sniffing around the scheme, Greene buys them off with a side deal: He promises Washington an oil concession if the Company permits the coup to proceed.

By infiltrating a Quantum teleconference, Bond learns of a plot to control "one of the world's most precious resources." In Bolivia he discovers that Greene -- working under the cover of his "Greene Planet" land acquisition corporation -- is planning to monopolize Bolivia's water supply.

Medrano initially balks when told to sign an agreement giving Quantum control over the country's water utility (which would double the price Bolivians were paying for the service), but he grudgingly scribbles his signature when he's reminded how easily he could be replaced.

In addition to the writings of Quigley and Mills, John Perkins' 2005 memoir-expose Confessions of an Economic Hit Man appears to have inspired at least some aspects of the Quantum of Solace storyline.

According to Perkins, the organs of international finance, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, engage in what is essentially a global loan-sharking scheme.
As an economic forecaster covertly recruited by U.S. intelligence in the 1960s, Perkins was dispatched to various countries — including Indonesia and Panama — as an "economic hit man," or EHM. His role was to help induce national leaders to take out huge World Bank loans to fund mammoth infrastructure programs.

Perkins claims that he was was just one EHM among thousands plying the same trade worldwide. If an EHM is successful, writes Perkins, "the [World Bank] loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources…. Of course, the debtor still owes us money — and another country is added to our global empire."

Vulcan's Forge: Civic symbol of Birmingham, Ala.

Economic Hit Men aren’t the only weapons in the Power Elite's arsenal. Perkins also refers to "Jackals," who are sent to deal with the most refractory foreign leaders by fomenting revolutions, or staging assassinations. 

"When the Jackals fail," Perkins continues, "young Americans are sent in to kill and die."

These depredations aren't confined to the Third World, at least as that designation is conventionally understood. 


During the early years of the 21st Century, just before the Federal Reserve's most recent debt bubble collapsed, the EHMs preyed on municipal and county governments across the United States. 

Among their victims are the residents of Jefferson County, Alabama, which has been bankrupted and ruined as the result of a plot eerily similar in some ways to the one depicted in Quantum of Solace.

In 1996, Birmingham was forced to sign a federal consent decree requiring it to reconstruct its municipal sewer system. The initial estimated cost was roughly $250 million. However, that initial cost estimate was like a tiny grain of sand lodged inside the mantle of an oyster.  The Jefferson County political establishment quickly turned that grain of sand into an immense pearl of civic corruption, inflating the cost of the project to $3 billion. 

Sharp-dressed sellout: Larry Langford, JP Morgan's whore.

When the County Commission sought lenders to refinance its sewer bonds, JP Morgan dispatched a low-grade EHM named Charles E. LeCroy. In 2002, Larry P. Langford, a man with a troubled financial background and a weakness for expensive clothes, was appointed president of the Jefferson County Commission -- and LeCroy had his General Medrano. 

LeCroy compromised Langford with the clinical precision of a practiced seducer. Plying him with expensive clothes, jewelry, and cash payouts, LeCroy induced Langford to sign off on a series of esoteric "synthetic debt swaps" that eventually inflated the county's debt -- for rebuilding a sewer system, remember -- to $5.4 billion. 

The mechanics of these instruments are deliberately convoluted; the agreements were cluttered with recondite language designed to obstruct understanding, and conceal trip-wires and trap-doors. 

"I needed somebody to tell me what all that stuff was," Langford would testify in a June 2008 deposition. "And even when they told me, I still don't understand 99 percent of it."


Seeking an "independent" adviser to vet JP Morgan's proposals, Langford turned to William Blount, who ran the local investment firm of Blount Parrish & Company. It's entirely possible that Langford honestly didn't know -- at first -- that Blount had also been compromised by Quantum -- er, make that JP Morgan. In fact, Blount's $300,000 side-deal with LeCroy was roughly double the size of Langford's price tag. 


In Quantum of Solace, Bond discovers that Greene and his cohorts had managed to buy off dozens of officials in both the U.S. and British governments with promises of lucrative oil concessions. As Mr. White, a bagman for Quantum who had been introduced in Casino Royale, tells Bond: "The first thing you need to know about us is that we have people everywhere" -- including supposed allies in key positions within U.S. and British intelligence.

As mentioned earlier, Dominic Greene was able to get the CIA to butt out of Bolivia in exchange for a bogus oil deal. It cost LeCroy, JP Morgan's EHM in Birmingham, $3 million to persuade Goldman Sachs to avert its gaze from the opportunities for plunder in Jefferson County.


When queried by a comrade at JP Morgan, LeCroy explained that the money was the price of Goldman "not messing with us. It's a lot of money, but in the end, it's worth it on a billion-dollar deal." 


As the irreplaceable Matt Taibbi pointed out in his definitive journalistic autopsy of Jefferson County, just about everybody in the Banking Cartel sought a piece of the action: Four of the nation's top investment banks, the very cream of American finance, were involved in one way or another with payoffs to Blunt in their scramble to do business with the county. 

In addition to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns paid Langford's bagman $2.4 million, while Lehman Brothers got off cheap with a $35,000 `arranger's fee.' At least a dozen of the county's contractors were also cashing in, along with many of the county commissioners." 


Dozens of local businessmen and political officials -- including Langford, who was elected Birmingham Mayor in 2007,  and Blount -- have been convicted on charges of bribery and other forms of corruption. LeCroy was eventually convicted and sent to prison for three months -- yes, three months -- for his role in a similar criminal enterprise in Philadelphia.


Some of those responsible for pillaging Jefferson County are behind bars, but nothing they will experience will compare to the suffering they have left in their wake. 

A chilling scene near the end of Quantum of Solace shows Indian peasants looking on in frustration and alarm as their local water pumps suddenly run dry in (temporary) consummation of Greene's plan. More than a few residents of Jefferson County have lived through very similar privations.


County residents now pay an estimated $750 a year for municipal services, more than twice the national average. Sewer costs are now 300 percent higher than they were when the reconstruction project began in 1996. These ruinous increases reflect the fact that those sentenced to live in Jefferson County are being taxed to pay the service on the debts created by JP Morgan's Economic Hit Man and his seraglio of civic servants. 

Birmingham resident Dora Bonner, a woman in her 70s who lives on a Social Security check and shares her home with four grandchildren, was among those forced to choose between paying a $250 water bill or keeping the furnace running in wintertime.  "I couldn't afford the water, so they shut it off," Bonner told Bloomberg News. 

Jefferson County residents draw nearer to bankruptcy every time they shower or flush the toilet. JP Morgan, the architects of this misery, received $25 billion in TARP bailout money and unspecified tens of billions more from indirect subsidies. Last year it dished out more than $11 billion in management bonuses. 


After the Economic Hit Men have done their work, John Perkins informs us, those who employ them send in first the jackals, then the troops. The destruction of Alabama's most populous county suggests that, at least where domestic operations are concerned, Quantum's real-life counterparts might simply skip the second stage and go directly to martial law. 

First Hit Men, then Jackals, then troops.

Last fall, a "kind of civil legal civil war broke out" in Jefferson County "when three county agencies -- the sheriff's department, an indigent-care hospital and the tax-assessor's office -- sued the county commission to stop ... budget cuts on the grounds that they posed a danger to public safety," reported Bloomberg News last October. 


Maintaining that budget cuts would make it impossible to provide law enforcement coverage for Jefferson County, Sheriff Mike Hale suggested that it would be necessary to call in the National Guard to serve as a police force. In fact, as AlterNet's Mike Ames observes, martial law is "a logical progression in the ongoing billionaire plunder of America."


In March 2009, following a shooting rampage in which 27-year-old Samson, Alabama resident Michael McClendon murdered ten people before killing himself, troops from Fort Rucker "were brought into Samson and other surrounding areas to patrol the streets," reported Ames. "This was a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, every freedom-loving American's worst nightmare." 

A subsequent investigation by the Army confirmed that it was illegal to dispatch soldiers to patrol the streets and man roadblocks, but no effort was made to identify, let alone punish, those responsible. As Ames points out, the damage done in Alabama by Wall Street's Economic Hit Men was hardly confined to Jefferson County: Pilgrim's Pride, one of the state's largest private employers, was seduced into leveraging itself into bankruptcy. 


"Now you can see why Alabamans are loading up on so many weapons," concludes Ames. For the same reason, it's not surprising that some statewide political campaigns in Alabama this year have an insurrectionary tone -- not that this is necessarily a bad thing, of course. The problem, predictably enough, is that the understandable rage and frustration are likely to be skillfully misdirected in the service of the same people who have all but reduced the state to Third World status. 


Those of us who don't live in Alabama need not feel left out, since -- as Quantum's Mr. White might put it -- Wall Street's taxpayer-subsidized oligarchy has people everywhere. Their fingerprints will most likely be found wherever a municipal or county government is suffocating in debt and wringing whatever revenue it can from tax victims who have nothing left to give.


Yes, I know: Quantum of Solace is a silly movie, full of implausible action gags and dodgy dialogue. And yet....

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