Oil and Gas Companies Can Take Your Land. By Alison K. Grass, Food & Water Watch
23 August 12 http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/328-121/13067-oil-and-gas-companies-can-take-your-land
[Excerpted] No Person Shall Be Deprived of Life, Liberty or Property… Unless the Oil and Gas Industry Says So.
Eminent domain, the government's right to condemn (or take) private land for "public use," has at times been a highly contentious topic because it can displace people from their homes to make way for construction of different projects, like highways or roads, civic buildings and other types of public infrastructure. However, what some may not realize is that several states have granted eminent domain authority to certain private entities, including oil and gas companies. These companies are using it as a tool to seize private land, which increases profits and benefits their wallets...
...The state legislature of North Carolina recently legalized
fracking. Yet, what some residents may not know is that North Carolina's eminent
domain law allows some private entities to take private property for certain
uses. This includes oil and gas companies who have been given the right to
condemn land and construct pipelines for natural gas transportation. As a supervising
attorney at the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic points out, there could be even bigger implications. "If private companies
engaged in these activities are designated as 'public enterprises,' then they
may be able to take private property for purposes far beyond that of laying
pipelines."
Op-Ed Contributor Giving In to the Surveillance State By Shane Harris. The New York Times
Published: August 22, 2012
[Excerpted] In March 2002, John M. Poindexter, a former national
security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, sat down with Gen. Michael V.
Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency. Mr. Poindexter sketched
out a new Pentagon program called Total Information
Awareness, that proposed to scan the world’s electronic information —
including phone calls, e-mails and financial and travel records — looking for
transactions associated with terrorist plots.
...when T.I.A.’s existence
became public, it was denounced as the height of post-9/11 excess and ridiculed
for its creepy name... and T.I.A.
was dismantled in 2003.
But what Mr. Poindexter didn’t know was that the
N.S.A. was already pursuing its own version of the program, and on a scale that
he had only imagined. A decade later, the legacy of T.I.A. is quietly thriving
at the N.S.A. It is more pervasive than most people think, and it operates with
little accountability or restraint....
...Today, this global surveillance system continues to
grow. It now collects so much digital detritus — e-mails, calls, text messages,
cellphone location data and a catalog of computer viruses — that the N.S.A. is
building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and
process it....
Majia here: The merger of corporations and the state has occurred in the energy industry, in the medical industry, in the food industry, and in the military-industrial-nuclear complex.
The merger occurs through revolving doors, corporate lobbying, and politicians' economic investment in powerful corporations. The result is that the laws that are written by congress, and the policies pursued by government more generally, are far more likely to benefit special corporate interests than the general public.
We see this corruption of legislation in this example of the extension of eminent domain privileges to fracking interests.
Those who resist this creeping (lunging?) fascism get constituted as enemies of the state, as internal threats to security, and are subject to surveillance and, sometimes, outright intimidation.
[Excerpted] Domestic emergency deployment may be "just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority," or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU's National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of "a creeping militarization" of homeland security. (Hsu and Tyson A1)
Majia here: These strands - the merger of mega-corporations and state apparatuses coupled with the growth of authoritarian surveillance - are clear symptoms of a democracy devolving into fascism.
References
ACLU. “ACLU Challenges Defense Department Personnel Policy To Regard Lawful Protests As ‘Low-Level Terrorism.’”ACLU. 10 June 2009. 24 June 2009 http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/39822prs20090610.html.
Hsu, Spencer S., and Ann S. Tyson. “Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security.” The Washington Post 1 December 2008: A1.
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