VIDEO: Susette Kelo and Eminent Domain

Those chilling words came from famed Connecticut homeowner Susette Kelo at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s Issues and Ideas Forum in East Lansing. Kelo’s battle to keep her property from being seized by her city government and turned over to private developers led to a controversial 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision...

Here's a problem for any developer. Let's say you acquire a large chunk of land in a Southern state. There's a spot over near one of the existing colonial era roads where they used to lynch Negro slaves.

So what do you do with it ~ do you just subdivide everything, build roads and ignore that "historic spot" (imagining that there aren't people around who knew what went on there), or do you put a fork in the road and build a new road a block over, and arrange your East/West grid roads to pass South of the site.

The developer was a local guy so he knew, and he knew that they knew, and that if he touched the site, everybody would know ~ (and this was in the early 1960s), so he subdivided it right out of his development and arranged the roads so they wouldn't overrun the site.

In short he left it as a sort of triangular chunk of land with no apparent purpose.

Then he dedicated it to public charitable use ~ by the 1990s "life was different" in that Southern state, and the site was offered to the VFW for a local memorial.

In the end when they discovered the problem with the site it reverted to being just a patch of grass at the fork in the road, but around here everybody knows what that was for, and I doubt anyone will ever find a use that wouldn't attract some degree of criticism.

The developer whose offers to CT resulted in the suppression of the rights of property ownership by free people in that state decided he didn't need the site.

Actually, the developer ended up deciding a lot of things and abandoned the project, but here he had Kelo's lot and no matter what he and his corporate crony buddies planned to do there was sure as heck going to be an HISTORIC SITE SIGN at or near that location on the berm of the nearest public dedicated easement or road.

Americans rebel at the idea of using the courts to steal from common people, but there it is. The place still deserves an HISTORIC SITE SIGN.

I don't know what we'll do about the place of execution in the middle of Springfield VA, but someday some smart guy will know. At the moment it is preserved for the ages and EVERYBODY around here knows about it. They even teach it in the local public schools. The kids know. The adults know. The business owners know.

Old times here are not forgotten.

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