Posted on 04/23/2011 7:05:23 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Don’t be fooled by the Donald. Take it from one who knows: I’m a South Jersey gal who was raised on the outskirts of Atlantic City in the looming shadow of Trump’s towers. All through my childhood, casino developers and government bureaucrats joined hands, raised taxes, and made dazzling promises of urban renewal. Then we wised up to the eminent-domain thievery championed by our hometown faux free-marketeers.
America, it’s time you wised up to Donald Trump’s property-redistribution racket, too.
Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run — first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea-party event in South Florida. He touts his business experience, “high aptitude,” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard bearer of conservative values, limited government, and constitutional principles than the cast of Jersey Shore.
Too many mega-developers like Trump have achieved success by using and abusing the government’s ability to commandeer private property for purported “public use.” Invoking the Fifth Amendment takings clause, real-estate moguls, parking-garage builders, mall developers, and sports-palace architects have colluded with elected officials to pull off legalized theft in the name of reducing “blight.” Under eminent domain, the definition of “public purpose” has been stretched like Silly Putty to cover everything from roads and bridges to high-end retail stores, baseball stadiums, and casinos.
While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private-property rights. In the 1990s, he waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City that stood in the way of Trump’s manifest land development. The real-estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limousine parking lot — Coking’s private property be damned. The nonprofit Institute for Justice, which successfully saved Coking’s home, explained the confiscatory scheme:
Unlike most developers, Donald Trump doesn’t have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property, because a governmental agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority or CRDA — will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell. Here is how the process works.
After a developer identifies the parcels of land he wants to acquire and a city planning board approves a casino project, CRDA attempts to confiscate these properties using a process called “eminent domain,” which allows the government to condemn properties “for public use.” Increasingly, though, CRDA and other government entities exercise the power of eminent domain to take property from one private person and give it to another. At the same time, governments give less and less consideration to the necessity of taking property and also ignore the personal loss to the individuals being evicted.
Trump has attempted to use the same tactics in Connecticut and has championed the reviled Kelo v. City of New London Supreme Court ruling upholding expansive use of eminent domain. He told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto that he agreed with the ruling “100 percent” and defended the chilling power of government to kick people out of their homes and businesses based on arbitrary determinations:
The fact is, if you have a person living in an area that’s not even necessarily a good area, and government, whether it’s local or whatever, government wants to build a tremendous economic development, where a lot of people are going to be put to work and make [an] area that’s not good into a good area, and move the person that’s living there into a better place — now, I know it might not be their choice — but move the person to a better place and yet create thousands upon thousands of jobs and beautification and lots of other things, I think it happens to be good.
Like most statist promises of bountiful job creation, government-engineered redevelopment math rarely adds up. Trump’s corporations have backed casino-industry bailouts and wealth-redistributing “tax-increment financing” schemes — the very kind of taxpayer-subsidized interventions we’ve seen on a grand scale under the Obama administration.
Championing liberty begins at the local level. There is nothing more fundamental than the principle that a man’s home is his castle. Donald Trump’s career-long willingness to trample this right tells you everything you need to know about his bogus tea-party sideshow.
However, I'm disappointed that she joins other RINO’s in obfuscating the issue, which is obama’s eligibility, or lack thereof.
So what if Mr. Trump's not our man or is grandstanding or feeding his ego? He's demonstrating the guts to confront a real issue that virtually everyone, including you, Ms. Malkin, has sidestepped or been downright silent on.
I understand that it might embarrass you and others if we ever find out that your silence on the matter contributed Obama’s election and subsequent downfall of America over the past two years.
But if you don't mind, we'd like to get to the bottom of just what is going on here and see to it that it never happens again.
Finally, tea party folks are independent thinkers, and are quite capable of making up their own mind of who is or is not deserving of their support. Please don't treat them otherwise.
Whatever you say.
Trumpsuckers have Zero credibility.
Trump talks a good game but that’s all it is to him, a game.
I like the way he attacks Obama, but he has given lots of money to the Dems and trashed Republicans. That’s not my kind of candidate. My kind of candidate is Sarah Palin.
While I support Palin, my point is that Romney is worse than Trump. Romney has used the jack boot of government to implement a health care scheme where millions of people became a victim. Trump’s actions affected how many again? And Romney is a willing socialist who is completely blind to the damage he has caused. Which is worse? The health care scheme is far worse. At least Trump will admit that his actions affected various individuals ( a few, how many?) and he freely discusses the actions he took rationally with interviewers. Romney never enters the rational discussion with anyone.
Mark Steyn and Mark Levin are contributors to NRO, who are not to be grouped with the others.
I do not misuse the word RINO as you have implied. Rush and Levin have both noted how the National Review has gone downhill since the days of William Buckley. The content in the National Review at best provides a schizophrenic representation of conservativism.
This alone shows Trump to be an opportunist, not a principled conservative.
Only if you allow it to be so. That's a lazy broad brush that you are painting with. If articles by Malkin, McCarthy, Steyn, Levin, Hanson, Nordlinger .... are good conservative thought, you don't want them posted and discussed on FR merely because they are on NR? Got it.
For some, apparently so. This is like Schwartzenegger v 2.0. Take someone with a lot of celebrity recognition and a reputation as a tough guy (even if in Arnold’s case it was a fantasy persona), and add in some tough talk (as in “don’t be economic girly men”) and it’s going to pull a certain segment of voters. We can see how that turned out for California.
It’s true that there’s a hunger for a candidate who’ll take an aggressive verbal fight straight into the heart of the MSM and Obama. If we had someone with the tough guy persona of, say, Chris Christie, and the proven conservative principles of, say, Michele Bachmann, we’d have a winner. Lacking that, which we are, The Donald’s going to gather up a head of steam.
So sick of that nonsense. If conservative Republicans don’t put up the right candidate than yes we deserve the crap that we have now for four more years. Grow up.
I will agree that NRO has gone downhill and that little boy Richie L has nowhere near the real world experience to run it. Folks in the know tell me that appointment was borne of WFBs heavy dope smoking in his waning years. Who knows?
I’ll disagree that Mitt is worse than Trump from a conservative point of view, but that’s a fair debate and they both raise red flags for me. I’m sure that will be part of the debate in the coming months.
My only point was that the eminent domain issue and Trump is a matter of history, and not opinion. Sure NRO may have ulterior motives, but that should not disqualify the info if it is correct. And here it is. BTW I support Cain but would vote for Palin (like you) or Trump or Mitt over a socialist idiot.
If you lived in the middle of a slum and found you couldn't borrow to expand your landscape business you'd agree too.
Kelo is one of those cases that pit pro-business folks against small residential property owners. All the Court ruled was that in Connecticut the state's own laws allowed for the rationale being used to use eminent domain.
Most states have Constitutions that don't allow for that rationale. Kelo occurred AFTER the dispute between the ACRDA and Vera began. Interestingly enough the ACRDA/Vera dispute doesn't involve pitting a business against a residential property owner ~ Vera ran a business out of her small hotel ~ so this is business on business shenanigans. She asked too high a price.
Then there's Vera's behavior with respect to Bob Guccione's attempt to build his casino. He had the zoning. He had the property. He had the capital resources lined up. He was building and Vera began a campaign of harrassment and intimidation to force a halt to the construction. She succeeded.
When I got to that part in my research on this case I finally figured out that Bob Guccione didn't have as good a connection to the Mob as I'd always thought he had, or if he had a connection it was at too low a level. Vera had better connections or she wouldn't have been able to get platoons of Atlantic City "inspectors" sent out to the casino site.
It's all about the price. It's about the mob. It's about how they use the government.
Trump has far better connections than the small time bunco artists in Atlantic City it would appear so he was able to build around the problem. Vera didn't manage to get his construction work halted.
excellent post - nice to see some facts around here
The facts are that Vera is not a sympathetic character, and she was into this as a business owner who wanted an upfront chunk of the action (as in $1,000,000 payment for her slum property).
Vera proved her stones by getting Bob Guccione out of there. That deal sent chills up and down my spine ~ I knew then she wasn't exactly who she was portrayed as.
Trump used guile and wit to negate Vera's big win over the casino.
The eminent domain part of the deal is a sideshow of only minor interest. Doesn't matter what Trump thinks about Kelo ~ Fur Shur his own lawyers found out early on that the ACRDA didn't have legislative authorization for use of eminent domain. You can probably find that out in some of the earliest NYT stories about the ACRDA. This whole thing was supposed to be about the AC business community pushing back against the forces of evil and darkness and bringing jobs and the 21st century to Atlantic City.
Sometimes the forces of evil and darkness win ~ but for a short time only. Am I surprised that Michelle Malkin got caught with her knickers down on this one? No, not really. She, herself, in a book, has actually stated that she supported rounding up Japanese-American women, children and citizens in WWII ~
It does now that he is seeking the GOP nomination. It matters big-time.
So true!
“Are we so starved for a strong courageous communicator who is happy to fight 0bama that we’ll jump on the first train that comes by, even if it is a carnival sideshow?”
Yup.
I WISH someone like Paul Ryan, Jim DeMint or Duncan Hunter could garner the nomination, but with the media attacks on people of that character, it doesn’t look likely. Trump is a flawed man, but he’d be better than 0bama.
I thought not.
I'd be more interested in what Trump thinks of blue laser combs ~
Go get stuffed. I am well aware of Kelo.
And I would recommend you read O'Connor's dissent and then still try to downplay it, Trumpette.
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