Stirring a hornet’s nest Fast forward to the present day, and you’ve got the government’s pipeline projects as a prime example of eminent domain being employed for corporate gain. All across the country, power com-
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panies have been given the green light to build massive gas and oil pipelines that crisscross the country, cutting through private and public lands, as well as unspoiled wilderness. “Yet despite oft-repeated claims by politicians and oil executives about the danger of relying on foreign oil, this U.S. petroleum renaissance never was designed to make America energy self-sufficient,” points out journalist Sandy Tolan. “A growing amount of that oil will end up in China, Japan, the Netherlands, even Venezuela.” So much for the public use.
These pipeline projects that are getting underway in a dozen states have stirred up a hornet’s nest of protests, most notably in Standing Rock, North Dakota, where activists attempting to block the completion of Dakota Access Pipeline were subjected to militarized police, riot and camouflage gear, armoured vehicles, mass arrests, pepper spray, tear gas, drones, less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force, rubber bullets, water cannons, concussion grenades, arrests of journalists, intimidation tactics and brute force.
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Other attempted takings include the transfer of three family-owned seafood businesses to a larger private marina in Texas; the transfer of farmland to a shopping centre anchored by a Lowe’s in Illinois; developing 233 low-income and elderly families’ properties into a seniors’ community where townhouses cost more than $350,000 in New Jersey; and developing middle-income, single-family homes on the waterfront into more expensive condominiums in New Jersey. Even U.S. President Donald Trump has taken advantage of eminent domain, in one instance attempting to take an elderly woman’s house to make way for a limousine parking lot. As an investigative report by the Institute for Justice notes, over the course of five years, local governments used eminent domain to lay claim to more than 10,000 homes, businesses, churches and pieces of private land for business development, including condemning a family’s home so that the manager of a planned new golf course could live in it; evicting four elderly siblings from their home of 60 years for a private industrial park; and removing a woman in her 80s from her home of 55 years supposedly to expand a sewer plant, only to turn around and give her home to an auto dealership.