Your money is as green as mine, right?
And mine as green as yours?
Not so fast.
Not everybody thinks so.
Here's an item from today's Matier and Ross, the political columnists from the San Francisco Chronicle, on Mayor Gavin Newsom's nominee for the San Francisco Board of Permit Appeals, Katherine "Katie" Albright, a former San Francisco Deputy City Attorney who now works for a local educational nonprofit supporting the public schools, according to M&R.
The story on Ms. Albright, whom I've never met but seems like someone I'd admire for her good works alone, is that, apart from being the daughter of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, appointed by Pres. Bill Clinton, is that she owns a few bucks.
Her investment portfolio, which M&R report, lists 26 companies in which she owns a lot of valuable shares and 54 in which she owns less but still plenty of bucks.
The companies, in case this makes a difference to you or to her qualifications to vote on who gets a building permit, and I can see that it might, include American Express, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobile, General Electric, Target Corp., Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and Caterpillar.
M&R report just the facts, above, without comment, other than to say that her investment portfolio of wealth is "eye-catching." Granted, it is, and more power to her.
A few pages later in the same section is an op-ed article by one Terry Leach, who is listed as a registered nurse, attorney, and health care consultant who has won a number of writing awards. I can admire that, too.
Ms. Leach is commenting on a nature film she saw that I've heard good things about and am planning to see, called "March of the Penguins" by Luc Jacquet, into which she says she has read something political. If you're politically attuned, this is something you do. I do it, and so, probably do you. We always see more, don't we, behind the obvious.
What does Ms. Leach see?
Ms. Leach notes that penguins flock together against the freezing cold wind and snow of Antarctica to survive, hatch chicks, feed and raise their young. Hooray for the penguins and hooray to us for noticing and applauding them.
What's political, per Ms. Leach, is that this film "makes the case better than I ever could have that unless we work together for the common good, we are all at risk of significant harm."
There is no argument, tacit or otherwise, that survival of the fittest is the ruling paradigm in nature's harshest clime -- notwithstanding the frequent repeating of "It's nature's way to reward the prosperous" (also known as "those who work hard" or "those who inherited from those who worked hard") by the many conservatives who seem to view social Darwinism as the 11Th Commandment.
Indeed, viewers come away understanding that the individual's needs, be they to eat or stay warm, must come second to the all-important goal of survival of the next generation.
Now we come to Ms. Leach's big jump, relating the penguins of Antarctica to the dreaded Bush administration.
What a concept. Right now the Bush administration is extolling the unifying theme that those who "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" (or, more likely, those who've inherited a bundle) don't owe a dime to their less fortunate fellow human beings or to the next generation.
The newly rich and the already rich are on a tear, ladies and gentlemen, and God help anyone who gets in their way. Passing their time reading, for example, the Financial Times magazine, How to Spend It, these first-class citizens learn early how to buy yachts, jewelry and additional homes along with jets to travel between their residences.
But nowhere in this or in many similar publications will the nascent rich philanthropist learn how to establish a foundation or otherwise redistribute his or her wealth.
Certainly there will be no discussions of the ruinous economic ramifications of destroying the middle class that provides the lions' share of a society's nurses, teacher and police officers [not to mention lawyers], let alone a discussion of the moral issues inherent in a widening gap between the very rich and everyone else.
Ms. Leach then goes on about Paris Hilton, a notable and quite sexy heiress, if a certain video going around the web is any evidence, not that I've looked at it very often, of course.
...California may experience the worst West Nile virus outbreak on record this summer. Last time I checked, mosquitoes didn't stop at gated communities. But money to most public health departments, hospitals and vector control departments did slow to a trickle, as a matter of fact. Many people may die from this neglect and our government's immoral distribution of income. Lots of rich people will eventually die, too, because every now and then they also need emergency care, and respirators and overworked nurses [how about attorneys?] may be unavailable.
Comes now Ms. Leach's [wonderful name] peroration:
We are either all in this together, as the penguins have always known instinctually, or we will all perish.
This is truly nature's lesson.
As taught by Ms. Leach and Karl Marx.
The problem for Ms. Leach is that the Marxian experiment endured for 72 years (1917-1989) and killed 20 million small farmers for the crime of owning and working their own small plots of land. Ms. Leach and her inspiration, Vladimir Lenin, succeeded by Joseph Stalin, saw to the collectivization of those farms and the farmers who weren't shot for having bad parentage and liking to own land, starved. Then there were the political purges that killed even more. And the wars, hot and cold.
I think that Ms. Leach might be surprised to find, if the penguins could find building materials, that some would be living in warm mansions while others huddled outdoors in the raging storm.
Nature has apparently given us an acquisitive gene, along with the altruistic one, and we exercise both.
Ms. Leach, meet Ms. Albright.
Ms. Albright, watch out for Ms. Leach.
Bill Gates!
Move over, once my new operating system us up to speed, I'm coming after you.
And meanwhile, thanks for giving so much of your dough away on health improvement causes in the 3rd World and this. I sincerely appreciate the thoughtful good works. If there's a heaven, there's a place in it for you, when you're not warming yourself elsewhere for the naughty, predatory, acquisitive, deeds committed en route.
***
Outside of your own family, which, if like most, is run on a communistic principle by which those who are able take care of those who aren't, their children, have you ever participated in a group in which you had to rely on trust to insure that everyone participated or contributed so that all benefited?
When I was a yute (yoot' or youth) growing up in Staten Island, New York, I worked with a group of sixteen young men, all going to school, as lifeguards at a beach. Every day we'd bring a bag lunch and stick it in the fridge in the room we had in a corner of the big bath-house. Each morning I'd prepare a sandwich, wrap it, and bring it to work. The beach was two miles from the nearest deli, so if you didn't bring your lunch, you had to leave the beach and make the trek. Either that or buy a killer hot-dog at ballpark prices, or go hungry, and we were growing boys.
I discovered that my sandwiches were being stolen and that one of my co-workers, Smilin' Jerry, was eating them. I accused him of stealing my lunch.
He thought nothing of it, which ticked me off as much as the missing hero sandwiches.
I brought the matter up to the bunch. Jerry maintained it was okay and I said it wasn't.
We decided to have a trial in the lifeguard shack.
This was my first big trial.
No attorneys, just me against Jerry, toe-to-toe, in front of a group of our fellow lifeguards.
We were all in high school and college, public and parochial, and debating the merits of whether Jerry (parochial) should be allowed to steal Bob's lunch.
Jerry's argument was that we were all part of the same group of friends, like a big family, so why was I getting upset.
Why was I getting upset?
My position was that I'd taken the trouble to remember to buy the bread, the ham and the cheese, the mustard and relish and the lettuce for the sandwich and did the work of cutting and building and wrapping the thing in the morning, and not forgetting to bring it to work, and Jerry didn't, plus I'd contributed the old refrigerator that still worked but had been replaced, so we could all use it, come to think of it, and if anyone was going to have to haul his ass into town to buy a sandwich it was going to have to be Jerry and not me. It was your typical Capitalist Pig vs. Socialist Whore sort of argument.
We went round and around in the lifeguard shack with a jury of our fellows sitting in judgment, exploring the issue from every which way we could think of. Jerry and I really had them going. For Jerry it was no big deal, just a sandwich, there were other sandwiches in the fridge that I could've eaten, one was as good as another, etc., etc. My sandwich was better, sandwiches were not all the same, and blah, blah, blah.
We were well aware of the difference between the rights of private property and the competing view in Soviet Russia. This was around 1959 or 1960 when Senator "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy had been notorious for fomenting the famous Red Scare and we'd been in the Cold War with Russia for years. We'd seen Boy Scout troop leaders and teachers drafted to fight in Korea against Communists. The Russians stole our A-bomb and H-bomb secrets. We executed the atomic spies, the Rosenbergs, in New York for providing the secrets. So we knew what was going on, and right from wrong when we were in college. Especially if you went to parochial school, which Jerry did, I argued, he should know better and what were those sisters teaching him in the first place, that stealing was okay? I didn't think so. The jurists were parochial school kids, too, some of them, so this was a telling blow, I figured.
The verdict was that Jerry shouldn't take Bob's lunch any more, and he never again did.
Right was right and wrong was wrong and that was that.
I saw smilin' Jerry recently at the 45 year reunion. He's a very successful business executive with a major pharmaceutical company, the kind of company that Ms. Albright, above, invests in. He's someone who would never tolerate anyone eating his lunch without his permission.
The fact of the matter is that Jerry plans to visit San Francisco soon and we plan to get together for lunch.... Ha!
This relates to Constitutional Law, of course.
The Framers of the U.S. Constitution were not communists or even socialists. While the Constitution does not provide that the economic system of the United States is capitalist as opposed to socialist, it does provide for the protection of "property," whatever that is, and we'll get to it.
Property may not be taken unless by due process of law and for just compensation. Private property, we're tawkin.'
Which means that private property can be taken provided due process and just compensation. Jerry hadn't asked permission and didn't offer to recompense, remember, and he had no governmental right over the contents of the refrigerator. But under his theory that we're all family, in effect, if not actually, he didn't feel the least qualm about eating someone else's lunch, if not mine, as I surely pointed out to the judges, then yours. That may have been what tipped the jury, as I think back on it. I can picture them looking at each other and thinking their lunch might be next. It was a long trek into town to Mrs. Scalise's crowded deli and there wasn't that much time for lunch.
Recently, in the Kelo v. New London case, the Supreme Court held that private property in which one lived for decades could be taken by the city (after a hearing, and with compensation, of course) if the taking was done, as the constitution requires, for a "public use."
But, the public use in New London was not for a new road or hospital or school, but to redevelop a run-down area (it wasn't run down to the person keeping up his home in the area) in order to allow private developers to come in, build upscale condominiums, attract big companies to locate plants there (Pfizer already had, nearby), in order to attract high-earning young professionals, couples, and new families. This would increase the revenue stream to the city, pay for schools and health facilities, and make the old area attractive once again.
Property owners across the country object to this as a violation of their expection, their right as they see it, to keep their private property and do what they like with it.
Property owners see Kelo as a step in the direction of socialism, not much different than Jerry eating my lunch, only this time Jerry has gotten the city council to go along with him to make it look cool. Now it's the neighbors who are stealing my lunch, not just Jerry, claiming that the work I did is for the common good.
So you see that when Ms. Leach looks longingly at Ms. Albright's good fortune, Ms. Albright has something to worry about it. Ms. Leach is arguing like Jerry was, unfortunately, when she casts her eye on private property.
How about this?
Suppose the city re-zones your property so now you can no longer sell it for a high price, perhaps because the city wants to protect a certain kind of a hummingbird that only lives on your land? Or it's beach front property worth a lot, and to protect the beach, the county says you can no longer build that beach-home you've been saving for, nor will anyone buy your land because they can't either. See Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission. Unless the government takes 100% of your land, it owes you nothing, under Lucas, by virtue of a case out of Pennsylvania in the 1920s written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who said, without defining what he meant, that the government doesn't owe you unless it takes "too much." Don't ask me what too much is. Go to Findlaw and look up Kelo or Lucas under "case names" and you can find the case by Holmes.
Or, this?
The government taxes our income, property, sales, possessions, right to hire workers, and inheritance to spend on the army, navy, welfare, government salaries and expenses, and the common good.
Isn't that socialism? One for all and all for one?
Of course it is.
Once you agree that we all need to band together for the common defense, it's hard to argue that we don't have defense socialism. If the U.S. sends the navy and marines to Central America to protect the supply of bananas for United Fruit, an American corporation, or to the Persian Gulf to protect the oil supply that fuels America and the World, we're no longer arguing principle but the application of it, which is all right with me so long as we know what we're doing and don't pretend otherwise.
Maybe this is why some claim that taxation is theft.
The I.R.S. has carved into stone on its headquarters a legend to the effect that taxes are the price we pay for liberty, which makes it easier to swallow the pill, I guess. As tax collector, you only want to pluck enough feathers to make the goose squawk, but not kill him.
What about farm subsidies to corporate farmers?
And tax incentives and oil-depletion allowances for guys who own oil wells?
Critics call this corporate welfare, or corporate socialism.
Pres. Reagan, a former Democrat union president (Screen Actors) who turned Republican as he got older and realized where his bread was buttered, working for General Electric, pointed his accusing finger at individual Welfare Queens, not Corporate Welfare Queens.
Welfare Queens were, I think, supposed to be fat black mamas riding around in Cadillacs with lots of kids. The male version was Willie Horton. Race plays a big role in American minds, and therefore politics.
This was worth a lot of votes among white folks. White folks receive the majority of the welfare money in this country, I'm told. Po' white folks. You saw some of them in "Million Dollar Baby," as Hilary Swank's "white-trash" family.
I was chatting up a waitress from Tennessee one day and she told me her background.
"Watraish," is what she said she was.
"Excuse me?"
"Wha-tray-ish," she pronounced slowly, so I'd get it.
"Wha-tray-ish? What's that?" I asked.
Then I got it.
I said that I'd talk further about property but I'm out of time. Suffice it to say that lawyers think of property differently than lay people might. Lay people see land and think, "That's property." Lawyers see land and think, "Who's got what rights to that property?" There's all sorts of rights from rental to fee simple absolute and quite a few things in between. We liken them to a bundle of sticks, and then analyze what the owner has, one stick or a full bundle. When there's a taking, we look to see how many sticks have been taken, for how long, and how many are left. Sometimes sticks are just borrowed, such as in the case of an easement. This isn't a course in real property law. So we'll leave it at that. It figured in Lucas.
I gotta go.
I can hardly wait for lunch with my ol' friend, Smilin' Jerry.
***
Below is Jim Zamora's article on a controversial eminent domain case in Southern California where the California Attorney-General is trying to intervene to get the city to back off. Shades of Kelo.