The Iowa Constitution gives the state the right to take private property for public use, with just compensation. It does not authorize the taking of private property for private use, and this should not be allowed.
A CO2 pipeline built by a private company, with the sons of three former governors (Branstad, Vilsack, Culver) and a former President of the Iowa Board of Regents (Rastetter) as investors, raises a peculiar odor long before the first shovel hits the dirt. That odor does not pass my sniff test.
There is a country where the state can take your land, give it to somebody else, and you have no power to stop them. That country is not America.
4 Responses
Do you plan to outlaw the use of civil asset forfeiture?
Yes, but not precisely.
What I plan to do, almost all the time, is eliminate bad laws. Therefore I will simply eliminate the laws which allow civil asset forfeiture.
Do you plan to include MidAmerican who is has worked with the state government to force farmers to sell land for wind turbines? 1 acre of good farm land equals out to a lot of money over the years, the farmers are also forced to allow an access road for maintenance to the wind turbine to be built through their land that, according to one of my sources, they are not paid for; over the years this can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars loss for the farmers forced to sell their farmland for not so green energy
Jacob – I have always heard that farmers are paid for these to sit on their ground. I read an article from WindWatch.org about MidAmerican not paying farmers in western Iowa as much as was agreed upon for soil compaction/damages during building the sites. In that article it also mentioned that nearly 31 million dollars was paid to farmers the previous year for leases. Several years ago Windustry.org mentioned in a FAQ leases pay like 4-8k per year per windmill, or 2-3% of revenue from windmill.