Finding A Legal Loophole, Memphis Takes Down Its Confederate Statues

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Kittamaru, Dec 22, 2017.

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  1. iceaura

    iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Standard Republican public contracting innovation, familiar to us all since Reagan and then W (via Republican Congressional initiative) removed the old-fashioned New Deal liberal regulations and red tape that formerly - however inadequately - curbed abuses.

    The open market is not the only measure of the fraud.

    Ryan Zinke just issued an edict granting the Polymet mine - a proposed hardrock heavy metal mine to be operated just upstream of the Saint Louis River, with tailings and waste processing ponds installed in the Boundary Waters flowage a few miles from the most popular entry points - full authority to proceed. These minerals are public resources, as is Lake Superior and the freshwater landscape of the BWCA (and Quetico - this could go international if bad things happen), but Polymet's price for extraction privileges and ownership of them does not reflect the cost of protecting the surrounding landscape and the public welfare. That burden will be either undertaken voluntarily by Polymet (subject to some loophole - ridden and always alterable regulations that may or may not be enforced), or fall to the taxpayer of the future.

    When Social Security and Medicare are privatized, joining the military and various aspects of national security and intelligence operations, that is how it will happen.

    Why is that suddenly an issue now, with this horrible and long-overdue-to-be-good-riddance statue?
     
    Last edited: Dec 23, 2017
    iceaura, Dec 23, 2017
    #21

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  3. Kittamaru

    Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    A pity I can only like this post once.
     
    Kittamaru, Dec 23, 2017
    #22

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  5. Bells

    Bells Staff Member

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    City councils are allowed to sell council land as they so wish. Isn't that what Trumpers and what Republicans had been whining about when Obama cited national parks as Federal monument lands under the Antiquities Acts, which would have prevented such lands being sold? Wasn't the argument for the rollback of those designations that it was for the State and local governments to do with the land as they wished?

    The local city council voted unanimously to sell those two parks and their statues.

    This is in line with what the GOP and Trump and his supporters had been demanding for public lands, that local governments get to decide for themselves instead of the Federal Government controlling those lands and keeping them as national monuments. This is a local city council, who determined how to use that land as they so wished and did so with a unanimous vote.

    The City Council voted unanimously earlier in the day to sell both Health Sciences and Fourth Bluff Parks where the Confederate statues were located. ​


    Trump and the GOP set the ball rolling when they removed the protected status of national monuments and parks and demanded that local Governments be allowed to designate them as they wish.

    This is what happens when you get what you ask for.

    He signed orders to remove the protection from those monument lands, and cutting their size down by obscene amounts, resulting in your country's history facing possible destruction if the local Governments choose to allow mining or drilling on said lands. Did he succeed? Yes, he did. To much fanfare from the right.

    Memphis City Council sold two small parks to a private entity. They are well within their legal rights to do so. The private owners may remove the statues and do with them as they wish, they can display them on private lands, donate them to a museum of American history, or melt them down for scrap metal. Would people be complaining if the Council had sold that land to a land developer, for example? Or if the parks were destroyed and the statues sold to build a new road?
     
    Bells, Dec 27, 2017
    #23

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