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My parents were both immigrants and survivors of the Holocaust who left me many things: a love of this country, a deep passion for music, and a home right near the boardwalk in Atlantic City. That home has been a source of love and renewal to my family for the past 50 years. But today, our home could be seized and bulldozed as part of a casino development plan.
New Jersey’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA), is trying to use eminent domain to seize and destroy my home as part of a project to complement the Revel Casino, even after the casino recently closed its doors and filed for bankruptcy.
My parents bought the building in 1969 when they moved to Atlantic City. They lived there until my father passed away in 1987. I’m now 67 years old and work as a piano tuner at the casinos. The home my parents left me allows me to work and I’m not going to let it be taken from me.
I’m fighting to keep my family’s home and need your help. Please click here to sign my petition demanding the CRDA drop their unconstitutional attempt to steal my home.
The home is more than a building. It’s is a reminder of my parents and the times our family shared together. When my parents got old, I cared for them in their own home instead of putting them in a nursing home, which I know helped them live longer and happier lives. Over the years, I’ve personally maintained and refurbished the entire building, hanging new sheetrock and repairing brickwork by hand. The first-floor apartment is now given over to my piano studio, and I rent the second and third-floor apartments to long-term elderly tenants at below-market rates.
Eminent domain has traditionally been understood as the power of government to take private property for a public use, like a road or a public school. But New Jersey’s CRDA is abusing eminent domain to take property for purely private development, like shopping centers and high-end boutiques. In fact, the CRDA does not even have a formal development plan in place. They’re trying to take my home just because they think they can.
But with your help, I can show the CRDA that tens of thousands of people oppose what they’re doing to me. Once they know that people around the country are paying attention, they’ll back off.
Click here to sign my petition to save my home from being bulldozed for a casino.
Thank you,
Charlie Birnbaum
Atlantic City, NJ
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I believe that eminent domain (nice spelling there Admin) has been expanded to now cover mandatory acquisition of property if it is deemed to be in the benefit of the community as a whole, not just for government projects.
In other words, they can take your land/home if it sits on a sight that Ford wants to use to build a factory that will bring 1000 jobs into a small town.
I believe that is now established law.
The fuckers will stop at nothing. Good luck, Mr Birnbaum.
Multiply this story by 350 homes.
http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/charlestown-indiana-eminent-domain/
Mr. Birnbaum just needs to sit down and shut up.
I am trying to help all of New Jersey. Mr. Birnbaum, a Jew, only care about himself.
I love you. He hates you. Fukhim.
Sincerely,
Chris Christie
PS: Please, don’t forget to click the link below to support my quest to be Ruler Of America.
Thank You.
http//:www.SupportTheFatFuckerForPrez,org
Ilpoh, I have news.
Eminent Domain has been used to seize private property for the benefit of crony businesses for at least 30 years. This crap started in St. Louis in the early 80s, when a local developer trying to “gentrify” a failing city neighborhood of no particular architectural distinction, was able to force a middle class black family to sell to him because they didn’t have the interior of their home, that they’d owned for 25 years, decorated to his prissy upper-middle class standards.
Yep, that’s right. He was intending to turn the neighborhood into another yuppie redoubt of trendy quiche restaurants and boutiques, and he wanted people whose home decor and dress conformed to his notions of gentility. These were nice people- an electrician, his wife, his two kids, and his mom, and they maintained the EXTERIOR of the house perfectly well. Additionally, the place was in perfect mechanical condition. But the developer, a suburban guy trying to be another Trump or somebody, had the power of Eminent Domain and was able to force this family out.
I railed and ranted about this, but everyone who listened thought I was crazy and wondered what I was so upset about. All you had to do was say “public good” and all the Silent Gen and GI Gen folks who still ran things then would just wag their heads .
Same thing when a local shopping mall decided to renovate and triple its footprint. They were granted Eminent Domain.
My view is that Eminent Domain should never have been permitted for one minute, even for government projects. Your property is your property, and in a truly free society that respects individual rights, it should not be possible to take what is yours without your permission even for a government project such as a highway, a military installation, a dam, a school, or whatever. And wrong makes more wrong- the sweeping powers we have granted to our government to A. tax ,B. seize property for the “public good”, and C. allocate vast portions of the seized booty to projects that do not have to prove their economic or social worth, has led to massive malinvestment in projects and systems that were uneconomical to begin with and will be utterly unsustainable as resources grow scarcer and the population poorer.
My understanding is that the great embodiment of the Republican Party, George W. Bush, made the bulk of his fortune in a eminent domain scheme involving the land around the subsidized stadium Texas taxpayers built for him.
Since a Republican did it, there must be absolutely nothing wrong with it or Fox would endlessly harp every day. Right?
Both Erectile Dysfunction (ED) and Eminent Domain (ED) are diseases of pricks out of control.
In the former instance it’s about dead pricks, in the latter it’s about pricks who should be dead.
Take for example that link provided by Westcoaster. Those 350 people are being offered just $6,000, on average, for homes they’ve lived in their entire lives. They are calling it a “blighted neighborhood”. Does this look blighted????
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The 350 homeowners are fighting it in court …. meaning, ONE person, a paid-off judge, hold their fate in his corrupt hands. What the homeowners really should do is get some rope and hang that motherfuckin ED developer.
It is an additional insult to injury that the New Jersey property is to be seized to further an industry that, in saner times, was known to be a social disease.
It’s bad enough to take my house to build yet another redundant highway or another unnecessary dam. But at least these things can pretend to benefit the “public”.
But gambling? If we were a rational society, gambling would be confined to the margins of respectable society. It’s one thing to allow it- if you want to drop your house payment or grocery money on a card game or into a slot machine with billion to one odds against you, that is your prerogative. But to subsidize, with money stolen from the tax payers and diverted from urgent public needs, to something that is flatly a vice that will bankrupt its practitioner, is obscene.
Five casinos declared bankruptcy in Atlantic City this year alone.
The so-called gaming “industry” is over. Even Las Vegas is trying to remake itself as a “family entertainment” venue. Casinos have proliferated like weeds since the 90s and the casino:patsy ratio has become unfavorable. I don’t see nearly as many casino buses in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood as I used to, because all the patsies have run out of money.
I’ve wondered how the hell the Federal Gooberment can own vast portions of a state…like Nevada…If I were Nevadans I take back my state…via eminent domain.
Chicago….Vegas gave up making itself a haven for families years ago.
Bucked, the only reason Nevada is even a state to begin with, is because the government used military power to clear the land of its native population.
It then invited the teeming masses in the festering tenements of the Eastern cities to come out there, promising each man and his wife, counted as two persons, 160 acres each to homestead….. land that would not be available to them, in all the arid western states as each was stolen from the native populations whose ancestral homes these places were.
Settlement of the west was a major policy goal of our government almost from day one. The General Land office was established in 1812, and a series of laws and services established by the government over the next 100 years were established to divide up the land and sell it as quickly as our military forces could exterminate the native population. Thus the Bureau of Land Management, originally the U.S. Grazing Service, was born.
Well, it didn’t take the aspiring homesteaders long to discover that the traditional farming methods of the east wouldn’t cut it in places with average rainfall of 10 inches of rain or less a year. Many busted and disconsolate folks trickled back east, broke and heartbroken. Not enough water is not enough water.
So, in 1902, our government passed the blatantly socialistic Reclamation Act of 1902, and the Bureau of Reclamation was born, to build thousands (about 2000 so far) dams and aquaducts and weirs and other heroic water infrastructure to meet the insatiable demand of the west for cheap, HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED, water. That’s right- the U.S. taxpayers at large have helped provide water for western growers far under what it costs to store and convey that water, and to grow crops whose value is far less than the value of the water being poured on them.
In short, the whole American west is a gigantic welfare state made possible by the wealth produced by the industrial East, which was destroyed over the next century to pay for the claiming of the west, and the works necessary to make it barely habitable. If the settlers who “claimed” the west had not had U.S. military might in back of them, could they have stayed? Or could they have managed without the Bureau of Reclamation?
Every single group of people that ever headed west in pursuit of “freedom” ended up asking the federal government for help, either in military assistance, or in maintaining order, or in providing for reliable water supplies.