"The Keystone Pipeline,
Eminent Domain and Government Duplicity"
from "In Defense of Rural
America"
By Ron Ewart, President of the
National Association of Rural
Landowners
and nationally recognized author and
speaker on freedom and property rights issues
© Copyright
Sunday, August 17, 2014 - All Rights Reserved
As published on
Newswithviews, August 13, 2014
This article is also
available on our website at:
UPDATE:
In our previous article entitled "Just How Evil and Corrupt is the American
Government", we implied that Flight 93 did not crash
in a Pennsylvania hay field in reference to the 911 Conspiracy Theory. Devvy
Kidd, a well-known conservative author, replied to our implication with a first
hand report of being there on the site where Flight 93 crashed. She
vehemently challenged our assertion with knowledge and pictures and provided the
following link as corroboration.
As we said in the article, we are not taking a position on
the 911 Conspiracy Theory. The questions we ask in that article would seem to
render the theory unsupportable.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
There is a great deal of confusion, mis-information, propaganda
and outright lies flooding the Internet and the airways about the Keystone XL
pipeline. Most people aren't aware that three phases of the pipeline are already
built and operating. It is the fourth phase that is creating all of the
hot air and acrid smoke among the competing parties and the mostly uninformed
public. There are many competing parties, most at odds with each other.
First, there is Canada who wants to sell a huge valuable
resource to the market. Eventually, that resource will reach the market,
it is only a question of who and when. Energy-hungry countries would beg,
borrow and steal the resource if it was economically feasible. All Canada
has to do is to make a right turn and run the pipeline to its west coast to load
up oil tankers and send them to the far east.
Since crude oil was discovered in the middle 19th Century, it
smacks and smells of big money. John D. Rockefeller, (1839 - 1937) the founder
of Standard Oil, reaped unbelievable profits from the sale of oil products and
gasoline to create a wealthy, powerful, politically influential empire. By
the early 1880's Standard Oil controlled some 90% of the oil refineries and
pipelines. Standard Oil no longer exists today, having been broken up into 33
different companies by a 1911 Supreme Court decision upholding the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act. New Jersey Standard, one of the 33 companies, eventually became
Exxon.
Today, world-wide oil is driven by five major oil companies;
BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell and Conoco/Phillips. When crude oil and natural gas
are explored, fracked, transported, or refined, one or more of these five
companies has its hand in the pie. With their immense international
wealth, they are powerful and politically influential. Which of these
companies has their hand in the Keystone XL pipeline project under the name of
the Transcanada Corporation is unknown to this author, but that is of no
consequence to what we wish to portray here.
Then there are the environmentalists, radical and
moderate. Environmentalists hate oil of any kind and we have discussed the
why of this hate in previous articles. They would and will do anything to
stop any project that has the remotest possibility of promoting petroleum
products of any kind. They too are wealthy, powerful and politically
influential and have the ear of the President, all of the Democrats and most of
academia and the print and electronic news media. Nevertheless, from our
perspective, the environmental impact of the Keystone XL pipeline is negligible
no matter what the environmentalists say. Environmentalists are against just
about any human endeavor, except maybe inefficient ethanol from corn, or
expensive and inefficient wind and solar power.
There is another competing player in this battle over the
Keystone pipeline and that is the railroads. Right now the railroads are
transporting most of the oil that would be carried by the new XL
4th-phase. It has been estimated that the railroads are making around
$30.00 per barrel of crude oil being carried to the refineries. With the
new pipeline in operation the cost drops to about one third. Berkshire Hathaway
owns most of the railroad companies. Warren Buffet owns Berkshire
Hathaway. Warren Buffet is a great and true, loyal friend of Barack
Hussein Obama. Ole Mr. Buffet stands to lose millions when the 4th phase
of the pipeline is competed. So whose water is the President carrying by
not approving the 4th phase of the pipeline project, the environmentalists, or
his friend Warren Buffet, or both? This whole project reeks of government
corruption and duplicity.
But there is one victim of the Keystone XL pipeline that no one
talks about and that is the rural landowner through which the new XL pipeline
will run. The new pipeline path transverses the states of Montana, South Dakota,
Nebraska and Kansas. The pipeline consortium, Transcanada, will confiscate
the rural landowner's land under the government power of eminent domain.
Most of us in this field know that government's power of
eminent domain is regularly and flagrantly abused. The landowner either
takes what the consortium is offering or challenges the consortium in
court. Most individual landowners don't have the "bread" to challenge a
commercial giant in America's corrupt judicial system. The consortium will
use their own appraisal experts to come up with a low value as "just
compensation" and the courts usually uphold those values, leaving the individual
landowner with no other recourse but to bend over and take the hit. The
rural landowner becomes victim to an alleged national interest and the profits
of the oil and pipeline companies. But then the rural landowner has been
taking it in the shorts for several decades now by draconian land use and
environmental regulations, local, state and federal.
We receive at least one call or e-mail per week from landowners
all over America being threatened with the "gun" of eminent domain. Their
stories are heartbreaking when they are forced to sell at a low price that has
been determined by a corrupt government or private entity and upheld by the
courts. The stories of eminent domain abuse by government abound. The U.
S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo vs. New London, CT only muddied the waters of
eminent domain law.
One property owner we know personally fought a transit company
for years in court over the taking of their commercial property under eminent
domain. What the transit company offered was far, far less than similar
property adjacent to or across the street from their property. They spent
over $500,000 on attorney's fees, court costs and expert witnesses in their
court fight. The judge finally agreed with the transit company's value and
awarded the landowner around $500,000, leaving the landowner netting essentially
zero for his audacity to challenge Goliath.
This same transit company then purchased a building and
commercial property in an adjoining city but they only needed a small portion of
the property for their use. The transit company then turned around and
sold the property they didn't need for a healthy profit. The property
owner had no recourse and could not participate in those profits he would have
received if he had sold the property to a ready, willing and able buyer
himself.
Government uses every legal trick in the book to lower the
value of the land they seek under eminent domain. One of their tricks is
to downzone the property. Another is to wait out the landowner with legal
maneuverings until he has exhausted his savings and anything he can
borrow. The landowner then is forced to sell at a lower price just to
recoup his savings, or pay off his loans as best he can. In many cases the
landowner is left with a huge debt for the privilege of fighting the all
powerful and corrupt government.
Fortunately, the little guy doesn't always lose under eminent
domain. In a well-known Texas eminent domain case against the XL Keystone
pipeline, landowner Julia Trigg Crawford won a Texas State Supreme Court ruling
in her favor against Transcanada, a foreign corporation, trying to exercise
eminent domain proceedings in the U. S. From a recent article in ECO Watch:
(see: http://ecowatch.com/2014/01/
Ms. Crawford said: "As a landowner, property rights are
key to my livelihood and family lga cy. A foreign corporation pumping
foreign oil simply does not qualify as a common carrier under Texas law.
TransCanada does not get to write its own rules. I look forward to the U.
S. Supreme Court hearing our case and our plea to protect the fundamental rights
of property owners."
"The ruling on Wednesday from the Texas Supreme Court
means that Crawford will be able to take the next step in the appeals process
against TransCanada. The southern segment of the Keystone XL pipeline,
also known as Gulf Coast Segment, stretches from Cushing, OK, to Beaumont, TX,
and carries tar sands or dilbit which is a combination of tar sands and
chemicals that react very differently when spills occur than traditional Texas
oil."
"We’re thrilled, because the Supreme Court has finally ruled in
favor of us—the little guys—and against a foreign oil giant," Julia Trigg
Crawford continued. Basically, TransCanada said that it wanted a waiver
from responding to our petition, and the Supreme Court said, ‘No, you must
respond’."
Hopefully, this case may set a precedent for all other cases
along the XL Keystone proposed right-of-way.
Boon or Boon Doggle
: The question is, whom does the XL
Keystone pipeline benefit? Sure, there will be some much needed
construction jobs but when the pipeline is completed those jobs will fade away,
leaving only maintenance crews manning the line. But if all of the tar
sand crude oil from Canada is shipped to Texas for refining and the refined
products are shipped off shore to foreign ports, only the oil producers, oil
companies and ocean shippers will reap the rewards. Meanwhile, the rural
landowners who were savaged by the taking of their land under eminent domain and
paid little for it, will be faced with bifurcated property, along with
maintenance crews trespassing on their land to get to the pipeline. Then
there is the risk of pipeline explosions although rare as they may be.
We know that pipelines and electric transmission lines are a
fact of life. Unfortunately, it is the rural landowner who must pay the
price so that big cities will have electric power and oil companies will be able
to ship their raw product to refineries and then to market. The problem
is, the rural landowner, who must lose part of his or her land to the pipeline
right-of-way, should reap some of the benefits by participating in the profits
from the crude oil or electric power being transported across their land instead
of receiving a one-time price. If we were rural landowners facing the
taking of our land for a pipe or transmission line, we would negotiate a
per-barrel or per-kilowatt price for any oil product or electricity transported
across our land. After all, landowners of oil-rich or natural gas
resources receive a royalty for the resources taken from their land.
It is an idea long overdue.
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