Squatting via Eminent Domain

The derogatory term squatting is used when low income people use abandoned property. But isn't that essentially what Phizer did in this case? They squatted for a few years and then quit squatting when they decided to squat elsewhere (probably in China or India). Just because Phizer has lawyers who make big money, don't think that what they do has any more validity than what a "squatter" does. When all is said and done, everyone is a "squatter."

And...

"Barren weed fields are all that exist where homes once stood."

Death, destruction, destitution, and barren weed fields have a way of cropping up all over the place when the right wing is in full control for a number of years.

GUEST COMMENT:

bardamu November 18th, 2009 9:37 pm
Not everyone considers the term squatting derogatory. It is also the term for a considerable movement around urban land and ownership reform in England and, to an extent, elsewhere.

I got some of the sharpest lessons I have encountered yet in anarchistic cooperation in London and Bristol squats a couple decades ago, and had they not been previously burned by bad press and suspected me of writerly motives, they might have taught me more.

Cheers to Brixton and Southwark from an old fool who never fit elsewhere either!

UNITY-PROGRESS:
Well like everything else that benefits the poor more than the rich, squatting has a more favorable reputation and more governmental support in most other countries than in the most pro-rich country, the US.

GUEST COMMENT:

Desmoulins November 18th, 2009 4:36 pm
"The derogatory term squatting is used when low income people use abandoned property. But isn't that essentially what Phizer did in this case?"

No. What you describe would be a little like old Golda Meir's lying dream of Israel: "a land without people for a people [in this case, corporation] without land." Phizer didn't squat on abandonded property. They got the city to use "eminent domain" to seize people's homes and evict them, tear down housing which had been occupied, and give the property to Phizer to develop.

UNITY-PROGRESS
Well since Phizer failed to develop what they said they would, they were definitely squatting. They did get stock market and other gains over the mere plans to develop what they said they would, but they never paid the taxes they implicity promised to pay in the development plan that got them the residential property.

Morever, for anyone who does not accept the process, or for that matter the general concept of large Corporations taking over private, middle class or lower class residential property, they were squatting regardless of whether they developed what they said they would or not.

The above conversation was in response to this article at Common Dreams.