Here's the entire 7-hour transit of Venus across the face of the Sun -
shown in several views - in just 39 seconds, as seen by the Solar
Dynamics Observatory on June 5, 2012. This view is in the 171 Angstrom
wavelenth, so note also the the bright active region in the northern
solar hemisphere as Venus passes over, with beautiful coronal loops
visible. The transit produced a silhouette of Venus n the Sun that no
one alive today will likely see again. With its specialized instruments
SDO's high-definition view from space provides a solar spectacular!
Scott Wiessinger from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio wrote this morning to tell us, "If you have the space and the bandwidth, I really recommend downloading this large file on the SVS to view. YouTube compression is hard on solar footage, so it looks even better when you watch it at true full quality."
Below is a composite image from SDO of Venus' path across the Sun, as
well as another great timelapse view from ESA's PROBA-2 microsatellite:
This movie shows the transit of Venus as seen from SWAP, a Belgian solar
imager onboard ESA's PROBA2 microsatellite. SWAP, watching the Sun in
EUV light, observes Venus as a small, black circle, obscuring the EUV
light emitted from the solar outer atmosphere - the corona - from
19:45UT onwards (seen on the running timer on the video). At 22:16UT -
Venus started its transit of the solar disk.
Venus appears to wobble thanks to the slight up-down motion of Proba-2 and the large distance between the satellite and the Sun.
The bright dots all over the image, looking almmost like a snow storm,
are energetic particles hitting the SWAP detector when PROBA2 crosses
the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the protection of the Earth
magnetic field against space radiation is known to be weaker.
New York - The bizarre rules of quantum physics are often thought to be
restricted to the microworld, but scientists now suspect they may play
an important role in the biology of life.
Evidence is growing for the involvement of quantum mechanics in a wide
range of biological processes, including photosynthesis, bird migration,
the sense of smell, and possibly even the origin of life.
These and other mysteries were the topic of a panel lecture June 1 held
here at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College, part of the fifth annual World Science Festival.
Quantum mechanics refers to the strange set of rules that governs the behavior of subatomic particles, which can travel through walls, behave like waves and stay connected over vast distances.
From the start, Jeff Bezos wanted to “get
big fast.” He was never a “small is beautiful” kind of guy. The
Brobdingnagian numbers tell much of the story. In 1994, four years after
the first Internet browser was created, Bezos stumbled upon a startling
statistic: the Internet had been growing at the rate of 2,300 percent
annually. In 1995, the year Bezos, then 31, started Amazon, just 16
million people used the Internet. A year later, the number was 36
million, a figure that would multiply at a furious rate. Today, more
than 1.7 billion people, or almost one out of every four humans on the
planet, are online. Bezos understood two things. One was the way the
Internet made it possible to banish geography, enabling anyone with an
Internet connection and a computer to browse a seemingly limitless
universe of goods with a precision never previously known and then buy
them directly from the comfort of their homes. The second was how the
Internet allowed merchants to gather vast amounts of personal
information on individual customers.
The Internet permitted a kind of bespoke
selling. James Marcus, who was hired by Bezos in 1996 and would work at
Amazon for five years, later published a revealing memoir of his time as
Employee #55. He recalls Bezos insisting that the Internet, with “its
bottomless capacity for data collection,” would “allow you to sort
through entire populations with a fine-tooth comb. Affinity would call
out to affinity: your likes and dislikes—from Beethoven to barbecue
sauce, shampoo to shoe polish to Laverne & Shirley—were as
distinctive as your DNA, and would make it a snap to match you up with
your 9,999 cousins.” This prospect, Marcus felt, “was either a utopian
daydream or a targeted-marketing nightmare.”
Whichever one it was, Bezos didn’t much
care. “You know, things just don’t grow that fast,” he observed. “It’s
highly unusual, and that started me thinking, ‘What kind of business
plan might make sense in the context of that growth?’” Bezos decided
selling books would be the best way to get big fast on the Internet.
This was not immediately obvious: bookselling in the United States had
always been less of a business than a calling. Profit margins were
notoriously thin, and most independent stores depended on low rents.
Walk-in traffic was often sporadic, the public’s taste fickle; reliance
on a steady stream of bestsellers to keep the landlord at bay was not
exactly a sure-fire strategy for remaining solvent.
Still, overall, selling books was a big
business. In 1994 Americans bought $19 billion worth of books. Barnes
& Noble and the Borders Group had by then captured a quarter of the
market, with independent stores struggling to make up just over another
fifth and a skein of book clubs, supermarkets and other outlets
accounting for the rest. That same year, 513 million individual books
were sold, and seventeen bestsellers each sold more than 1 million
copies. Bezos knew that two national distributors, Ingram Book Group and
Baker & Taylor, had warehouses holding about 400,000 titles and in
the late 1980s had begun converting their inventory list from microfiche
to a digital format accessible by computer. Bezos also knew that in
1992 the Supreme Court had ruled in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota
that retailers were exempt from charging sales tax in states where they
didn’t have a physical presence. (For years, he would use this
advantage to avoid collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in state
sales taxes, giving Amazon an enormous edge over retailers of every
kind, from bookstores to Best Buy and Home Depot. In recent months,
however, Amazon, under mounting pressure, has eased its opposition and
reached agreements with twelve states, including California and Texas,
to collect sales tax.) “Books are incredibly unusual in one respect,”
Bezos said, “and that is that there are more items in the book category
than there are items in any other category by far.” A devotee of the
Culture of Metrics, Bezos was undaunted. He was sure that the algorithms
of computerized search and access would provide the keys to a consumer
kingdom whose riches were as yet undiscovered and barely dreamed of, and
so he set out to construct a twenty-first-century ordering mechanism
that, at least for the short term, would deliver goods the old-fashioned
way: by hand, from warehouses via the Postal Service and commercial
shippers.
The depth and spectrum of Steiner has to put him in the league of the world's greatest people.
From
Wikipedia: Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner[2] (25/27 February 1861[3] --
30 March 1925) was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect,
and esotericist.[4][5] Steiner gained initial recognition as a literary
critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the 20th century,
he founded a spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric
philosophy growing out of idealist philosophy and with links to
Theosophy.
Steiner led this movement through several phases. In
the first, more philosophically oriented phase, Steiner attempted to
find a synthesis between science and mysticism;[6] his philosophical
work of these years, which he termed spiritual science, sought to
provide a connection between the cognitive path of Western philosophy
and the inner and spiritual needs of the human being.[7]:291 In a second
phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a
variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts
(developing a new artistic form, eurythmy) and architecture, culminating
in the building of a cultural centre to house all the arts, the
Goetheanum. After the First World War, Steiner worked with educators,
farmers, doctors, and other professionals to develop numerous practical
initiatives, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture,
anthroposophical medicine.
Francis Boyle: Judgement at Indonesian hearing may help push case at
ICC; Obama is also in violation for not pursuing indictment.
Francis Boyle is a Professor of Law at the University of llinois School
of Law, where he currently teaches courses on Public International Law
and International Human Rights. He was a part of the prosecutionteam
that tried former US President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld and their legal advisors in absentia in Malaysia.
Transcript
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Washington.
There have been many attempts over the last few years to prosecute
former president Bush, vice president Cheney, and other senior members
of his administration for war crimes of various sorts. None of those
until recently were successful. Well, one of those prosecutions has now
ended up in a conviction - in absentia, of course. And that took place
in Malaysia.
Now joining us is one of the members of the prosecutorial team [snip]
Francis Boyle. He's a professor of law at the University of Illinois
school of law, where he currently teaches courses on public
international law and international human rights. He was a part of the
prosecution team, as I mentioned, that tried President Bush - former
president Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
their legal advisers, in Malaysia, and were successful, as I said.
Thanks for joining us.
FRANCIS BOYLE, PROF. INTERNATIONAL LAW, UNIV. OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF
LAW: Well, Paul, thank you very much for having me on, and my best to
your audience.
JAY: Thank you. So what were the charges? And tell us a bit about the process.
Ad
BOYLE: Well, the charges were twofold: first, torture, and then, second,
since torture in wartime constitutes war crimes, the second charge were
war crimes. There was four days of hearings by the prosecution and the
defense. And then, on the end of the fifth day, the tribunal issued a
unanimous judgment to the effect that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and five
of their top lawyers advising them on this, including Yoo, Bybee,
Haynes, and Gonzalez, Addington, were personally responsible for and
guilty of torture and war crimes as defined by the Convention against
Torture, to which the United States government is a party, and the four
Geneva conventions of 1949, to which the United States government is a
party as well.
JAY: Right. Now, under whose auspices was this process held? What kind of official status did it have?
BOYLE: The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal Foundation is a private
organization set up and chartered under Malaysian law. So it is a
creature of Malaysian law.
JAY: But most nonprofits and such can be registered with the government.
But let me - what I'm saying is it didn't have direct government
endorsement of any sort, did it?
BOYLE: No, it was like a U.S. corporation being set up under U.S.
corporation law. But it was not run by the government. Indeed, my guess
is the current government in Malaysia probably found it to be somewhat
embarrassing, since the current government in Malaysia is trying to get
into good cahoots with the United States government. But I can't speak
for them.
JAY: And was there a defense offered? And who offered it?
BOYLE: Yes, a defense team was appointed for them. It consisted of four
or five Malaysian lawyers. And they did the best they could with a very
difficult case, because effectively Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
repeatedly incriminated themselves publicly, both in their public
statements and in their memoirs and otherwise, in acts of torture. So it
is hard to defend people who have already incriminated themselves, but,
you know, the defense did try.
JAY: So what will be the effect of this? I understand you have a
separate process going at the International Criminal Court. So how do
these two relate to each other? And then, also, how do you have
something going at the International Criminal Court when the United
States is not a signatory to it?
BOYLE: Well, that's correct. Over the years now, I've tried to get Bush
indicted three times in Canada, working with Canadian lawyers, and then
in Switzerland, where we scared Bush out of giving a speech in
Switzerland because he feared prosecution. It got back to Bush that we
were going to try to get him indicted in Switzerland for torture.
So this is the first conviction anywhere of Bush and the rest of them
for torture and war crimes. Efforts have been made in Spain and in
Germany. So far as WikiLeaks points out, the United States government
has applied enormous pressure to both the Spanish governments and the
German governments not to prosecute. So, so far that hasn't been done.
But this is the first conviction. I think it's a good sign. We will be
attempting to get this conviction enforced in all other states that are
parties to the Convention against Torture and all other states that are
parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which in fact is almost every
state in the world.
JAY: But the fact that this is a nongovernmental tribunal, it's going to
make it rather difficult to get governments to recognize it, isn't it?
BOYLE: Well, it'll be prima facie evidence of their guilt, pretty much
like any other conviction around the world. If you have individuals
convicted in one state, there's not necessarily any obligation by
another state to prosecute those individuals. There could be an
obligation to extradite if there is an extradition treaty in effect. So
this is a question of enforcement of foreign judgments. It depends on
treaties and statutes of the country involved. It also - international
comity, principles of international legal comity.
JAY: So how were you able to get something going at the ICC, and where is it at?
BOYLE: Right. Well, numerous complaints have been filed against Bush and
the rest of them at the International Criminal Court, but they got
nowhere, because the United States government is not a party to the Rome
Statute for the International Criminal Court. And I was the first one
to figure out a way around this conundrum by filing a complaint against
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Gonzalez, Bybee, Yoo, Tenet, and Rice
for their policy of so-called extraordinary rendition, which, as I
pointed out to the ICC, is really a euphemism for the enforced
disappearance of human beings and torture, both of which are Rome
Statutory crimes. And as I pointed out to the ICC, these defendants have
committed Rome Statutory crimes in Rome party states. Indeed most of
Europe, where these extraordinary renditions in part took place, are
parties to the Rome statute, as well as Afghanistan. And therefore I
argued to the ICC that the court did have jurisdiction to prosecute them
and should exercise that jurisdiction.
JAY: Well, how has the ICC responded to your arguments?
BOYLE: They responded to me saying they gave me a docket number, they
were inquiring into the matter, and they would get back to me in
writing. [crosstalk]
JAY: How long ago was that?
BOYLE: Pardon me?
JAY: How long ago was that?
BOYLE: That was two years. It's going to take time, obviously, because
there's massive documentation of the extraordinary rendition policy and
also the torture. So I believe they are engaging in a good-faith
investigation of this complaint and I will get an answer.
JAY: Why do you believe that?
Ad
BOYLE: Well, because everyone before me has been rejected, and I have
not been rejected in writing. They've all gotten letters from the ICC
prosecutor's office saying, we don't have jurisdiction to prosecute.
That did not happen to me, and they did promise a response in writing.
In any event, we'll be filing the Kuala Lumpur judgment with the ICC,
and I believe that will further support the complaint I already have
against Bush and the rest of them.
JAY: Right. Now, what is the obligation, if any, on the Obama
administration in regards to all of this? I mean, when President Obama
was elected, he said it's time to look forward, not back, which, you
know, a lot of people have suggested that would mean no crimes of any
kind would ever be punished, 'cause it's always happened already. But is
there any legal obligation on the Obama administration to
investigate/prosecute? And if so, the fact that they haven't, what does
that mean?
BOYLE: Yes, the Obama administration has all along had an obligation to
prosecute Bush and the rest of them under the Convention against
Torture, including U.S. implementing legislation for that convention,
making torture a crime, a felony, and in some circumstances punishable
by death if death has occurred, which it has, although I don't support
the death penalty. But it does give you an idea of the severity of the
crimes. And also the Obama administration has an obligation to prosecute
these individuals under the four Geneva conventions of 1949, including
the U.S. implementing legislation, the U.S. War Crimes Act. So there is
an obligation by Obama to prosecute. Perhaps in a second term they
might. We'll just have to see what happens.
You are correct to indicate that so far they said they were looking to
the forward and not to the past. I pointed out then to the ICC
prosecutor that this is definitive proof that the Obama administration
is not going to prosecute at this time and therefore satisfies the
element known as subsidiarity, which requires the ICC to defer to the
national state for prosecution before the ICC steps in. And if you
already have Obama and Holder saying they're not going to prosecute,
that satisfies that requirement and puts it firmly in the hands of the
ICC.
JAY: And is the Obama administration then itself in violation of the law by not pursuing this?
BOYLE: That's correct. It's clearly in violation of the Convention
against Torture and the four Geneva conventions of 1949, and, I regret
to report, technically this would make them accessories after the fact
to these offenses.
JAY: Right. Now, you focused on torture at the Malaysia tribunals, but
why not the issue of the Iraq War itself? Kofi Annan - it was little
late coming, but eventually said the war was illegal. What is a bigger
war crime than invading a country and killing several hundreds of
thousands of people?
BOYLE: Yes. Actually, we did that last November. The charge on torture
and war crimes was charge two. Charge one last November - I was out
there for that prosecution as well. We prosecuted - well, indicted and
then prosecuted Bush and Blair for committing a crime against peace by
invading Iraq. And there were, again, close to four days of hearings,
there were a defense counsel, and a judgment did come back that Bush and
Blair were guilty of crimes against peace for their invasion against
Iraq. And we are making efforts to get that judgment enforced, too.
Obviously, these things take time. Pinochet stepped down as president of
Chile, and it took eight years before he was finally hauled to court
there in Britain. So, you know, if you're pursuing major war criminals
such as Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest of them, you're not
going to have justice tomorrow. You know, you can take a look at the
Balkans with Milosevic. I first went after him in the World Court in
1993, and finally got him indicted by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for what he did in Bosnia in 2000. So
that took seven years, and he was finally on trial for these crimes.
Unfortunately, he died before we were able to get a final verdict. So,
you know, you have to view these things as a long-term effort.
JAY: Thanks very much for joining us.
BOYLE: Well, again, thanks for having me on. And my best to Real News. Keep the good work up.
JAY: Thank you. And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
Over 9 million students are at risk for increased educational debt, due
to bank-affiliated campus debit cards that come with high fees,
insufficient consumer protections, and few options. Financial
institutions now have affinity partnerships with almost 900 campuses
nationwide, grafting bank products onto student IDs and other campus
cards to become the primary recipient of billions in federal financial
aid to distribute to students.
"Campus debit cards are wolves in sheep's clothing," observed
Rich Williams, U.S. PIRG Higher Education Advocate and report co-author.
"Students think they can access their dollars freely, but instead their
aid is being eaten up in fees."
The Campus Debit Card Trap, a new report released by the U.S. Public
Interest Research Group Education Fund, finds that banks and financial
firms now control or influence federal financial aid disbursement to
over 9 million students by linking checking accounts and prepaid debit
cards to student IDs. For decades, students would receive their aid by
check, without being charged any fees to access their student aid. Now,
students end up paying big fees on their student aid, including
per-swipe fees of $0.50, inactivity fees of $10 or more after 6 months,
overdraft fees of up to $38 and plenty more. Financial institutions
aggressively market or default students into their bank accounts to
maximize these fees.
A well-structured debit card program can provide
benefits to students, but many current programs provide little to no
choice, while high fees on grant and loan money leave students in deeper
debt.
"Every penny of financial aid money should go to educational expenses, not an education in high bank fees," said Williams.
Additional findings from the report include:
1) Millions of students are affected. Almost 900 of the 7,300
campuses participating in the federal financial aid program now have a
banking partnership. Higher One, the biggest financial firm, has
partnerships with 520 colleges that enroll 4.3 million students.
Currently 12.5%, or 1 in 8, of all federal aid recipients nationally
disburse their aid money into a Higher One OneAccount. Wells Fargo, the
biggest bank in the market, partners with 43 campuses that enroll over 2
million students.
Many of the country's largest colleges already have agreements.
Currently, 32 of the 50 largest public 4-year universities, 26 of the
largest 50 community colleges, and 6 of the largest 20 private
not-for-profit schools have debit or prepaid card contracts with a bank
or a financial firm, according to U.S. PIRG Education Fund research.
2) There is big money at stake. The biggest firm in the business,
Higher One, makes 80% of its revenues by siphoning fees from student aid
disbursement cards, totaling $142.5 million of its $176.3 million total
revenues in 2011, according to SEC filings. These fees include ATM and
other transaction fees, overdraft fees, and interchange fees imposed on
merchants who accept cards.
3) The most-impacted students are among the neediest. Students
most reliant on financial aid come from low and moderate income
backgrounds. Roughly 40% of freshmen are first-generation college
students, and 25% of all students are both first generation and low
income.
4) The service appears to be endorsed by the colleges. Huntington
Bank paid $25 million to co-brand and link their checking accounts with
Ohio State University student IDs. Other schools receive substantial
payouts, revenue sharing deals, and large reductions in administrative
costs.
"Many bank contracts require aid recipients to visit the provider's
website before they choose how to receive their aid - into an existing
account, on a check or on a disbursement card -- again implying an
endorsement," added Williams. These relationships create at least the
appearance of a conflict of interest, as schools may be tempted to
choose the arrangement that gives them the most money rather than the
arrangement that gives their students the best deal.
"The campus debit card marketplace is tilted so that students can't get a
fair deal," said Ed Mierzwinski, report co-author and U.S. PIRG
Consumer Program Director. "Campus administrations and policymakers have
the power to clean it up." Mierzwinski also urged the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau to upgrade consumer protections on prepaid
cards.
The report includes recommendations to colleges and policy makers,
such as taking steps to ensure students have an unbiased choice of where
to bank and that there are no fees charged to access financial aid.
The report also lists tips for ways student consumers can avoid these high fees.
U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups
(PIRGs), stands up to powerful special interests on behalf of the
American public, working to win concrete results for our health and our
well-being. With a strong network of researchers, advocates, organizers
and students in state capitols across the country, we take on the
special interests on issues, such as product safety,political
corruption, prescription drugs and voting rights,where these interests
stand in the way of reform and progress.
The Venus Project of Jacque Fresco, featured in the Zeitgeist films, documents a “resource-based economy” to optimize Earth’s resources for the success of all Earth’s inhabitants. This 8-minute video is the best I’ve found for concise and powerful communication of this possibility.
In contrast, the economy we have is by the 1% for the 1%. These are its features:
Ad
What we use for money is created by 1% bank owners as a debt that must be repaid with interest.
This causes increasing total debt that can never be repaid because that
is what we use for money. The promotion of debt owed by the 99% to the
1% as somehow “good” for the 99% is criminal economic fraud in annual
damages of trillions of dollars, harm to billions of people, and deaths
to millions of people.
The 1% operate in cartels that collude to transfer the 99%’s wealth to themselves. This includes a war cartel that kills millions in Orwellian violation of war law (military armed attacks are Wars of Aggression in all cases except when under armed attack by another nation’s government).
The 1% corporate media lie and distract
rather than ever expose the 1%’s crimes centering in money and war, and
never seriously report on topics such as a resource-based economy in
benefit for 100% of us.
The solution to get from our “debt supply” in Orwellian opposite of a
money supply to a resource-based economy will likely happen through
monetary and credit reform as a first step:
Monetary reform creates debt-free money that extinguishes national debt (details here),
allows government to become employer of last resort for infrastructure investment (hard and soft) for full-employment and optimal infrastructure,
Credit reform allows for public loans (interest directly pays for
public goods/services) as another monetary tool for stable money supply
(credit reform details here). An example could be 2% mortgages from a state-owned bank that would completely fund state taxes.
The largest volcanoes on our planet may take as little as a few hundred years to form and erupt.
These "supervolcanoes" were thought to exist for as much as 200,000
years before releasing their vast underground pools of molten rock.
Researchers reporting in Plos One have sampled the rock at the supervolcano site of Long Valley in California.
Their findings suggest that the magma pool beneath it erupted within as little as hundreds of years of forming.
That eruption is estimated to have happened about 760,000 years ago, and would have covered half of North America in its ash.
Such super-eruptions can release thousands of cubic
kilometres of debris - hundreds of times larger than any eruption seen
in the history of humanity.
Eruptions on this scale could release enough ash to influence the global
weather for years, and one theory holds that the Lake Toba eruption in
Indonesia about 70,000 years ago had long-term effects that nearly wiped
out humans altogether.
What little is known about the formation of these supervolcanoes is
largely based on the study of crystals of a material called zircon,
which contains small amounts of radioactive elements whose age can be
estimated using the same techniques used to date archaeological
artefacts and dinosaur bones.
Zircon studies to date have suggested that the time between the
formation of the enormous magma pools and the eventual super-eruptions
can be measured in the hundreds of thousands of years.
Now, Guilherme Gualda of Vanderbilt University and his colleagues
present several lines of evidence from the Bishop Tuff deposit at Long
Valley, suggesting that the pools are "ephemeral" - lasting as little as
500 years before eruption.
Initially, the magma pools are nearly purely liquid rock, with few bubbles or re-crystallised minerals.
Over time, crystals develop, but the process stops at the point of the
eruption. As a result, the characteristic development time of these
crystals can also give an estimate of how long a magma pool existed
before erupting.
Rather than zircon, the team's target was crystals of the common mineral quartz.
Because the processes and timescales of quartz formation in the
extraordinary underground conditions of a magma pool are well-known, the
team was able to determine how long the crystals were forming within
Long Valley's supervolcano before being spewed out in the eruption.
Their estimates suggest the quartz formed over a range of time between 500 and 3,000 years.
"Our study suggests that when these exceptionally large magma pools form
they are ephemeral and cannot exist very long without erupting," said
Dr Gualda.
"The fact that the process of magma body formation occurs in historical
time, instead of geological time, completely changes the nature of the
problem."
At present, geologists do not believe that any of Earth's known giant
magma pools are in imminent danger of eruption, but the results suggest
future work to better understand how the pools develop, and aim
ultimately to predict devastating super-eruptions.
In the northernmost reaches of California's Ventura County, a two-lane
rural road called Highway 33 runs into the rugged and mostly undeveloped
Transverse Mountain Range. Though it's mostly raw wilderness, a few
businesses catering to adventurous explorers have long existed there,
some for more than a century.
But now the local government is
shutting those businesses down, one by one, using arcane zoning and
building-code laws to get the job done.
"If there isn't someone
complaining, and there isn't really a serious public health and safety
issue, why do they spend so much of their time pursuing these kinds of
cases?" asks Lynne Jensen, executive director of the Ventura County
Coalition of Labor and Business (COLAB).
Ad
Tom Wolf owns the Pine
Mountain Inn, a restaurant that's been serving biker groups and local
community organizations since the 1930s. Wolf temporarily had to shut
the doors when he suffered a heart attack in 2002, and he was never able
to reopen when the county informed him that his property had been
rezoned as an "Open Space" back in the 1980s without his knowledge.
"[The
county] wanted everybody out of here," says Wolf. "And they wanted a
complete open space with nothing but deer and frogs... and no people."
No
matter how hard Wolf tried to comply with the ever-changing codes, the
county just wouldn't relent, at one time even ordering him to remove a
chicken coop that had never actually existed on the property.
Wolf
isn't alone, says Jensen. Several other small businesses along Highway
33 have been hit by multiple county agencies for no apparent reason.
"They
had every department hit us with violations to make sure that they shut
us down," says April Hope, who, along with her husband Bob, owns a bed
and breakfast called The Wheel, which has existed in the area since the
1890s.
Since the Hopes purchased The Wheel in early 2000, they've
never been able to open it to the public. While officials from the
county supervisor's office and the planning department refused to speak
with ReasonTV for this story, Jensen says that the county is using code
enforcement to drive these businesses off the land without compensation.
"This
rezoning is really a way to get around eminent domain, because eminent
domain means you give up your entire property. And here, you only give
up part of your rights," says Jensen.
Invoking eminent domain to
seize private property would not only require the county to compensate
landowners, but also to demonstrate that the taking served a "public
use."
"They have been very successful in taking people's
property in a number of different ways without compensation as long as
they don't take ownership of it," says Jensen.
About 5.30 minutes.
Written and Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alex Manning, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller.
Go to http://www.reason.tv
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