Hooray for the Supreme Court! And Consumers Win Again!

From the Heartland, Margot McMillen writes: I love to start the weekend with good news. Here are two pieces of it: The Missouri Supreme Court stood up for individual rights last week against the corporate interests that want to condemn land to build a giant port on the Mississippi. The port would be build solely to build giant storage tanks for crude oil from the North Dakota fracking fields. Missouri law, which the court upheld, says that condemnation under Missouri’s eminent domain laws cannot take place “for solely economic development purposes.” The port authority wasn’t interested in paying landowners a fair price and thought they could just condemn the land under the law. Good for the Supremes for saying no! The lawyers for the port authority said something about “improving river traffic” but the Supremes were able to see past the language. In the past, there have been condemnations of land, mostly urban, that have taken entire neighborhoods and moved them so that some big box store can build a gi-normous parking lot so that rich people can come and shop. The river bluffs with their woods and wildlife are a precious commodity. Too precious to cover with concrete like some industrial wasteland. I’m glad this court has unanimously sided with the land owners. On another positive note, several big box stores are refusing to handle GMO salmon. This is the salmon that has been genetically modified to grow faster than normal salmon. If it gets into the wild, normal salmon won’t be able to compete. But consumers don’t want to eat GMO food, so the stores are saying no! Fabulous news, and now there’s a movement to ban gmo salmon from all stores in our region. Hope it gains some traction!