Metropolitan Government would eliminate the individual states as meaningful political entities, would divide the nation into metropolitan regions sprawling across state lines, and would place the management of these regional governments in the hands of appointed experts answerable not to local citizens but to the supreme political power in Washington. (For detailed discussion, see The Dan Smoot Report, April 13 and 20, 1959, "Metropolitan Government–Part One," and "Metropolitan Government–Part Two.")
Through the Area Development activities of the Committee for Economic Development, the Council on Foreign Relations has supported the Urban Renewal program.
Urban Renewal with federal tax money was authorized in the National Housing Act of 1949, and enlarged in scope by amendments to the Housing Acts of 1954, 1956, and 1957; but it did not become a vigorously promoted nationwide program until late 1957, after the Council on Foreign Relations (through the CED) started pushing it.
Urban Renewal is a federally financed program of city planning which requires city governments to seize homes and other private property from some citizens and re-sell them, at below cost, to real estate promoters and other private citizens for developments that the city planners consider desirable.
Under the ancient, but awesome, right of eminent domain, city governments do not have the power to take private real estate from one citizen for the profit of another citizen. But in November, 1954, the Supreme Court in an urban renewal case, said that Congress and state legislature can do anything they like to the private property of private citizens as long as they claim they are doing it for public good.
Federal urban renewal has opened rich veins of public money for graft, corruption, and political vote buying; and it is destroying private property rights under the pretext that clearing slums will eliminate the causes of crime. Moreover, urban renewal authorizes the seizure not just of slum property, but of all private property in a whole section of a city, for resale to private interests which promise to build something that governmental planners will like.
Federal urban renewal–since the Council on Foreign Relation's CED started supporting it–has become a national movement with frightful implications and dangers. (For detailed discussion of urban renewal, see The Dan Smoot Report, September 29, 1958, and October 6, 1958.)