It seems activist judges, of which there are far too many, don't understand the difference between what is legal and what is right. They want to legislate from the bench and are far too often permitted to do so.
Take the latest ruling about civil rights legislation covering sexual orientation. Nothing in the law actually covers orientation and in fact only list a few categories out of infinite possible classifications that are considered protected. The judges believed it was unfair that a lesbian was possibly being prevented from being employed because of her orientation so they simply added it to the list of protected classes.
Now you can believe that the employers actions were unfair, as most people probably would, but according to the law they were not illegal until a panel of judges suddenly made them so. The proper course of action for a judge would have been to rule in favor of the employer (because that's what the law demands) while stating in their opinions why they believe the law should be changed. The appropriate legislative body could have taken it under advisement and taken whatever course of action they saw fit. It is not the job of the judge to overrule or rewrite the law unless they can actually point to a constitutional basis for their decision.
The Bannon thing has been a red herring since day one. Obama (as did other Presidents before him) routinely sent political operatives to NSC meetings, he just didn't list them as full members so they wouldn't show up on the public lists. This has been pretty standard practice.
Trump, on the other hand, decided to list Bannon as an official member so his name appeared on public documents. He has now removed Bannon from the official members list so he can still go to the meetings whenever he wants but won't appear on public listings; at least not the ones most people see.
Even the groups hired by PP's defenders reported that the edited videos did not differ in any material way from the unedited ones which were also freely available. The closest they come to actually showing a lie is the fact there is a scene of a stillbirth, that was not the result of an abortion, while a voiceover described an actual abortion. Effectively the fact they used the wrong stock photo is being used as a case that all the hours of raw footage are inaccurate. By that standard half of TV news would be considered a lie.
People like you keep repeating the 'lying' claim but it's usually a circular argument pointing to someone else's claim pointing to someone else pointing to nothing.
What should really worry people about this prosecution is the level if intermingling there is between the prosecutors in CA and PP. The Attorney General has accepted campaign contributions from PP all the while filing charges against their political enemies. The Dems are pushing legislation which would effectively make any type of undercover reporting against PP a crime.
The law requires a reasonable expectation of privacy. That's a very big loophole.
In some cases even having a meeting in your office with the door open can be considered outside this law let alone having a meeting in a public restaurant (where most of these recordings happened).
The "investigated by more than a dozen states" itself is a very misleading stat. PP is not a monolithic organization and each States 'chapter' (I don't know how they like to refer to themselves) run under slightly different rules. In many of the states where investigations happened the local PP did not even partake in the fetal organ donation program so effectively they were investigating NOTHING. In others they just had to show they didn't make a profit from the donation.
There is also a difference between breaking the law and skirting the law (much like the recordings in question). The law prevents PP from making a profit from organ 'donations' but when you control the costing it's very hard to make a profit if you don't want to. It's the same way so many Hollywood movies 'lose' money even when their budgets were small and they had enormous ticket sales. When you control all the cost if you want to lose money on paper it's just a matter of adjusting a number here and there.
These videos were never going to lead to prosecutions against PP (although the Feds did send a list to DOJ for further investigation but since Obama was in office you can guess where those went). They were all about getting PP executives on video/tape saying what most people would think are unconscionable statements. It was a PR campaign from the get go just like these charges are mostly PR with little chance of actual conviction based on existing CA case law.
where the other party expects the conversation to be private.
That is the issue. It's been pretty much established that most meetings in public areas where neither party had reasonable expectation of privacy were exempt from this law. There are also cases where meetings happened inside the offices of the targeted party that were considered exempt because while not in 'public' the conversations could be overheard by any other passerby thereby removing the expectation of privacy.
Essentially the law is written and enforced in such a way that unless the parties are alone behind locked doors the recording party can make a claim the conversation was public and not be in violation.
In this case 14 of 15 charges would most likely already be covered under the exceptions already spelt out in CA case law. The 15th charge is essentially saying they conspired to commit the crime of making the recordings, which is obvious but not much of a crime if the 14 other charges are dismissed.
No matter where you fall on the pro/anti abortion scale this prosecution reeks of politics.
2 copies of every video were released; the edited copy (for time reasons) and the unedited copy. Even when reviewed by liberal groups they could not find any substantive changes due to editing.
Through M. Obama's healthy eating initiatives federal school lunch guidelines were modified making lunches almost inedible. Schools across the country were complaining that new guidelines actually led to hungrier kids, increased waste (as a lot of the meals were simply thrown out) all while having the added benefit of costing them a lot more.
Anarchist fall on all points of the political left-right scale. The protestors in question were anarcho-communists (as indicated by their flag) and are in fact far left on the political spectrum.
While a handful did show up to protest Obama (because they didn't consider him far left enough) it was a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers who showed up for the Trump protest.
Just a small correction: Meals on Wheels does not seem to include the block grants in their 35% federal funding calculation so if the $33 million is taken out and calculated separately then the overall impact on Meals on Wheels is about a 5% reduction in funding; that's if every penny of the $33 million where actually going to Meals in the first place which it's not.
"The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers the community development block grant program that Trump targeted for elimination, couldn't say how much of that money ultimately flows to Meals on Wheels. It's certainly a small fraction: Social services are capped by law at 15% of the block grants, and the most recent HUD figures show all senior services receive about $33 million."
So even by your own link the maximum amount possibly impacted by the block grant cuts is $33 million nationally and that's only if every single dollar was actually going to Meals on Wheels.
The $227 million in your quote is not part of the block grant being eliminated, it's part of an entirely separate program. It is possible that that $227 might see some reduction as part of the overall cost cutting but it's a very popular program so even if it is reduced would probably be one of the last programs they'd touch.
So for the 35% of their budgets that come from Federal monies less than 12% is on the chopping block which is a little over 4% overall.
To be fair it only receives federal grant money in some States and even in those States it's not actually that much of their income.
In the States where they do receive 'Federal' grant money it is covered under the blanket Federal transfers to States which they can generally spend on anything. In a few cases they use a pittance of that transfer to help fund good programs like Meals but the vast majority of it goes to simple local pork projects.
Cutting these types of transfers will have more impact on some State level Senators plans on having a Library named after himself than any local Meals on Wheels program.
You cannot 'stonewall' a budget. It's not subject to filibustering in the same way other laws are. Harry Reid, as Senate leader, could have put a budget proposal up for a vote and pass it with 51 votes and there was nothing the Republicans could have done to stop it; he simply didn't want to do his job.
That's not to say it would have gone into effect since there would have been a lengthy process to merge the House and Senate budgets together, but to at least start that process you need a budget from both Houses and too often it was only the House budget that was passed.
Obama's proposed budgets were generally only brought up for a vote by Republicans because Democrats didn't want to go on record voting against their leaders proposals, which they were then forced to.
It doesn't really matter anyway because Presidential budgets are only suggestions and while they may give insight into how they plan on prioritizing spending it's Congress that actually creates and passes a budget. During Obama's tenure the House (mostly controlled by Repubs) passed a budget each year but the Senate (mostly controlled by Dems) often didn't bother and just governed using continuing resolutions.
The majority of 'subsidies' given to the oil and natural gas industry are not actually subsidies in any real sense. Most of the 'studies' that like to report such enormous world wide subsides inflate their figures by defining a subsidy in such a way that even if when gas companies themselves don't get any money out of it it's added to their totals.
For instance the top 3 'subsidies' in the US, making up half +/- a few percentage points every year are, the strategic oil reserve, farm fuel tax credit and the various low income home heating credits.
The first is, as the name implies, a strategic reserve of oil that the US government keeps on hand to act as both a security blanket if anything bad happens to the oil supply or at times a tool to help control pricing if they believe their is not enough supply to meet normal demand.
The farm credit is simply the amount of money farmers don't have to pay torwards normal road taxes on fuel for equipment that does not run on roads.
The home heating credits are just that, credits given to low income people in colder climates to ensure they can heat their homes during winter.
None of those really go into the pockets of the oil companies but they are all counted towards the 'subsidy' totals reported. Similar programs exist in many other countries and help greatly inflate the global subsidy numbers.
Even regular business expenses are often deemed subsidies for the purpose of these reports. For example, say the normal practice allows for depreciation of an asset over some fixed period of time like 5 years. If an oil company requests the ability to depreciate that asset over an 8 year timespan instead and someone writes an exemption for them then all the tax savings from their ability to depreciate that asset are generally included in the 'subsidy' total. Never mind that all companies do that and it's not usually considered anything special, but when you're trying to make numbers as big as possible anything with the word oil or gas on it counts.
That's not to say they don't get direct subsidies too, they do, but the real numbers are just a fraction of the numbers used by most of the studies about ff subsidies.
Most contracts give the client some control over "how it get's done". The contractor is being hired to perform a specific task, if I as the client have some stipulations then that is negotiated at the time the contract is signed.
Who provides and who decides the materials used? Who decides the hours to be worked? Can the work be done offsite or on?
All of these can be dictated by the client or left up to the worker and can have various degrees of bearing on whether they are employer/employee of client/contractor.
In most countries there is usually at least 5 or 6 primary criteria (often with several sub-criteria) for determining employee vs. contractor and the weights given to each are generally decided case by case.
Contractors are often required to use specific tools to perform their tasks as set out by their client. Go to any office where software contractors are brought in to help in projects and you'd be hard pressed to find a place that allows them to use whatever they want to complete that project. They are almost always required to use the same software as employees and in many case the company dictates/provides the hardware (computers, peripherals, etc..).
The law never technically gave anyone legal protection, just made it a dangerous process for the rights holders to try and sue because most people didn't like the idea of record companies 'double dipping' (receive their portion of the tax and then suing for damages). Even so, if they tried to sue after the tax was removed for a violation that occurred while the tax existed my guess would be most judges would possibly find for the plaintiff (as piracy is a violation of copyright law) but the reward would be miniscule and set a precedent the record labels wouldn't want.
The main reason we get away with a lot of piracy is that we introduced the blank media tax in 1997. At the time that meant that almost any storage media that could possibly used to store MP3s/Video had some charge placed on it that was paid to the various rights holders. Essentially the various interested parties surrendered some of their ability to go after violators so that they could get a steady paycheck. It wasn't like Canada was some piracy utopia, they just found an alternative method to get paid and were happy to settle for that.
Cut to today where most people don't even use the taxable media anymore and those paychecks are getting smaller and smaller. The rights holders have fought for years to extend the tax to other devices (like MP3 players and smartphones) and have sometimes won but usually lost or been overturned so now they're just going to make noise. They've been talking about trying to remove the tax so that they can go after individuals much like in the US.
The laws allowing for this search exist both in the US and most other countries and have for decades. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with who currently occupies the White House. Even if it did, I doubt if Trump's had time in the last 2 weeks to personally replace every border agent with the imaginary fascist thugs you seem to think exist.
International travellers have been telling stories like these forever back to the days of being requested to open up your locked briefcase.
The basic rule is if you don't want to comply, and you still want to enter the country in question, then either contact your employer for further instructions and wait it out or be ready to surrender your device which will be returned whenever border services decides they're done with it.
Canada border services has pretty much the same powers as their American counterparts. They can't keep you out of the country since you are a citizen but your goods and possession are subject to almost any search they want to perform, without a warrant.
So while telling the border agent to "go fuck themselves" when they ask for your laptop won't keep you out of the country, it will most likely mean you are going home sans 1 laptop until such time that they 'decide' it's no longer of interest for them to hold it.
By her own admissions she was in violation of several statues involving the handling of classified information. Unlike most criminal law, these statues even directly state intent was not required to violate them so even her excuses do nothing but further prove her guilt.
The issue never had to do with evidence, that was a slam dunk on day one. It all had to do with political will and the FBI simply decided no one had the will to go after Clinton for what would have had essentially worked out to a small slap on the wrist. It's hard to get a prosecutor to bring forward a case that will in the end cost taxpayers millions with almost no benefit since she was no longer in office and would most likely have only been hit with a few hundred thousand in fines. Lesser people with lower level violations of the same statues have served jail time but that simply doesn't happen to the political elite in the US.
He made a standard court filing to identify the owners of the few parcels of land that are completely surrounded by his property so that they can choose whether they want to pay any back taxes and continue to own the land, sell to him (or someone else they choose) or officially abandon the land to the State. Apparently some of these half acre plots can have hundred of owners, most of whom have no idea they even own the property, so no one bothers to do anything with them.
From the article it appears only one even had a resident, who left a few years back, and he's actually supporting Zuckerberg's filing so that all the owners can be properly identified and paid.
He followed standard Hawaiian procedure for identifying land owners of essentially abandoned properties. The suit requires the owners to be identified and served before any actions are taken and if they choose to they can simply ensure all property taxes are up to date (or make arrangements) and then continue using/not using the land as they desire.
Zuckerberg isn't forcing anyone off their land; most of the owners don't even know it exists but after this they will and can possibly make a few dollar off of it.
From the article, this is exactly why this process is used,. By filing they have to notify the owners (most of whom have no idea they own anything) and then they get a chance to settle up (if in arrears) and sell before the government just seizes the land and auctions it off.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems activist judges, of which there are far too many, don't understand the difference between what is legal and what is right. They want to legislate from the bench and are far too often permitted to do so.
Take the latest ruling about civil rights legislation covering sexual orientation. Nothing in the law actually covers orientation and in fact only list a few categories out of infinite possible classifications that are considered protected. The judges believed it was unfair that a lesbian was possibly being prevented from being employed because of her orientation so they simply added it to the list of protected classes.
Now you can believe that the employers actions were unfair, as most people probably would, but according to the law they were not illegal until a panel of judges suddenly made them so. The proper course of action for a judge would have been to rule in favor of the employer (because that's what the law demands) while stating in their opinions why they believe the law should be changed. The appropriate legislative body could have taken it under advisement and taken whatever course of action they saw fit. It is not the job of the judge to overrule or rewrite the law unless they can actually point to a constitutional basis for their decision.
The Bannon thing has been a red herring since day one. Obama (as did other Presidents before him) routinely sent political operatives to NSC meetings, he just didn't list them as full members so they wouldn't show up on the public lists. This has been pretty standard practice.
Trump, on the other hand, decided to list Bannon as an official member so his name appeared on public documents. He has now removed Bannon from the official members list so he can still go to the meetings whenever he wants but won't appear on public listings; at least not the ones most people see.
The end result is absolutely nothing changed.
Even the groups hired by PP's defenders reported that the edited videos did not differ in any material way from the unedited ones which were also freely available. The closest they come to actually showing a lie is the fact there is a scene of a stillbirth, that was not the result of an abortion, while a voiceover described an actual abortion. Effectively the fact they used the wrong stock photo is being used as a case that all the hours of raw footage are inaccurate. By that standard half of TV news would be considered a lie.
People like you keep repeating the 'lying' claim but it's usually a circular argument pointing to someone else's claim pointing to someone else pointing to nothing.
What should really worry people about this prosecution is the level if intermingling there is between the prosecutors in CA and PP. The Attorney General has accepted campaign contributions from PP all the while filing charges against their political enemies. The Dems are pushing legislation which would effectively make any type of undercover reporting against PP a crime.
The law requires a reasonable expectation of privacy. That's a very big loophole.
In some cases even having a meeting in your office with the door open can be considered outside this law let alone having a meeting in a public restaurant (where most of these recordings happened).
The "investigated by more than a dozen states" itself is a very misleading stat. PP is not a monolithic organization and each States 'chapter' (I don't know how they like to refer to themselves) run under slightly different rules. In many of the states where investigations happened the local PP did not even partake in the fetal organ donation program so effectively they were investigating NOTHING. In others they just had to show they didn't make a profit from the donation.
There is also a difference between breaking the law and skirting the law (much like the recordings in question). The law prevents PP from making a profit from organ 'donations' but when you control the costing it's very hard to make a profit if you don't want to. It's the same way so many Hollywood movies 'lose' money even when their budgets were small and they had enormous ticket sales. When you control all the cost if you want to lose money on paper it's just a matter of adjusting a number here and there.
These videos were never going to lead to prosecutions against PP (although the Feds did send a list to DOJ for further investigation but since Obama was in office you can guess where those went). They were all about getting PP executives on video/tape saying what most people would think are unconscionable statements. It was a PR campaign from the get go just like these charges are mostly PR with little chance of actual conviction based on existing CA case law.
where the other party expects the conversation to be private.
That is the issue. It's been pretty much established that most meetings in public areas where neither party had reasonable expectation of privacy were exempt from this law. There are also cases where meetings happened inside the offices of the targeted party that were considered exempt because while not in 'public' the conversations could be overheard by any other passerby thereby removing the expectation of privacy.
Essentially the law is written and enforced in such a way that unless the parties are alone behind locked doors the recording party can make a claim the conversation was public and not be in violation.
In this case 14 of 15 charges would most likely already be covered under the exceptions already spelt out in CA case law. The 15th charge is essentially saying they conspired to commit the crime of making the recordings, which is obvious but not much of a crime if the 14 other charges are dismissed.
No matter where you fall on the pro/anti abortion scale this prosecution reeks of politics.
2 copies of every video were released; the edited copy (for time reasons) and the unedited copy. Even when reviewed by liberal groups they could not find any substantive changes due to editing.
Through M. Obama's healthy eating initiatives federal school lunch guidelines were modified making lunches almost inedible. Schools across the country were complaining that new guidelines actually led to hungrier kids, increased waste (as a lot of the meals were simply thrown out) all while having the added benefit of costing them a lot more.
Anarchist fall on all points of the political left-right scale. The protestors in question were anarcho-communists (as indicated by their flag) and are in fact far left on the political spectrum.
While a handful did show up to protest Obama (because they didn't consider him far left enough) it was a drop in the bucket compared to the numbers who showed up for the Trump protest.
Just a small correction: Meals on Wheels does not seem to include the block grants in their 35% federal funding calculation so if the $33 million is taken out and calculated separately then the overall impact on Meals on Wheels is about a 5% reduction in funding; that's if every penny of the $33 million where actually going to Meals in the first place which it's not.
From your link:
So even by your own link the maximum amount possibly impacted by the block grant cuts is $33 million nationally and that's only if every single dollar was actually going to Meals on Wheels.
The $227 million in your quote is not part of the block grant being eliminated, it's part of an entirely separate program. It is possible that that $227 might see some reduction as part of the overall cost cutting but it's a very popular program so even if it is reduced would probably be one of the last programs they'd touch.
So for the 35% of their budgets that come from Federal monies less than 12% is on the chopping block which is a little over 4% overall.
To be fair it only receives federal grant money in some States and even in those States it's not actually that much of their income.
In the States where they do receive 'Federal' grant money it is covered under the blanket Federal transfers to States which they can generally spend on anything. In a few cases they use a pittance of that transfer to help fund good programs like Meals but the vast majority of it goes to simple local pork projects.
Cutting these types of transfers will have more impact on some State level Senators plans on having a Library named after himself than any local Meals on Wheels program.
You cannot 'stonewall' a budget. It's not subject to filibustering in the same way other laws are. Harry Reid, as Senate leader, could have put a budget proposal up for a vote and pass it with 51 votes and there was nothing the Republicans could have done to stop it; he simply didn't want to do his job.
That's not to say it would have gone into effect since there would have been a lengthy process to merge the House and Senate budgets together, but to at least start that process you need a budget from both Houses and too often it was only the House budget that was passed.
or Democrats.
Obama's proposed budgets were generally only brought up for a vote by Republicans because Democrats didn't want to go on record voting against their leaders proposals, which they were then forced to.
It doesn't really matter anyway because Presidential budgets are only suggestions and while they may give insight into how they plan on prioritizing spending it's Congress that actually creates and passes a budget. During Obama's tenure the House (mostly controlled by Repubs) passed a budget each year but the Senate (mostly controlled by Dems) often didn't bother and just governed using continuing resolutions.
The majority of 'subsidies' given to the oil and natural gas industry are not actually subsidies in any real sense. Most of the 'studies' that like to report such enormous world wide subsides inflate their figures by defining a subsidy in such a way that even if when gas companies themselves don't get any money out of it it's added to their totals.
For instance the top 3 'subsidies' in the US, making up half +/- a few percentage points every year are, the strategic oil reserve, farm fuel tax credit and the various low income home heating credits.
The first is, as the name implies, a strategic reserve of oil that the US government keeps on hand to act as both a security blanket if anything bad happens to the oil supply or at times a tool to help control pricing if they believe their is not enough supply to meet normal demand.
The farm credit is simply the amount of money farmers don't have to pay torwards normal road taxes on fuel for equipment that does not run on roads.
The home heating credits are just that, credits given to low income people in colder climates to ensure they can heat their homes during winter.
None of those really go into the pockets of the oil companies but they are all counted towards the 'subsidy' totals reported. Similar programs exist in many other countries and help greatly inflate the global subsidy numbers.
Even regular business expenses are often deemed subsidies for the purpose of these reports. For example, say the normal practice allows for depreciation of an asset over some fixed period of time like 5 years. If an oil company requests the ability to depreciate that asset over an 8 year timespan instead and someone writes an exemption for them then all the tax savings from their ability to depreciate that asset are generally included in the 'subsidy' total. Never mind that all companies do that and it's not usually considered anything special, but when you're trying to make numbers as big as possible anything with the word oil or gas on it counts.
That's not to say they don't get direct subsidies too, they do, but the real numbers are just a fraction of the numbers used by most of the studies about ff subsidies.
Most contracts give the client some control over "how it get's done". The contractor is being hired to perform a specific task, if I as the client have some stipulations then that is negotiated at the time the contract is signed.
Who provides and who decides the materials used? Who decides the hours to be worked? Can the work be done offsite or on?
All of these can be dictated by the client or left up to the worker and can have various degrees of bearing on whether they are employer/employee of client/contractor.
In most countries there is usually at least 5 or 6 primary criteria (often with several sub-criteria) for determining employee vs. contractor and the weights given to each are generally decided case by case.
Contractors are often required to use specific tools to perform their tasks as set out by their client. Go to any office where software contractors are brought in to help in projects and you'd be hard pressed to find a place that allows them to use whatever they want to complete that project. They are almost always required to use the same software as employees and in many case the company dictates/provides the hardware (computers, peripherals, etc..).
The law never technically gave anyone legal protection, just made it a dangerous process for the rights holders to try and sue because most people didn't like the idea of record companies 'double dipping' (receive their portion of the tax and then suing for damages). Even so, if they tried to sue after the tax was removed for a violation that occurred while the tax existed my guess would be most judges would possibly find for the plaintiff (as piracy is a violation of copyright law) but the reward would be miniscule and set a precedent the record labels wouldn't want.
The main reason we get away with a lot of piracy is that we introduced the blank media tax in 1997. At the time that meant that almost any storage media that could possibly used to store MP3s/Video had some charge placed on it that was paid to the various rights holders. Essentially the various interested parties surrendered some of their ability to go after violators so that they could get a steady paycheck. It wasn't like Canada was some piracy utopia, they just found an alternative method to get paid and were happy to settle for that.
Cut to today where most people don't even use the taxable media anymore and those paychecks are getting smaller and smaller. The rights holders have fought for years to extend the tax to other devices (like MP3 players and smartphones) and have sometimes won but usually lost or been overturned so now they're just going to make noise. They've been talking about trying to remove the tax so that they can go after individuals much like in the US.
The laws allowing for this search exist both in the US and most other countries and have for decades. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with who currently occupies the White House. Even if it did, I doubt if Trump's had time in the last 2 weeks to personally replace every border agent with the imaginary fascist thugs you seem to think exist.
International travellers have been telling stories like these forever back to the days of being requested to open up your locked briefcase.
The basic rule is if you don't want to comply, and you still want to enter the country in question, then either contact your employer for further instructions and wait it out or be ready to surrender your device which will be returned whenever border services decides they're done with it.
There is nothing new here.
Canada border services has pretty much the same powers as their American counterparts. They can't keep you out of the country since you are a citizen but your goods and possession are subject to almost any search they want to perform, without a warrant.
So while telling the border agent to "go fuck themselves" when they ask for your laptop won't keep you out of the country, it will most likely mean you are going home sans 1 laptop until such time that they 'decide' it's no longer of interest for them to hold it.
By her own admissions she was in violation of several statues involving the handling of classified information. Unlike most criminal law, these statues even directly state intent was not required to violate them so even her excuses do nothing but further prove her guilt.
The issue never had to do with evidence, that was a slam dunk on day one. It all had to do with political will and the FBI simply decided no one had the will to go after Clinton for what would have had essentially worked out to a small slap on the wrist. It's hard to get a prosecutor to bring forward a case that will in the end cost taxpayers millions with almost no benefit since she was no longer in office and would most likely have only been hit with a few hundred thousand in fines.
Lesser people with lower level violations of the same statues have served jail time but that simply doesn't happen to the political elite in the US.
He made a standard court filing to identify the owners of the few parcels of land that are completely surrounded by his property so that they can choose whether they want to pay any back taxes and continue to own the land, sell to him (or someone else they choose) or officially abandon the land to the State. Apparently some of these half acre plots can have hundred of owners, most of whom have no idea they even own the property, so no one bothers to do anything with them.
From the article it appears only one even had a resident, who left a few years back, and he's actually supporting Zuckerberg's filing so that all the owners can be properly identified and paid.
He followed standard Hawaiian procedure for identifying land owners of essentially abandoned properties. The suit requires the owners to be identified and served before any actions are taken and if they choose to they can simply ensure all property taxes are up to date (or make arrangements) and then continue using/not using the land as they desire.
Zuckerberg isn't forcing anyone off their land; most of the owners don't even know it exists but after this they will and can possibly make a few dollar off of it.
From the article, this is exactly why this process is used,. By filing they have to notify the owners (most of whom have no idea they own anything) and then they get a chance to settle up (if in arrears) and sell before the government just seizes the land and auctions it off.