BEHIND THE GREEN MASK:

U.N. Agenda 21

ROSA KOIRE

The Post Sustainability Institute Press

www.PostSustainabilityInstitute.org

BEHIND THE GREEN MASK: U.N. Agenda 21

Copyright © 2011 by Rosa Koire

Cover art and illustrations © 2011 by Barry N. Nathan

Cover Designer: Barry Nathan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

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including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording

or otherwise, without the express prior written

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The Post Sustainability Institute Press

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Santa Rosa, CA 95402

http://www.PostSustainabilityInstitute.org

http://www.DemocratsAgainstUNAgenda21.com

http://www.SantaRosaNeighborhoodCoalition.com

The Post Sustainability Institute is a 501 (c)(4) non-profit organization registered in California, USA

Awareness is the first step in the Resistance

Take this book and use it to regain your freedom

Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by: Kimberly A. Hitchens, hitch@booknook.biz

Dedicated to the memory of

ESTELLE W. KOIRE

Her courage to speak the truth

‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’

CONTENTS

About The Author

Preface

The Individual And The Collective

OK, What Is UN Agenda And Why Should I Care?

Let’s Dig A Little Deeper

In The Beginning

Bringing It Home

Consensus: Neutralizing Enemies

The Delphi Technique

How Could All Of This Be Going On Without My Knowledge or Approval?

From International To Local In One Easy Step: ICLEI

So What Exactly Are We Talking About?

Back To The Land

Wildlands: Our Glorious Future

The Rotten Tomato Award

How Does Regionalization Fit In With All of This?

We Know When You’ve Been Sleeping

Our Journey To The Truth Begins

An Awakening

Taking On The City

On The Duty of Civil Disobedience

The Twilight Zone

A Coalition Of Friends

Put It All Together And It Spells UN Agenda

Democrats Against UN Agenda

The City Loses Control

When Ideology Collides With Reality

A Peek Behind The Looking Glass

The End Of The Line

Hang Onto Your ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ Card

The Smart Mask

Ministry of Truth

Our Spartan Future: Neo- Feudalism

OK, I Get It. What Now? What Can I Do?

Acknowledgements

ABOUT THE POST SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE

OUR MISSION

The Post Sustainability Institute was established to study the impacts that United Nations Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, and Communitarianism have on liberty. Our intent is to track the progression of the Sustainability movement and to forecast the most likely outcomes if it proceeds unchecked.

We are a non-partisan, non-governmental think tank based in the United States. It is our intention to provide a clearing house for information on United Nations’ alliances with non-governmental and governmental groups seeking to erect Communitarianism as the dominant form of world governance, and to serve as a rallying point for those who oppose the dismantling of liberty. We welcome your participation and assistance.

Post-sustainability: the condition of

environmental, political, social, and

economic systems after the imposition of

Communitarianism.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rosa Koire is the executive director of The Post Sustainability Institute. She is a forensic commercial real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain valuation. Her twenty-eight year career as an expert witness on land use and property value has culminated in exposing the impacts of Sustainable Development on private property rights and individual liberty.

In 2005 she was elected to a citizens’ oversight committee in Santa Rosa, Northern California, to review a proposed 1,300 acre redevelopment project in which 10,000 people live and work. Her research into the documents justifying the plans led her, with her partner Kay Tokerud, to challenge the fraudulent basis for the huge Gateways Redevelopment Project. The City, in an attempt to block Koire from exposing the project, removed the neighborhood in which Koire and Tokerud’s properties were located from the redevelopment area.

Koire and Tokerud fought on, however, not wanting to abandon the thousands of business and property owners still in the area. They formed a business and property owners association and a non-profit organization (Concerned Citizens of Santa Rosa Against Redevelopment Law Abuse) and were able to raise nearly $500,000 in donations and pro bono legal work to sue the City of Santa Rosa to stop the project. The court case, Tokerud v. City of Santa Rosa, lost in Superior Court but the court ruled that they could continue, and they appealed to the San Francisco First District Court of Appeals where they lost again in 2009. The three years of litigation fighting eminent domain and the redevelopment project succeeded in delaying the project while the economy collapsed--the City has failed to implement its plans, but still has the power of eminent domain over the 1,100 acre area until 2018.

Over the course of the legal challenge Koire became aware of the source of the planning revolution she had observed over more than 10 years: UN Agenda 21. Through her research she found that much of the funding and power to implement local UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development land use programs comes through the diversion of property taxes to redevelopment agencies.

Her work in providing information and solutions for citizens fighting UN Agenda 21 has spread across the nation and world as more and more people become aware of the increased restrictions on their property rights, and the methods used to implement social engineering.

Through her website, Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 dot com and her grassroots tactical organization, Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition, she, with other leaders, has enabled activists on many seemingly unconnected issues to come together and fight the source: UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development.

In 2010 the non-profit organization she and her partner founded was expanded in scope and renamed The Post Sustainability Institute.

Rosa Koire, ASA

California Certified General Real Estate Appraiser

Accredited Senior Appraiser, American Society of Appraisers

District Branch Chief, California Dept. of Transportation

Bachelor of Arts, English, UCLA

PREFACE

The arm of UN Agenda 21 is long and reaches into every area of the world.

The philosophy of Communitarianism pervades this plan. To want government to serve the people by providing services, infrastructure, and protection is not contradictory to objecting to the imposition of restrictions that break the hearts and wallets of property owners. Communitarianism ‘balances’ the rights of the individual with the so-called rights of the community. Because the rights of the community are not defined in a constitution they can change without warning or notice; one’s individual rights are balanced against a continuously redefined amorphous rulebook. This rulebook is written in the dark and the individual runs up against it at dawn, and alone.

The slogan of UN Agenda 21, to protect the rights of future generations and all species against the potential crimes of the present, is both a smokescreen and a declaration of entitlement. By standing on this high sounding premise the rights of the individual are called selfish and those who would fight for them slurred as immoral. The philosophy that by merely living and exhaling we pose a direct danger to the earth is self-destructive and truly damaging to those lands that we steward.

The Green Mask must be drawn back—far back from the personalities: the little dictators running trusts, foundations, planning departments, city and town councils, provinces and states, non-governmental foundations and the like. The Green Mask must be removed from those who have hijacked the environmental movement. Behind the money in green; the more than five trillion dollars in private money poised to make green loans; the carbon credit brokers; the enormous wealth in purchasing land fills, ‘carbon sinks’, inaccessible lands in third world countries; behind that greed which one would expect—look behind that. Find what intelligent, educated people the world over look away from as from a spotlight: there is a plan for world governance that is in place and eating like a metastasized cancer into every nation, free and bound, in the world. Under the banner of saving the planet we are drowning liberty. Under the mask of green our civil liberties are being restricted, constricted, and suffocated in every village and hamlet. The plan is imposed locally.

Your government is a corporatocracy, a new authoritarian state in the process of consolidating your output into a more controllable, exploitable channel. The reason you are being misled by your government and told that all of this is good for you, is because there is no profit in managing a mass uprising. It is too disruptive. The markets want you to continue to cooperate---quietly and obediently. The technology that is being marketed to you is actually being used to condition you to expect to be spied on, and to spy on others. Every totalitarian state in history has relied on data collection. The Nazis were masters of data collection and analysis. Your government now has technological capabilities that far exceed anything ever seen on the planet to this date. You are in the midst of the biggest public relations scam in the history of the world. The pretty pastel vision of life in a Smart Growth development is a manipulation, a mask. In fact these plans are designed to restrict your freedom.

Awareness is the first step in the Resistance.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE

Communitarianism is the balancing of the individual’s rights against those of the community. In the US Constitution we are guaranteed rights that we were born with: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The last right, under the philosophy of John Locke, was ‘property.’ Property is not just land. YOU are your own property. The execration of slavery was a fundamental element in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.

So how can you ‘balance’ individual rights with those of the community? The community has no rights under the US Constitution. Individuals have rights and responsibilities, but the community as a whole---what is that? The collective? Whenever you ‘balance’ or subsume or subordinate or consensus-ize the individual’s rights you’ll get something different from what we are guaranteed under the Constitution

Here’s an example:

Let’s take two glasses and set them on a table.

One glass is full of water. Let’s call it a Constitutional Republic.

The other glass is full of milk. Let’s call it a Communitarian State.

Now we’ll get a glass pitcher and set it on the table.

Let’s balance the water with the milk by pouring them both into the pitcher. What do you have?

It’s not water anymore, is it? It’s milk. Watery milk. But milk. Not water.

The Third Way.

Communitarianism: Balancing your individual rights with the ‘rights of the community.’ Defined now as the ‘global community.’ This is being pitched to you as the new enlightened form of political discourse. You are ‘selfish’ if you insist on your individual rights and freedoms. This is the justification for UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. For the good of the planet. For everyone’s security. For your health. To protect your children. To limit workplace violence. To stop bullying. To protect the ‘rights’ of those in the future.

All of these are laudable ideas but somehow they always result in more restrictive laws that affect everyone. They criminalize everyone. In many towns simple ordinances have been criminalized. What does that mean? If you don’t mow your lawn it’s a violation.

Will your child have a criminal record if he calls another kid a ‘queer?’ Will you be held responsible if your employee shoots someone and you knew he was upset over a breakup with his wife? Will your 15 year old daughter be strip-searched at the airport? Will you lose custody of your 10 year old because he is obese?

Will you be evicted from your apartment because you smoked on your balcony in violation of a local ordinance? Will you be taxed for driving 15 miles to work instead of riding your bike? Will you be fined for watering your vegetable garden? Will your Smart Meter be used to tell advertisers what to sell you? Will your Smart vehicle with remote shut off capability be shut down by someone in your state capitol while you’re driving?

Will your neighbor report you to the Community Oriented Policing Unit of your local police department because you seemed to be acting strangely? Will you be denied the right to use the water in your well? Will you be required to pay triple your original electricity rates because your town has decided to go into the power business (Community Aggregate Power Generation)? Will you be required to donate acres of your ranchland for county open space before you can put a house on it? Will you pay years of property tax without receiving any services for it because Redevelopment debt has crippled your city? Will you be required to do your mandatory volunteering before you can get your child into Little League?

Will you be accused of not caring about the planet if you question Sustainable Development?

Your rights have been balanced. Welcome to the New World Order of the Twenty-first Century.

IN ADDITION TO YOUR APPLICATION FOR A BUILDING PERMIT BEING DENIED, WE INTEND TO CONFISCATE YOUR PROPERTY FOR THE COMMON GOOD!!

OK, WHAT IS U.N. AGENDA 21 AND WHY SHOULD I CARE?

Have you wondered where these terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘Smart Growth’ and ‘high density urban mixed use development’ came from? Doesn’t it seem that about 10 years ago you’d never heard of them and now everything seems to include these buzz words? Is that just a coincidence? That every town and county and state and nation in the world would be changing their land use/planning codes and government policies to align themselves with…what?

First, before I get going, I want to say that yes, I know it really is a small world and we’re all one planet etc. I also know that we have a government of the people, by the people and for the people, and that as cumbersome as that can be sometimes (Donald Rumsfeld said that the Chinese have it easy; they don’t have to ask their people if they agree. And Bush Junior said that it would be great to have a dictator as long as he was the dictator), we have a three branch government and the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and self-determination. This is one of the reasons why people want to come to the US, right? We don’t have Tiananmen Square here, generally speaking (yes, I remember Kent State--not the same, and yes, an outrage.) So I’m not against making certain issues a priority, such as mindful energy use, alternative energy sponsorship, recycling/reuse, and sensitivity to all living creatures.

But then you have UN Agenda 21. What is it?

Considering its policies are woven into all of the General Plans of the cities and counties in the United States, it’s important for people to know where these policies are coming from. While many support the United Nations for its peacemaking efforts, few know that it has very specific land use policies that it wants implemented in every city, county, state and nation. The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development, which has its basis in Communitarianism. By now, most Americans have heard of sustainable development but are largely unaware of Agenda 21; the agenda for the twenty-first century.

In a nutshell, the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any of the decision making in the hands of private property owners. It is assumed that people are not good stewards of their land and the government will do a better job if it is in control. Individual rights in general are to give way to the needs of communities as determined by a globalist governing body. Moreover, people should be rounded up off of the land and packed into human settlements or islands of human habitation, as they are called in the UN Agenda 21 documents, close to employment centers and transportation. Another program, called the Wildlands Project, spells out how most of the land is to be set aside for non-humans. In anticipation of our objections to such plans, our civil rights will be dissolved.

UN Agenda 21 cites the affluence of Americans as being a major problem which needs to be corrected. It calls for lowering the standard of living for Americans so that the people in poorer countries will have more; a redistribution of wealth. Although people around the world aspire to achieve the levels of prosperity we have in our country, and will risk their lives to get here, Americans are cast in a very negative light and will be taken down to a condition closer to average in the world. Only then will there be social justice which is a cornerstone of the UN Agenda 21 plan.

UN Agenda 21 policies date back to the 1970’s but it got its real start in 1992 at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro when President Bush signed onto it along with the leaders of 178 other countries. Because it is a ‘soft law’ it did not have to be ratified by the Congress. The following year President Clinton began to implement it by creating the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD). Made up of cabinet level government officials, captains of industry (including Ken Lay of Enron), and non-profit groups such as the Sierra Club, one of the first tasks of the PCSD was to give a multi-million dollar grant to the American Planning Association to design a legislative guidebook to be used as a blueprint for every city, county, and state in the United States in order to implement UN Agenda 21. This document, called Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change, took seven years to complete, and a full nine years to arrive at the final version. The guidebook, and it’s not just a guidebook but a blueprint, contains sample legislation, ordinances, rules, regulations and statutes to be incorporated into the General Plans of every single city and county in the United States. By 2002 every planning department and every local, state, and federal department that governs land use had a copy and was implementing the practices. Every university, every college, every junior college, private school and teaching institution in our nation was using Growing Smart in its curriculum. Sound familiar? Growing Smart is Smart Growth.

A non-governmental organization called the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives, ICLEI, is tasked with carrying out the goals of UN Agenda 21 locally. Over 600 cities and counties in the U.S. are members. The costs are paid by taxpayers.

Ok, you say, interesting, but I don’t see how that really affects me. Here are a few ways:

No matter where you live, I’ll bet that there have been hundreds of condos built or planned in the center of your town recently. Over the last ten years there has been a ‘planning revolution’ across the US. It was the implementation of Growing Smart. Your commercial, industrial, and multi-residential land was rezoned to ‘mixed use.’ Nearly everything that got approvals for development was designed the same way: ground floor retail with two or three stories of residential above. Mixed use. Very hard to finance for construction, and very hard to manage since it has to have a high density of people in order to justify the retail. A lot of it is empty and most of the ground floor retail is empty too. High bankruptcy rate.

So what?

Most of your towns provided funding and/or infrastructure development for these private projects. They used Redevelopment Agency funds. Your money. Specifically, your property taxes. Notice how there’s very little money in your General Funds now, and most of that is going to pay Police and Fire? Your street lights are off, your parks are shaggy, your roads are pot-holed, your county hospitals are closing. The money that should be used for these things is diverted into the Redevelopment Agency for 30 years. It’s the only agency in government that can float a bond without a vote of the people. And they did that, and now you’re paying off those bonds for the next 30 to 45 years with your property taxes. Did you know that?

So, what does this have to do with Agenda 21?

Redevelopment is a tool used to further the Agenda 21 vision of remaking America’s cities. With redevelopment, cities have the right to take property by eminent domain---against the will of the property owner, and give it or sell it to a private developer. By declaring an area of town ‘blighted’ (and in some cities over 90% of the city area has been declared blighted) the property taxes in that area are diverted away from the General Fund. This constriction of available funds is impoverishing the cities, forcing them to offer less and less services, and reducing your standard of living. They’ll be telling you that it’s better, however, since they’ve put in nice street lights and colored paving downtown. The money gets redirected into the Redevelopment Agency and handed out to favored developers building low income housing and mixed use. Smart Growth. Cities have had thousands of condos built in the redevelopment areas and are telling you that you are terrible for wanting your own yard, for wanting privacy, for not wanting to be dictated to by a Condo Homeowner’s Association Board, for being anti-social, for not going along to get along, for not moving into a cramped overpriced apartment downtown where they can use your property taxes for paying off that huge bond debt. But it’s not working, and you don’t want to move in there. So they have to make you. Read on.

Human habitation, as it is referred to now, is restricted to lands within the Urban Growth Boundaries of the city. Only certain building designs are permitted. Rural property is more and more restricted in what uses can be on it. Although counties say that they support agricultural uses, eating locally produced food, farmer’s markets, etc, in fact there are so many regulations restricting water and land use (there are scenic corridors, inland rural corridors, baylands corridors, area plans, specific plans, redevelopment plans, huge fees, fines) that farmers are losing their lands altogether. County roads are not being paved. The push is for people to get off of the land, become more dependent, come into the cities. To get out of the suburbs and into the cities. Out of their private homes and into condos. Out of their private cars and onto their bikes.

Bikes. What does that have to do with it? I like to ride my bike and so do you. So what? Bicycle advocacy groups are very powerful now. Advocacy. A fancy word for lobbying, influencing, and maybe strong-arming the public and politicians. What’s the connection with bike groups? National groups such as Complete Streets, Thunderhead Alliance, and others, have training programs teaching their members how to pressure for redevelopment, and training candidates for office. It’s not just about bike lanes; it’s about remaking cities and rural areas to the ‘sustainable model.’ High density urban development without parking for cars is the goal. They call them ‘Transit Villages.’ This means that whole towns need to be demolished and rebuilt in the image of sustainable development. Bike groups, often dominated by testosterone-laden zealots, are being used as the ‘shock troops’ for this plan.

What plan? We’re losing our homes since this recession/depression began, and many of us could never afford those homes to begin with. We got cheap money, used whatever we had to squeak into those homes, and now some of us lost them. We were lured, indebted, and sunk. Whole neighborhoods are empty in some places. Some are being bulldozed. Cities cannot afford to extend services outside of their core areas. Slowly, people will not be able to afford single family homes. Will not be able to afford private cars. Will be more dependent. More restricted. More easily watched and monitored.

This plan is a whole life plan. It involves the educational system, the energy market, the transportation system, the governmental system, the health care system, food production, and more. The plan is to restrict your choices, limit your funds, narrow your freedoms, and take away your voice. One of the ways is by using the Delphi Technique to ‘manufacture consensus.’ Another is to infiltrate community groups or actually start neighborhood associations with hand-picked ‘leaders’. Another is to groom and train future candidates for local offices. Another is to sponsor non-governmental groups that go into schools and train children. Another is to offer federal and private grants and funding for local programs that further the agenda. Another is to educate a new generation of land use planners to require New Urbanism. Another is to convert factories to other uses, introduce energy measures that penalize manufacturing, and set energy consumption goals to pre-1985 levels. Another is to allow unregulated immigration in order to lower standards of living and drain local resources.

Everything that has happened was meant to happen by your government.

LET’S DIG A LITTLE DEEPER

The three cornerstones of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development are Economy, Ecology, and Social Equity, sometimes called the Three E’s.

Economic collapse creates a chain of events, but on a micro level (county, city) there is a marked reduction in revenue for maintenance of services. Loss of services to outlying areas means, for example, roads not being maintained to rural and suburban areas. Roads not being maintained to those areas, schools not being supported in those areas, law enforcement/fire/social services not being supported in those areas means a gradual movement into the denser city centers. Add to that the increased cost of gasoline (manipulated), and the higher cost of energy (manipulated) to heat and cool statistically larger homes, and you have more pressure to leave rural and suburban areas. Reduction of energy usage is key. Smart Growth/New Urbanism in Redevelopment Areas is the supposed answer: smaller units, attached condos, little or no parking, few private cars. More eyes on the street. Redevelopment projects are one implementation arm of the UN plan, and include rezoning of huge sections of your cities to Smart Growth zones. This physical manifestation of UN Agenda 21 is social engineering paid for with your property tax dollars. These areas then have their property taxes diverted away from your services and into the pockets of a few developers and bond brokers for decades. Result? Bankrupt cities and counties.

In addition to these factors, ecologically motivated regulation makes rural/suburban development prohibitive. From stream/creek/ditch protection to watershed protection, to bayland/inland/rural corridor prohibitions, to increased species protection (lists are growing), the use of land is greatly limited. Water well monitoring and loss of water rights reduce the opportunity for living outside of cities. Wildlands programs that prohibit roads and trails into rural areas while supposedly protecting them with conservation easements increase the loss of our food source independence. The sale of development rights to Agricultural Land Trusts that restrict farmers and ranchers from using their lands and therefore make it impossible to farm for more than one more generation endanger our ability to feed ourselves.

Add to this the pressure from ICLEI Climate Protection Campaigns to reduce our energy usage to pre-1985 levels, and increased regulations on industry and you have the perfect storm for loss of jobs and greater dependence on other countries for goods. The push for neighborhood gardens and urban gardens is a manipulation. You can’t grow enough food to do more than provide a minor supplement to your purchased food, and most people are not farmers. Dedication, knowledge, inexpensive water, good quality soil not contaminated with lead (as is most urban soil), and sufficient land to provide economies of scale are required to provide food. Otherwise you’re just playing. As the population becomes more and more urbanized and less able to provide food or necessary products, more people will be dependent on the government for housing, food, and other basic necessities. Government itself becomes dependent on grants and loans with requirements attached. In this way policy-makers are influenced and pressured by the corporatocracy. Public/private partnerships favor some businesses over others and completely unbalance the playing field. Independent businesses go bankrupt. Poverty works its way into the middle class.

Social equity, another cornerstone of Agenda 21 comes in here. As a major leveler, the loss of money, land, food, and energy independence will bring the US into ‘social equity’ with the poorer countries. This is a goal of Agenda 21. In 1976 the UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat I) stated in its preamble that ‘private landownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice…Public control of land use is therefore indispensible.’ Think about the implications of that when we’re discussing eminent domain, land use restrictions, and conservation easements. You might have thought that social equity would mean that the poor would be raised up. Nope. There are elements of the social equity concept that block development of ‘dirty industry’ or anything that would be ‘bad for the community’ in a low income area. Low income areas should not be viewed as a dumping ground for pollution. Yes, I agree. So do you, probably. But it’s the Green Mask. Behind that is the removal of ALL industry from all areas. The only thing being built in low income areas is low income housing (with redevelopment funds.) Warehousing of the poor is the result. Health will suffer, presumably health care will suffer, and nutrition will suffer. Psychological problems, stress from living in tight Smart Growth areas with other un- or underemployed people, and crime will result. Community Oriented Policing (under the Department of Justice) will encourage, if not require, people to watch their neighbors and report suspicious activity. More activity will be identified as ‘crime’--such as obesity, smoking, drinking when you have a drinking problem, name calling, leaving lights on, neglect (in someone’s perception) of children, elderly, and pets, driving when you could ride a bike, breaking a curfew, and failure to do mandatory volunteering. The ‘community’ will demand more law enforcement to restore order, and more rules and regulations will ensue. The lines between government and non-governmental groups will blur more and more as unelected local groups make policy decisions using the Delphi Technique to manufacture consensus. The Chinese and Russian models are instructive in what you can expect under Communitarianism. Read Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, and Alexsander Solzhenitsen’s The Gulag Archipelago for real world examples. The War on Terror is a Communitarian plan designed to terrorize YOU.

You can see that the groundwork for this has been laid and is being implemented throughout the nation. When you create deep dependence and then withdraw assistance the result is chaos and poverty.

Propaganda infuses our culture with messages that there are just a few winners and many losers; that we are killing the earth and time is running out; that prosperity is an anachronism and detrimental to life; that individual freedom is selfish and injures those who are less free. These messages are crafted to shame and pressure you, and to create a sense of urgency that impairs your ability to reason clearly.

IN THE BEGINNING

Although there are even earlier indications that the United Nations sought to control land use and manage populations, (1976—Habitat I), the precursor to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit was a similar meeting of the same commission in 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (called the Brundtland Commission,) that initially defined the term ‘sustainable development.’ In its ‘Our Common Future’ report to the United Nations, the Brundtland Commission defined sustainable development as:

‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’

All that remained was to state that our current activities and means of living were ‘compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ and then decide what to do about it.

After ‘Our Common Future’ was presented to the UN General Assembly in 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission) was tasked with designing strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000. At the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Commission, (chaired by Maurice Strong), came back with Agenda 21. There is no aspect of our lives that is not covered by this document. The forty chapters are divided into four sections:

Section I: Social and Economic Dimensions

Section II: Conservation and Management of Resources for Development

Section III: Strengthening the Role of Major Groups

Section IV: Means of Implementation

You can read it yourself on the United Nations website. Just put UN Agenda 21 in a search engine. Some of the most important information can be found in Chapter 7—Human Settlements, which is the foundation for ‘Sustainable Communities’ and in the last chapters where the technology and methods for implementation are discussed.

The philosophical basis for much of UN Agenda 21 legislation and regulation is the Precautionary Principle. It’s from the 1992 Rio de Janiero Earth Summit and is Principle 15. The definition:

The precautionary principle states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action.

It’s sort of a guilty-until-proven-innocent thing. Calling it a principle makes it a source of law in the European Union. A fun fact is that the EU hasn’t formally defined it but they use it to craft their laws on food, technological development, trade, environmental and consumer protections. It is compulsory. Here in the US we call it the precautionary ‘approach’ so as not to codify it as law, but it is still being used to develop policy. How do you like that? In the absence of proof that something is harmful you’re supposed to prove that it isn’t. This is serious—think about climate change/global warming, or species impacts.

BRINGING IT HOME

William Clinton was elected President in November, 1992, and six months later he issued Executive Order #12852 which created the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD). It first met in the summer of 1993; and continued until 1999. The members of the PCSD included Cabinet Secretaries for Transportation, Agriculture, Education, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration, Energy, Interior, and Defense. Representing business were CEOs for Pacific Gas and Electric, Enron (Ken Lay), BP Amoco, and Dow Chemical, among others. Environmental organizations rounded out the balance with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, World Resources Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and the Environmental Defense Fund being the most notable.

The PCSD immediately began laying the groundwork for implementing Agenda 21 in the United States. The goal was to change public policy to bring it into alignment with the new agenda for the twenty-first century. The PCSD formalized its recommendations in ‘Sustainable America—A New Consensus.’ We have never been the same since.

CONSENSUS: NEUTRALIZING ENEMIES

One of the elements of a new rule of law is the creation of a new language to go with it. Called ‘jargon,’ this new vocabulary has a different meaning for those in the know from what you would understand from just seeing or hearing those words. Nearly every profession has its jargon, but the implementers of UN Agenda 21 rely on the obscurity of their definitions to keep you from becoming alarmed.

Livable. Walkable. Vibrant. Bikeable. Consensus. Conversation. Progressive. Community. Diversity. Carbon Footprint. Smart. Vision. Green. Stakeholders. Regional. Sustainable. Buzz words and slogans are used as tags to manipulate you. When you hear jargon words like this you are being conditioned to support and accept the project or plan they’re attached to without questioning it. These words, by their regular usage in the media and implied acceptance by your peers, tell you that something is popular. They are designer buzz words. Jargon that has been created to help you feel that you belong to the masses, that you are doing something positive and good, and that you’ll gain acceptance by participating. The best public relations people in the world are working on these terms, just for you.

The word ‘consensus,’ for example, is defined in my dictionary as “An opinion or position reached by a group as a whole.” In the PCSD’s list of vital elements to incorporate into their recommendations they included this statement:

‘We need a new collaborative decision process that leads to better decisions, more rapid change, and more sensible use of human, natural, and financial resources in achieving our goals.’

A new collaborative decision process. The new definition for consensus is the neutralization of expressed opposition.

In the old way of doing things, the democratic way, an issue is put before the voters and they vote on it directly, or they have a representative who reviews the issues, debates them publicly, and then votes. If the voters are not satisfied with the outcome, they can initiate a referendum or vote out the representative.

‘Sustainable America—A New Consensus’ does not allow for actual dissent. There can be no opportunity for failure in implementing Agenda 21. In fact the Cabinet Secretaries reported that they could implement approximately two thirds of the PCSD’s recommendations administratively. However, it is not desirable that you notice that you are not being given a choice in the most important issues of your life, so you are given the illusion that you are making decisions for yourself. As with the earlier example of the glasses of water and milk, this principle of taking two opposing points of view and mixing them to render a third does not in fact represent your opinion. It might be said that it doesn’t represent the ‘other’ side either, but since the ‘other’ side is running the meeting you can be sure that the manipulation will result in their predetermined outcome. You’ll find that the water never gets into the pitcher at all. The real meaning of consensus is to take away your voice and leave you feeling as if you are the only one who has some problem with the results. The President’s Council on Sustainable Development incorporated the Delphi Technique into its recommendations so that ‘more rapid change’ could be imposed on you through clever manipulation.

THE DELPHI TECHNIQUE

Developed by the RAND Corporation as a Cold War mind control technique, Delphi is used to channel a group of people to accept a point of view that is imposed on them while convincing them that it was their idea. In the 1970s and ‘80s, it was used to convince land owners of the merits of accepting General Plan maps. Delphi can be used on any group, from just one person to the entire world. Trained facilitators present a range of choices to a group but have tailored them to direct the outcome. This is most often done in public meetings, called ‘visioning meetings,’ put on by your city or county to get your opinion on Your Town 2020 or 2035. Money for these programs often comes from federal agencies (members of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development) in the form of grants to your local government. The meetings are advertised as an opportunity for you to give your input to an exciting new plan for the redesign of your city center for the future. You’ll usually see it as a specific plan for a redevelopment project or a regional transportation plan that involves housing and land use restrictions. Delphi is used in school board meetings, in trainings, at neighborhood association meetings, and other places where the organizers want to give the appearance that they have listened to community opinion and incorporated it into their plan. By the way, you’ll never hear the word ‘Delphi’—they will never acknowledge that they’re doing it.

The key thing to know about this is that of course you have no input. Only comments and observations that support the pre-approved plan will be supported. All others will be written on a big pad of paper and discarded later. The illusion of public buy-in is all that is needed. The organizers can later point to the fact that they held a public meeting, a certain number of residents attended, public comment was taken, and the community approved the plan. The facilitator is often a private consultant who has been professionally trained in running and managing a meeting. This consultant has been hired by your city to fulfill the requirement that the project has been seen and supported by its citizens---it’s YOUR plan. If the project is a controversial one the city may have put out the call for non-profit groups, neighborhood associations, city boards and commissions, and city employees to send members to seed the audience and outnumber potential opponents. This is war. On those few occasions when the majority of the attendees object to the planned outcome, the facilitator will close the meeting and reschedule it for another time and place. You are experiencing the new consensus.

So let’s see what goes on in a Delphi meeting. As you come in the door you’ll be asked to sign in. You’ll be given a name tag and, depending on the meeting type, you’ll either sit at tables or you’ll be in an auditorium. A brief overview of the project will be given and no questions will be allowed. The facilitator may try to establish the demographics of the attendees by asking you to raise your hand if you’re between 18-25, 26-35 etc., your race, and gender. Now the meeting begins in earnest.

Speakers will include government officials, sometimes your mayor or council people, representatives from non-profit organizations, and local business persons with an interest in the outcome, such as engineers, architects, and planners. The meeting is on a tight time schedule and there are few opportunities for questions. What questions are permitted are usually answered briefly or deflected to ‘later.’ The facilitator has produced attractive power point slides, and colored hand-outs with lots of photos of middle class people recreating among sun-lit multi-story buildings with wide sidewalks lined with bistro tables. You notice that there is no manufacturing. In this pleasant utopia there are few cars, lots of high speed trains, blue skies, and bikes. Lots of bikes. Open space parks but no private yards. Shallow porches that face the street. Buildings constructed right behind the sidewalk and touching their neighbors.

You may be shown a set of maps of your town and told to color in areas where you’d like to see the pastel utopia instead of what’s there now. By the way, often the property owners in the specific project area have deliberately not been notified about this meeting, and they absolutely will not have been sought out to attend. This meeting is for the ‘public,’ meaning anyone can attend from anywhere and give their opinion about the vision.

As people are happily scribbling away with their crayons and gold stars like kindergarteners, they are unaware that a large percentage of the group has already been briefed on the project and instructed to manage their table. Yes, there are ‘shills’ at every table. In the larger meetings they may identify themselves as being part of the organizing team, and they will run the table openly. While the unsuspecting real people are chatting, the table monitors are observing their behavior. Who is argumentative, who is docile, who can be triggered to cause a scene, who can be counted on to support the project. Neighborhood ‘leaders’ who cooperate are identified for cultivation later. They will be used to start neighborhood associations or encouraged to dominate existing ones.

When the meeting is going smoothly you’ll never notice the obvious. That you haven’t been given any real choices, and that all of the printed material shows the project just as it will be when finalized regardless of anything you might say. At your table you might say something like “Hey, I don’t like the idea of narrowing Main Street to two lanes.” But you’ll either be ignored or several of the people at the table will team up to show you that it’s best for the community and don’t you want your town to be friendly for bikes and pedestrians? You might say “How can the Fire Department get through there if you put a median down Center Street?” You’ll be told that it has already been approved by the Fire Department and your comment will be written down to be thrown out later.

What happens if you dare to speak out? Communitarianism is at the heart of consensus meetings. A vital element of Communitarianism is the use of social pressure to make you conform. Shame. The point is to create a climate of isolation in the meeting for those who do not agree. The idea of dissent is too scary, too exposed, and too anti-social for you to brave ridicule and the disapproval of your peers. So if you do dare to speak out you will be ignored, laughed at, maligned, shamed, boo’d or shouted down. Individual table monitors may goad a person they’ve identified as ‘liable to make a scene’ to loudly agree with you in order to make you appear to have a fringe point of view. The facilitator may allow this bit of chaos to continue for a minute so that the tension can be relieved and your question forgotten.

When the meeting is over you’ll be thanked for your input and leave feeling that maybe you’re the only one who doesn’t like the plan or who felt manipulated. You might even decide that you’re not going back to one of those meetings since you didn’t really feel heard, and besides it took hours of your evening. Maybe you have a nagging bit of shame that you were visioning on someone else’s property, someone who wasn’t there and couldn’t protest that they like their property just the way it is. Maybe you don’t want to think about what it would take to make that vision real. But you shrug your shoulders and walk to your car feeling that you’ve been a good citizen and participated in a community event. You’ve been Delphi’d.

HOW COULD ALL OF THIS BE GOING ON WITHOUT MY KNOWLEDGE OR APPROVAL?

You don’t get asked to vote on covert activities in your government. Treaties and agreements, like United Nations Agenda 21, the Agenda for the 21st Century, are made and you won’t hear about it. Maybe there’s a presidential signing statement that can supersede the Congress, or maybe that isn’t even necessary.

Just because you didn’t notice, does that mean it hasn’t happened? If it’s in the paper in the second section on page 3 on one day in the year were you informed? If the county held 15 meetings on the formation of the General Plan (with full compliance with UN Agenda 21) and you stayed home and watched TV or went to 15 meetings where they never mentioned Agenda 21 does that mean that it doesn’t exist? If you don’t put all of the different restrictions, regulations, propaganda movies, books, radio, magazines and TV together, does that mean it’s not happening? The irony is that UN Agenda 21 mandates more citizen involvement but does it by creating so many boards, commissions, regional agencies, non-profits, meetings, and programs that it is impossible to stay on top of what is happening. So we become, necessarily, more fragmented, less of a neighborhood, exhausted and isolated because we can’t keep up. The so-called citizen involvement is dictated by phony neighborhood groups with paid lobbyists and facilitators running them. The boards and commissions are chosen based on ‘team players’ or shills selected to push through an end game by running over the few actual unconnected citizens on them. These groups are the ‘pre-screening’ groups for candidates for public office. They are the ones who get donations at election time. It’s doubtful that anyone will get on the ballot who doesn’t play ball. Then we’re told that WE came up with the new regulations.

We’re too burnt out to fight on more than one issue. We may be victimized by our government regulations but since it’s done one project/property/business at a time we seldom get the chance to join together. Or we may be afraid that we’ll be targeted by government, local groups, or the newspaper if we stand up. The less of us who own small businesses and private property, the less of us there are to care or notice when un-just decisions are made. So a crashed economy where we lose our homes and businesses supports UN Agenda 21.

You never hear about Agenda 21/Sustainable Development on Conservative Radio. You never hear about it on Liberal Radio either. You don’t see it on FOX. You don’t see it on MSNBC. They won’t talk about it. Republicans and Democrats won’t break the silence. They’re both in favor of it. Four presidents supported it. Two Bushes, Clinton and Obama. When we bring it up we are either called conspiracy theorists, or told that it doesn’t exist.

But it does. And they know it. So it’s a race now. You’re in it. The race to expose it. To educate your friends, business associates, relatives, and neighbors---to get the word out. People know that something is happening but they can’t put a name on it, and they may not realize that it is all connected. But you do. You might wonder why they bother to ask your opinion at meetings. Why don’t those guys at the top just push it through without Delphi? Because they don’t want to remove the Green Mask. They’d have to acknowledge that there IS a Green Mask, and that would incite civil unrest. Take a look at the European Union for the results of ‘austerity measures.’ Riots. Martial law and increased domestic surveillance. The show of force is intimidating, but it’s also a view of what’s behind the mask.

Another reason why you may not have heard of UN Agenda 21 before is because opposition to it is often conflated with anti-Semitism. Calling it a ‘Zionist plot’ is absurd considering that Zionism is an ultra-nationalist movement that is completely opposed to the dissolution of national boundaries (Israel is about the size of Vancouver Island and slightly larger than New Jersey). If you’re approaching it from that angle I urge you to drop those attitudes. It is not productive, not realistic (you could say it’s a Protestant plot, would that make sense?), and feeds right into the dialectic that pits us against one another. The mainstream media can then refer to it as ‘fringe’ and that justifies their lack of reportage. Demonizing all liberals is foolish and wrong. Don’t play the alienation game with half of the US. We need to work together.

Familiarize yourself with Communitarianism. It’s the political philosophy behind all of this. It states that the individual’s rights are a threat to the global community. Everyone is an individual, so we are all a threat to the global community. Our rights to property ownership, to personal mobility and life choices, to feed and clothe ourselves, are a danger to the global community. So we must be rationed. We must be controlled. We must be watched. We must be regulated, restricted, and balanced. Our individual rights must be balanced against those unnamed rights granted to the world community by the United Nations, as codified by Agenda 21/Sustainable Development.

Communitarianism is based on a paradigm: A problem is created. A solution is proposed. Struggle between the ‘two sides’ produces an outcome that is a ‘third way’. This so-called Third Way would never have been agreed to except that now it is called a solution to a problem. That didn’t exist. And now the ‘solution’ is the new ‘normal.’

Corporatocracy. Government by corporation. Public-private partnerships. Tax credits to corporations. Non-profits that are also corporations but have a green face. ‘BP IS GREEN.’ It doesn’t matter what political party they profess to support; they take turns funding both sides. It’s UN Agenda 21. Administered in your town by directives and training by the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives—ICLEI, and its many partners.

Everyone is being impacted by UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. It doesn’t come with flashing lights and a label so you have to be sharp and put it together. Since your government uses different names for all of the programs (it’s alphabet soup), you don’t recognize that there is a connection when you hear, for example:

Your 10-year old child won’t be automatically going to the middle school in your neighborhood but has to apply for admission. S/he may end up across town where you’ll never attend parent/teacher night, never become friends with other parents, and not volunteer in the classroom (and hear the lesson) because you can’t make it home from your job in time.

Your business is being subjected to a Business Improvement Tax by your local government and you have to pay it even though your customers now have to put money in the meters, pay huge parking tickets, and can go to the Mall with free parking.

You inherited a piece of land from your folks but now you find out that it’s impossible to build anything on it because the County has an ordinance that won’t allow you to install a septic system on your 40 acres. And the Biotic Resource Corridor that it’s in won’t allow development anyway. And besides you’re in the ‘viewshed’ so bicyclists can look at your land as they ride a nearby trail, and a building would ruin that.

You thought it was too good to be true when you and your husband were able to buy that nice three bedroom house in the suburbs, but the mortgage broker was really excited about the interest-only loan and the payments were affordable. Now you see that you were ignorant about how the loan was structured and, along with most of your new neighbors, you’ve lost everything. You’re hoping to get into one of the affordable housing units by the train station.

You’re trying to quit smoking since you feel like a pariah everywhere you go, but it’s just so tough that you finally agree with your doctor that the best thing is to go on Zoloft or Wellbutrin so you can get through it. Now you seem to be floating through the day with a cozy blanket around your brain, and you can see why your wife takes Prozac.

You don’t believe that you’re being ‘forced’ out of your private vehicle but then you notice that even though Libya produces only 2% of the world’s oil your gasoline cost just jumped up 20% since Gaddafi started shouting. You also have noticed that there’s talk about a ‘Vehicle Miles Traveled Tax’ in your town council that would charge you for long commutes. You moved there to buy a house but the market has crashed and you’re not going anywhere for a while.

You, of course, were an avid fan of the Smart Train idea and voted for the 1/4 cent sales tax hike in perpetuity, but now the train is a distant hope since they underestimated costs, and the money went to repair the tracks (for freight) and big pensions for staff. All of those Smart Growth dwellers by the tracks are now going to hear freight train whistles, smell the fumes six feet away, and risk injury at grade crossings.

You’re sick of being called an “Oil Addict” and can’t understand why innovations for energy efficient vehicles have never been funded by your government. Until now, when you can pay $40,000 for a compact that gets 35 miles to the gallon.

You’re raising your kids on the farm you grew up on but there are so many regulations and rules that you spend hours a day filing out paperwork and complying with new laws that you didn’t know about until you violated them. Costs for feed and seed and processing are increasing faster than you can manage, and without your wife’s job you’d be sunk. You still haven’t paid your brother and sister for the farm---you inherited it jointly from your dad---and now with taxes going up you’re not sure you can keep it unless you sell a conservation easement to the Open Space District. You look at your three kids, though, and wonder how they’ll be able to pay the inheritance tax when you die and there are no more conservation easement rights to sell.

You’re getting ready to graduate from high school and you’d like to go to a state university but you need a 4.2 or higher and besides, you haven’t done nearly enough volunteering for non-profits like your friends have. You figure you’re going to have to take a year off and serve in the Peace Corps or Community Corps, or you’ll never get into a good school.

You came home from work and noticed that your energy company had installed a SMART METER without asking you, and now you’ve heard that they can shut it off remotely, monitor your use, reduce your allotment, and generally mess with you any time. Your brother’s kids sleep in a room right next to the whole bank of meters at his condominium complex and they’re complaining of headaches and nausea.

You’ve gone from saying you’d never bother to learn computers to checking your email every half hour, and your kids never look up from their I-whatever when you talk to them. Their classrooms are so crammed with kids that even you think remote learning might be a good idea, and, hey, textbooks on-line should save money---they can update them, change them, change history with a click of the mouse---Great!

You just came back from a vacation in Mexico and noticed the retina recognition and fingerprint readers at every customs officer’s station, and it made you nervous. Of course they’re not using them on everyone yet, but how long will it be? You’ve also read that they have miniature drone spy hummingbirds that can fly eight miles, in and out of windows, and record sound and video! Who? Your government. What else do they have? Do they know you’re reading this?

You go to a neighborhood association meeting out of some sense of civic duty and see that they’re electing officers to the association. You’d like to nominate your neighbor but you can’t because the by-laws say that any candidate has to be OK’d by the board first. You try to make a comment but you’re boo’d by your ‘neighbors’ in bike helmets and spandex. It’s clear that they have a candidate who will be elected and claim to speak for the entire neighborhood.

The shocking truth is that they don’t just Delphi meetings; your entire government and legal system is being Delphi’d and is transitioning to government by ‘consensus.’

This is not a left/right issue. No American wants increased domestic surveillance, corporate takeover of our political, legal, and governmental systems, restrictions on free speech, and the enormous waste of our resources through endless war.

Call it Smart Growth. Call it Sustainable Development. Call it Form Based Zoning. Call it Capacity Building. Call it Consensus Building. Call it Green Building. Call it Wildlands. Call it Homelands. Call it Outcome Based Education. Hey, it’s not “What is Agenda 21”, it’s “What isn’t Agenda 21?” It’s not Republican, and it’s not Democrat. It’s not Libertarian, and it’s not Independent. It’s COMMUNITARIAN. The new law of the land.

FROM INTERNATIONAL TO LOCAL IN ONE EASY STEP

It’s time for the big picture. First we’ll look at the story and then we’ll look at what they’re doing with the story. Let’s not worry about whether the story is true or not at this point. In my opinion, it would have been created regardless—it’s just so useful!

Here’s The Green Mask Story:

We discovered recently that the planet is heating up fast. The ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. Biodiversity is threatened. There are too many people. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas contributing to the rise in temperature. Our use of oil and natural gas combined with development in the world’s rural areas is intensifying global warming/climate change. We have to change, and fast. Time is running out. Celebrities, officials, and all sane people agree that the planet is in danger and we are the cause.

Enter the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives—ICLEI. Created in 1990 as a non-governmental organization to implement Agenda 21 locally around the world, ICLEI (pronounced ick-ly) brings the international into your town. According to its international website, iclei.org, ‘members come from 70 different countries worldwide and represent over 569,885,000 people.’ Surprising that you’ve never heard of it, isn’t it? It is a lobbying and policy consultant designed to influence and change local governmental policies related to all aspects of human life. You’ve noticed that ICLEI was founded before the 1992 Rio Earth Summit where the formal precepts of Agenda 21 were introduced to the world. ICLEI sells trainings to governments, sets up climate adaptation programs, measures and monitors community greenhouse gas emissions and more, for a fee. Recently, ICLEI changed its name so that you wouldn’t notice that it’s an international organization. It’s now called ICLEI--Local Governments for Sustainability. Here’s what it says on ICLEI’s own website:www.icleiusa.org

ICLEI: Connecting Leaders

Connect. Innovate. Accelerate. Solve.

The pace of global environmental change, the degradation of ecosystem services globally and the overshoot of the human footprint on Earth require an acceleration of local efforts. Even if all 1,100+ local governments forming ICLEI’s membership performed in the most advanced manner, and if we were to extrapolate these efforts into the future, those valiant efforts alone would not reach a sustainable level of resource consumption and pollution in communities - better known as the ecological footprint of cities.

Experts confirm what all of us feel: We must act more rapidly and collaboratively and strive for more radical solutions

To accelerate action, ICLEI invites to the table leaders from a wide array of sectors who all have a stake in urban sustainability: Local governments, regional and national governments, international agencies, financing institutions, non-profits, academia and the business community. They are mayors and entrepreneurs, scientists and agency heads, ministers and CEOs, strategists and organizational leaders. They are innovators, decision makers, agenda setters and agents of change.

That about covers it. Did you feel the sense of urgency, the panic, in that message? That is a tactic of UN Agenda 21. To keep you panicked, nervous, unfocused, anxious, and scattered. It’s a fact that people don’t think clearly when they are in panic mode. Confusion and information-overload are a part of the Delphi Technique. ‘Radical solutions’ and ‘accelerated action’ are required to survive. Notice that even if every local government in ICLEI performed in the most advanced manner into the future that it would not be enough to reach a sustainable level. Feel that panic? Not buying it? Well then, let’s pass some legislation to make you buy it. But first let’s see what you’re buying. Again, from www.icleiusa.org:

What ICLEI Members Receive:

- Clean Air & Climate Protection (CACP) Software and training

- Tools, guidebooks, case studies, and other resources, including a library of local government sample ordinances, policies, resolutions, and other documents

- Webinar trainings and regional workshops

- State, regional, national and international peer networking opportunities

- Technical and programmatic expertise and assistance from our regional staff

- Regional, state, and federal funding updates, as well as federal and international policy analyses

- Annual training and leadership events

- Recognition and awards

- Representation at international meetings

You’re sharper already, aren’t you? You spotted the library of local government sample ordinances, policies, resolutions, and ‘tools.’ Sound familiar? And by the way, this can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The big one here is the ‘Clean Air and Climate Protection’ software and training. That’s the key. Once your city or county signs onto membership with ICLEI (paid for with your tax dollars) or becomes a Climate Resilient city and makes a commitment, the trap is clamped down on you. You are on the conveyor belt towards the buzz saw. If you’re really unlucky, one of your government officials will actually be sitting on an ICLEI board, representing your city or county in an international group. In Sonoma County, Supervisor Valerie Brown voted to give an $83,000 no-bid contract to ICLEI to measure greenhouse gases and prepare a protocol. That contract was awarded with no mention of the fact that Valerie Brown also sits on the National Board of ICLEI. I reported her to the California Fair Political Practices Commission for conflict of interest, but they declined to investigate. Here’s what your council or supervisors have committed to by accepting pressure from ICLEI:

- Milestone One: Conduct a Climate Resiliency Study

- Milestone Two: Set Preparedness Goals

- Milestone Three: Develop a Climate Preparedness Plan

- Milestone Four: Publish & Implement Preparedness Plan

- Milestone Five: Monitor & Reevaluate Resiliency

How does all of this fit together? You were in a Delphi meeting where you were told that multi-story housing must be built along bus or rail lines in your town, and that the current design of buildings and streets in your city center is all wrong. You were told that living the rural or suburban lifestyle is bad for the planet, and that you drive too much, eat too much, water your garden too much, use too much energy, and are destroying the planet with your selfish attitude. How do they know? Because your city conducted or is in the process of conducting a Climate Resiliency Study to measure your greenhouse gas emissions. Chances are you’re somewhere in that milestone list and the pressure is on. Your city or county’s General Plan has been changed to conform to UN Agenda 21. Remember though, that they want your ‘buy-in’ so that they can say it’s your plan. Why? Because it’s easier when you’re cooperative, and, after all, Revolution is bad for business. Yes, this is a Big Business scheme. The biggest.

The carrot for you, the mule, is that you’ll be saving the planet from imminent disaster if you follow the new rules. And if you don’t want to? The stick. Legislation. We’ll look at legislation a bit later. First let’s look a bit more closely at ICLEI.

You’ve heard the term ‘NGO’ and know it means non-governmental organization. From that you naturally assume that it means non-profit and that it applies to all non-profits. It’s jargon. An NGO is a non-profit corporation that is independent from government control, as was defined in 1945 by the United Nations. Non-profit does not mean that the corporation doesn’t make money, but that surplus money, after salaries and projects are paid, goes back into the corporation, and no tax is paid on the surplus. Chapter 27 of UN Agenda 21 focuses on the role of NGOs in implementing the agenda worldwide. NGOs are used to blur the line between government and the private sector. As governments become less able to maintain staff they will contract out for services with organizations, civil society organizations, which are not accountable to the people. ICLEI is such a group. It has Special Consultative Status to the United Nations, a position held by only handful of the millions of non-profit groups worldwide. Made up of government employees, non-profit environmental and transportation planning groups, and for-profit industries, ICLEI is making legislation and policy in accordance with international law that impacts you. ICLEI is the implementation arm of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. ICLEI fragments into and influences so-called local groups that pressure your government for more regulations.

Does it bother you that a ‘non-governmental’ organization is made up of local governments? It should. It’s a private group holding meetings that are not open to the public. ICLEI, a so-called non-governmental organization, is representing local governments in international UN Climate Conferences. States cannot have a foreign policy—that’s in our constitution. No treaty, alliance, or confederation can be made by states and local entities. ICLEI is receiving federal funding. Federal Internal Revenue audits available online for tax years 2005 and 2006 show that ICLEI received over $1.7 million in 2005 and just over one million in 2006 from these four federal agencies: Commerce, Environmental Protection, International Development, and Agriculture. ICLEI’s federal identification number is 043116623. The IRS Form 990 for tax year 2009 shows that ICLEI had $4,553,618 (over four and a half million dollars) in income. That was for tax year 2009 alone from all sources reportable in the US. Remember that one of the sections of UN Agenda 21 was ‘strengthening the role of major groups?’

You can check the membership list at www.icleiusa.org to see if your municipality is a member, but it’s likely that ICLEI has tentacles into your town even if you don’t see it on the list. The list is out of date online and doesn’t show Cool Mayors, Sustainable Cities, or Cool Counties. Check those too. The STAR program is a new one with ten pilot cities. Here’s what ICLEI says about it:

At ICLEI USA, we have found that educational and policy programs are not enough. Networks and best practices are not enough. Software tools and consulting are not enough. Transformation requires a carefully coordinated, linked up system of political education, professional training and networking, technical support and civic education, and constant performance evaluation and feedback with each local government member over an extended time period. ICLEI has always focused on building that ‘system.’ STAR is designed to leverage each element of the system, and through our network of regional offices we are scaling up capacity to deliver and, together with our members, institute change as a matter of public interest.

ICLEI USA is developing STAR with a number of key partners including the U.S. Green Building Council, the Center for American Progress, and the National League of Cities. In addition, ICLEI USA has enlisted 160 volunteers representing 130 organizations, including 60 cities and 10 counties, state and federal agencies, non-profit organizations, national associations, universities, utilities, and private corporations.

Greenhouse gas emissions are being tracked, measured, and logged by ICLEI. Carbon offset trading, greenhouse gas emission goals, and legal statutes are designed and lobbied for by ICLEI.

Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article, May 23, 2011:

Across America and in Congress, the very existence of climate change continues to be challenged---especially by conservatives. The skeptics are supported by constituents wary of science and concerned about the economic impacts of stepped up regulation. Yet even as the debate rages on, city and state planners are beginning to prepare.

Melissa Stults, the climate director for ICLEI USA, an association of local governments, said that many of the administrations she’s dealing with are following a strategy of ‘discreetly integrating preparedness into traditional planning efforts.’

There’s a lot to refute there—but let’s note that ICLEI is called an association of ‘local’ governments, people who question are mainly ‘conservatives’ ‘wary of science’, and traditional planning is being stealthily changed.

Your city/county has been committed to reducing your carbon dioxide/greenhouse gas emissions. It’s likely that you’ve been committed by your local government in response to legislation passed by your state. You are now REQUIRED to reduce your ‘greenhouse gas emissions’.

In our county, Sonoma County, Northern California, the government has committed to reducing our carbon dioxide output by 25% below 1990 levels by 2015. Four years from now. This is happening across the nation.

Here’s the obvious question: When were Sonoma County carbon dioxide emissions at 25% below 1990 levels? What year? You can’t find that info. Anywhere. How many people were in the county at that time? Don’t know since we don’t know the year, but the county population has grown since 1990. So if we’re talking about per capita reductions and we don’t know what the population was at the time that we were supposedly at 25% below 1990, this goal will place us at a greater percentage than a reduction of 25% on a per capita basis.

It’s about control. The county doesn’t even know what year it’s trying to go back to. The county wasn’t measuring ‘greenhouse gases’ back in the 80’s. Or the 70’s. But their goals will put our farming, our industry, our energy usage, our businesses, our production, and our livelihoods, back at some level in the past. That is just a number to some people, but we don’t know what the consequences will be. What impact will this have on our food production? On our ability to work and continue to be financially independent? Will we be so restricted and regulated that we become totally dependent on the government for our food, housing, and income? Then what? Will we be living in Smart Growth slums? Traveling on buses routed only where we are permitted to go? Restricted to working in our transit villages?

This is the result of policy makers trying to outdo one another, and agencies acting regionally to try and comply with state and federal mandates orchestrated by ICLEI. You are required to comply. What happens if we don’t meet their goals? Let’s look at a sample inventory:

2009 COUNTYWIDE GHG EMISSIONS INVENTORY

Sonoma County’s GHG emissions in 1990: 3.6 million metric tons carbon dioxide (CO2)

Goal of 25% below the 1990 level: 2.7 million metric tons carbon dioxide (CO2)

Sonoma County’s GHG emissions in 2009: 4.28 million metric tons carbon dioxide (CO2)

Source:Sonoma County Water Agency

http://www.sctainfo.org/data.html

If this were enforced in 2009 it would have required a 36.92% reduction in emissions. So what’s next? If you can’t meet their goals? FINES? And if you can’t pay your fines? Tax liens? And if you can’t pay your tax lien? Confiscation of property? Or will they do it by raising your energy costs while rationing you, and establishing tiers where you will pay more if you use more until you’re sitting in the cold?

Did you know? The United Kingdom and much of the United States has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. This was one of President Obama’s campaign promises. What will that mean for you? Are you wondering if your mayor has signed on to the US Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement? Just type that into your search engine. Every single state in the United States has at least one city that has signed onto it—more than 1,050 cities. These are commitments for major energy reductions of up to 25 percent by 2015. To see your city or county’s goals for greenhouse gas reductions go to your search engine and type in ICLEI USA 2009 Annual Report.

I searched for days but was unable to find a chart of the historical greenhouse gas emissions for the United States. I did find this chart that shows historical global carbon dioxide emissions from 1850-2004. It indicates that in around 1945 the emissions began to climb from 5,000 million metric tons to about 29,000 million metric tons in 2004. The year 1990 shows approximately 20,000 million metric tons. If you were to reduce that by 80 percent the result would be 4,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. According to this chart the last time that the world was at that level was…1934.

At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit where the Agenda for the 21st Century was introduced, Chairman Maurice Strong said:

Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.

SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?

How do these rules actually get enacted, and where can you find them? Here’s a question we frequently receive on our website:

Our county (city, village, township, province) is making a Comprehensive Plan now. What is that? Is it related to Agenda 21?

Yes. A Comprehensive Plan is also called a General Plan, and is generally mandated/required by State law. It is a long range plan for the physical development of the jurisdiction that is prepared every twenty years and is usually updated every five years in addition to some occasional amendments. It may be called Your Town 2020 or 2035, or something similar. You get it from your Community Development/Planning Department. You can often find it online, and you should take a long look at it. You may find direct quotes from UN Agenda 21 in the goals section. Remember the Delphi Technique? You’ll recall that it was first used on Americans to get them to accept the idea of mapping their communities and dictating where and what development could occur—General Plans. The law requires specific contents of the General Plan (transportation, biological resources, community development, energy, and our personal favorite; the Socioeconomic Element.

The Socioeconomic Element will generally include: Community Participation (Delphi meetings), Public Safety (Community Oriented Policing), Environmental Justice (curbing or eliminating industry), Child Care (child endangerment/family law), Education (indoctrination), Economy (picking winners and losers), Parks and Recreation (bike lanes).

The 2020 and 2035 General Plans will identify the rights of the community as ‘balancing environmental protection with the needs of present and future residents for housing, jobs, and recreation, and on the need for transportation options to reduce dependence on automobile use.’ (Quote from Marin Countywide Plan--General Plan, Marin County, California.) Note the word “balancing”. That’s a key jargon word for Communitarians. You’ll recall that it means that your individual rights are not as important and will be disregarded for the ‘community’s rights.’

This is the symbol of UN Agenda 21: the interlocking circles of Ecology, Economy, and Social Equity. Where they meet is ‘Sustainable Development.’ This particular image is from the Marin County, California General Plan. Does your General Plan use the UN logo?

The General Plan is the method, the document, the comprehensive design for living that is imposed upon us. It forms the framework for many of the restrictive laws and regulations that strangle opportunity for all but the chosen few. It is a land use plan but it extends far beyond the boundaries of property lines into the life decisions we make. Remember: it is an energy and transportation plan, too.

The General Plan/Comprehensive Plan is adopted by your municipality after lots of Delphi meetings where the public is invited and those who are ‘team players’ and toadies are identified and honored as ‘community leaders’ so that they can speak for you. Those who raise objections are also identified. The General Plan will be used to deny property owners the right to use their land as it was previously zoned.

Here’s how they do it. You may already know that if the city or county is going to change your zoning it’s required to notify you first. But the underlying document that takes precedence over zoning is the General Plan. You don’t need to be notified when the General Plan is changed because it’s ‘general’ and your property is not the only one that’s use is changing. The General Plan is the visionary document that shows how the City or County would like its land use to be in the future, even if it’s different from that now.

When you go in to the Community Development/Planning Department to, for instance, add on to your commercial building, or make some improvements to your apartment building, or even build a new building on your vacant lot, you’ll get a shock. Because the General Plan requires that all zoning be brought into compliance with it, if the new vision of your area is different from your current zoning. You’ll be told your property is now ‘legally non-conforming.’ This is jargon that means that you’re not going to be able to make those improvements or build what you thought you could. In most municipalities if your building burns down or needs repairs over more than 50% of the total, you won’t be able to do the work to restore it as it was. If your non-conforming use is discontinued for more than six months you typically will lose the right to reinstate that use. That’s it. Over. You’re ‘grandfathered in’, as we say, but only while your existing use continues. This is a big deal.

Why? Because if you’re in the middle of your town or city chances are your land has been re-designated as ‘mixed use’ or ‘Transit Village.’ That is Smart Growth-- ‘high density mixed use.’ As we discussed earlier, this kind of construction is expensive to build, hard to get financing on, and might bankrupt you before you’re done with it---especially if you’re not well-connected politically. And even if you are one of the crony developers, it’s a shark tank, and you might find yourself feeding the bigger guys if they have their eye on your property. One of the things to remember about those high density developments is that they are big condominium or apartment house projects. Big. Sometimes they’ll be required to build 80 units to the acre, which looks like a four story building with ground floor parking and retail space on a city block. That’s what the term ‘high density’ means. These can be huge. If you’re just a little guy you can’t line up the funding for this in the same way that you could if you were building twenty houses on that same lot instead of eighty condos. Condos usually sell from the top down. In other words, the top floor with the better views sells faster and for more money. But you have to build the whole building at once; you can’t build the top floor first! So instead of building five houses first and then the next ones after you’ve sold those, you’re hugely in debt before you get anywhere near the roof. If you’re in a redevelopment area you’re ripe for eminent domain, and if no projects are happening at the moment you can consider yourself the holding company for some favored developer who will come along later and get the city to take your property at a discount because it’s ‘legally non-conforming’ and ‘blighted.’

Discount? Yes. Your property will be worth less or even worthless because the risk will be higher for a lender or buyer. Investment is all about risk and return. The best combination for an investor is a low risk and high return. If your property is legally non-conforming then the risk increases that it can’t be rebuilt if it burns, or that the city won’t allow the current use to continue if a tenant moves out, or that if extensive repairs need to be made it will have to be demolished instead. As I mentioned, most cities have a rule that if a use is non-conforming and the use is discontinued for more than six months you won’t be able to get a new use permit for that. So, for example, if you have a non-conforming specialized manufacturing building and you lose your tenant for more than six months you may have to tear down your building. Banks will demand a higher interest rate and higher down-payment on higher risk property. Your property value drops. Why would someone pay the same amount for your place that they would for a property that doesn’t have these issues? They won’t. Uncertainty in what it can be used for is a shadow on your property and will affect your insurance, your potential tenant mix, your financing, your partnership options, and your chances of selling. This can be the case for all property types both improved and vacant. And you may not even have known this until you tried to get a loan.

Do you find this boring? You shouldn’t. Most small businesses are started with money obtained from home equity or commercial equity lines of credit. If you can’t get a loan you can’t start or continue your business. If you can’t start your business you may be unemployed or underemployed working for someone else. You have less opportunity, less freedom, and less flexibility in your employment choices.

Pssst! Want to hear a secret? When an area is declared ‘blighted’ and becomes a redevelopment area, one of the criteria used by consultants for that initial designation is that there are too many local businesses there. ‘Blight’ is a jargon term that is defined in your state Health and Safety Code and refers to two categories: Economic and Physical. Part of the economic element says that not enough sales tax revenue is being generated in the area. Typically smaller businesses generate less tax revenue than larger, national chains. The consultant, who your city essentially pays to find blight whether it’s there or not, will say that too many local businesses are dragging down the whole town. They’re in older buildings that they own and don’t pay a lot of property tax. So your city says out with the old, in with the new! Create a code enforcement unit in the Building Department to harass property owners! Refuse to allow façade improvements! Let the area run down! Rezone it for mixed use! Fire up the local community ‘leaders’ to demand that a new vision be enforced! Declare it blighted! Take property under eminent domain! Give it to crony developer pals or to government-subsidized low income housing builders! Demolish the old mom and pop businesses! Rebuild to the new model with a Quiznos, Jamba Juice, Starbucks, Panda Express, Kinko’s, and Payless Shoes with two or three stories of apartments above! Rents will go up! Property taxes will go up! That’s the vision. This only works in a boom time, as you’re seeing now with the collapse of the economy.

Wonder why every town looks like every other town? This is pushed by the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties with workshops, trainings, and sales pitches from Redevelopment Associations. That’s why. And the property taxes get diverted away from your local, county, and state coffers for 30 to 45 years into the bond brokers’ pockets. UN Agenda 21 benefits big corporations. The cities need to be sure that those bonds will get paid off so they don’t want to take their chances with a local business. Those apartments and condos are often built by huge national corporations like LISC, and Enterprise Community Development, each of them builders of 280,000 units with investments and leverage of over eleven billion dollars.

Here’s a little sidebar on Enterprise Community Development. With a non-profit and a for-profit division and lots of expertise at building low income units nation-wide, Enterprise profits hugely from redevelopment subsidies. Who partners with Enterprise? Bike Coalitions. Thunderhead Alliance (now called People Powered Movement) is a lobbying group that has hundreds of member bike coalitions, bike shops, and consultants in its ranks. They also had Tim May of Enterprise Community Development sitting on their board of directors. When those groups go down to the planning department to holler for Smart Growth there is a financial incentive. How many of the helmets and spandex crowd know they’re being manipulated by their board of directors and development corporations who are making billions from our tax dollars?

Low income housing = Social Equity = big money for huge corporate developers. Hey, who wouldn’t want grants of $300,000 a unit for low income apartments when houses are selling for $150,000? Or sitting vacant.

In the new green world, sprawl is evil. Legislation against suburbs is increasing. The cul-de-sac is the devil’s spawn! In California, Senate Bill 375 is the anti-sprawl bill that combines with Assembly Bill 32 (greenhouse gases) to legislate UN Agenda 21. Federal and state transportation dollars go to development and infrastructure for Smart Growth. Here’s the justification, the Green Mask, according to New Urbanism dot org:

Our quality of life keeps getting worse as we are constantly stuck in traffic. Our ugly, car-dominated environment is highly stressful, extremely unhealthy (from the constant toxic exhaust fumes we breathe daily), and very deadly (from the endless car accidents). This stressful environment takes its toll on us in countless ways: increased stress and rage, more alcoholism and drug abuse, rising divorce rates, rising rates of cancer and other environmental diseases, and a general dissatisfaction with our lives.

In addition, major health organizations point to the fact that a high percentage of Americans have serious health problems due to being overweight. This is caused primarily by the lazy lifestyle sprawl dictates with little or no walking or exercise as part of our daily routines.

SPRAWL IS NOT INEVITABLE. It is not an unavoidable symptom of modern growth. Sprawl is the direct result of specific government transportation choices and policies, combined with archaic zoning laws.

Smart Growth in Berkeley, CA.

Wow, what don’t they blame on suburbs? And did you catch that zinger--’archaic zoning laws’? That means that they favor changing General Plans so that you can’t build anything but Smart Growth, and only where they say you can.

The new kid on the block is Infrastructure Financing Districts (IFD) that go hand in hand with anti-sprawl legislation and are sort of super-redevelopment districts that don’t need a blight finding. Although there is no power of eminent domain for private use, as in redevelopment, there are ways to use an infrastructure project like a street re-design to take property for a ‘public use’ under eminent domain. The real news is that they can be used to pay for high density residential development: Smart Growth. No vote of the tax payer is needed to obtain bonds, and the payback period is 40 years. How’s that for ‘not compromising the citizens of the future by actions taken today’? Is that sustainable?

BACK TO THE LAND?

Are you hoping to escape by going out to the countryside? Forget it. Let’s say you’re out in a rural area sitting on 360 acres zoned for a minimum lot size of sixty acres. It’s time to get nervous. You might think that you can put six houses on that 360 acres but think again. Besides the viewsheds, habitats, ridgelines, streamside thresholds, and other restrictions on development, it’s likely that your county General Plan has decided that only one residence is permitted on each legal parcel. Smaller parcels may be merged into a single larger one if the county decides that they weren’t originally split with county approvals back a hundred years ago. Parcels of one thousand acres can be restricted to one house. You may spend ten years trying to obtain entitlements to subdivide those thousand acres. The county wants open space. Ante up! Pay to play!

You might say “So what? I don’t own any ranchland. Why should I care if a farmer or cattleman can’t divide his ranch?” Well, if you’re a member of the local food movement you should be concerned. Don’t want to buy your food from three thousand miles away? We’ll get to food sheds and population control through nutritional restrictions in a bit, but first let’s look at the stress your local farmer or rancher is under. In a January 31, 2009 news story on the depressed dairy industry in the North San Francisco Bay Area, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reported:

Domenic Carinalli, whose 350-cow dairy outside Sebastopol looks west to scattered rural homes and trees clustered on hilltops, said he can’t recall such depressed times in his industry. “You really can’t sell out, even if you wanted to, because there’s nobody who will buy your cows,” said the 67-year-old Carinalli. He is secretary and past president of the Modesto-based Western United Dairymen, which represents 1,100 of the state’s 1,700 dairy farms. For dairy farmers, he said, “it’s just a matter of how much equity they want to burn up to stay in business.”

Why would a rancher want to build houses on her land? We’re not talking about hundreds of homes; we’re talking about one house for every sixty acres. With rising costs and increased regulations a farmer or rancher may be thinking of ways to recapitalize. She may be concerned that her adult children will not be able to live on the farm unless they each have their own home, but zoning codes won’t allow more than one house plus some agricultural buildings on a parcel. She might be worried that when she dies they won’t have enough money to keep the farm going and will have to sell it to pay inheritance taxes or to divide the inheritance. Many General Plans will not allow any use besides agricultural on land zoned for it, and have ever-changing ideas about what agriculture is. Some counties say that if your land is not producing a crop worth at least $800 per acre then you’ll be taxed at a higher, residential rate. For a hay grower this is the kiss of death.

The local Agricultural Land Trust has been coming around and offering to buy a conservation easement. When that Land Trust agent comes around and offers a high price to cover the land with a conservation easement, many farmers and ranchers jump at it. Believe it or not, the State of Wyoming Department of Agriculture is actually sending facilitators out to elderly ranchers to ‘assist them in estate planning.’ As usual this stuff is too crazy to make up. The state says that it’s concerned that not enough family farms are being retained by family members. The state-paid facilitator pressures all family members to get together with him or her and discuss what will happen to the ranch when the owner is dead, and then meets with each family member privately to find out all of the intimate dynamics of the family. I didn’t read the whole facilitator guidebook but it looks like the goal is to get a conservation easement for the state. If you want to read it yourself, put the title in your search engine: Passing It On: An Estate Planning Resource Guide for Wyoming’s Farmers and Ranchers. Did they really call it Passing It On, as in: ‘Oh, Old Bill? Why, he’s passed on, poor guy.’ They do have a sense of humor…

The ‘Green Mask’ of a conservation easement is that it will allow that farmer or rancher to continue with an agricultural use forever, and keep that land in production. The truth is far different. Essentially the sale of a conservation easement is the sale of the development rights on the land forever. It runs with the land, not the owner, so if you sell the land the easement stays with it. A conservation easement gives the Land Trust the right to enter, inspect, and monitor the land use, and financially penalize the property owner if there is any violation of the easement agreement. You lose your rights to privacy, to decide what you want to do on your land and where you want to do it. If, for example, you are the rancher and you park your farm truck in an area in order to load cattle, and that area is ‘off-limits’ according to your easement, you will be fined. If you want to fight that fine in court you will pay all legal fees and court costs regardless of whether you win or lose. One dispute can cost you thousands of dollars. The money you got for your development rights won’t last more than one generation. Your kids won’t have much to sell if they need to pay taxes or buy each other out, and the land will likely be sold to the conservation easement holder. It may be the same Land Trust that bought it from you or it might be a different one. They don’t notify you if they sell your easement to someone else. What is the true purpose of a land trust? To take the land out of private ownership and to return it to the wild. Much of the land in Land Trusts is completely closed to humans. If you think this is a good thing, think again. Where is your food going to come from?

I hope you like vegetables. Here’s what the United Nations News Centre has to say about farm animals:

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.” www.un.org

According to the United Nations, cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalents, than transportation. Their solutions include methane capture (very expensive), and restrictions.

Have you heard of food sheds? Transit villages (formerly known as cities) will be restricted to having only the population that can be supported by food grown within a 100 mile radius (called a ‘food shed’). Food sheds will dictate where you can live and when you can change your residence. Calculations, such as those done recently at Cornell University, will determine how much food can be grown within that area and then the Transit Village population will be limited to the number of people who can be fed by that land (take a look at the Cornell website by putting ‘Cornell University’ and ‘Food Sheds’ in your search engine).

It is reasonable to expect rationing based on this mode. If you want to move to that village you’ll have to apply and wait for an opening, don’t you think? Doesn’t that make sense? Because if they only produce enough calories for the existing population then you’ll have to wait. And everyone living there will have to have an identification card. And anyone who wants to marry into the area or have a child might need to get permission. Just musing on the possibilities here. I suppose they could reduce the number of calories you need. That might solve the problem. Gives more meaning to the ‘locavore’ label, doesn’t it? Go local!

WILDLANDS: OUR GLORIOUS FUTURE

Conspiracy theories are for kids. This is the big time. No need for theories when you have policy implementation staring you in the eyes. The Wildlands Project is one of those science fiction-y sounding things that make people look at you funny when you talk about it. Unfortunately you’re not crazy. By now you’ve seen the map that Dr. Michael Coffman prepared for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s objections to the Convention on Biodiversity Treaty on the Senate floor. The treaty was never ratified by the Senate but is being implemented administratively. If you haven’t seen it put ‘Wildlands Map’ in your search browser. When you see it, it looks like the whole US is a mass of red and yellow lines. Those lines represent wildlife corridors, both existing and proposed, that restrict human activity. The idea is to bring back species into the wild and provide corridors traversing the continent for their safe migration. Sounds terrific, doesn’t it? Ted Turner, the billionaire media mogul, owns thousands of acres of land in Montana and is apparently releasing wolves and bears onto his land to repopulate it. Ranchers and farmers in the area are concerned that some of these wolves are a Canadian breed that whelps more pups per litter than local wolves, and are ferocious hunters. Two wolves can bring down a horse or elk. Across the nation, in cities near open space, more mountain lions, bears, coyotes, cougars, and bobcats are coming into populated areas. If you take a look at Wildlands Network dot org you’ll find this quote:

Our science-based solution is the creation of four Continental Wildways, large protected corridors of land running coast to coast, and north to south throughout Canada, the U.S. and Mexico — providing enough Room to Roam© to protect wildlife and people for the long-term. Our current areas of focus are the Western and Eastern Wildways.

Kind of cute that they copyrighted ‘Room to Roam.’ You can see their vision of the wildlife corridors on a map they have at WildlandsNetwork.org/Wildways. They obviously don’t own all of that land so the plan is to either acquire it in fee (government parks or lands off-limits to human activity), by conservation easements, or through restrictions or regulations (biotic resource overlays, sensitive species overlays etc. in General Plans).

Water rights are the new battleground, as you are aware. Whether it’s the Delta Peripheral Canal, commercial fishing restrictions, species protection that calls for creek setbacks, reduction in river flow diversion, or dam destruction, it’s all for the ‘greater good.’ According to UN Agenda 21 dams are ‘unsustainable.’ Look at pages 728 to 763 of the UN Global Biodiversity Assessment for lots of other unsustainable constructions and targeted activities (including golf and ski runs.) I’d like to mention just two of the many, many bizarre new world order examples.

The first example is the proposed 2012 demolition of the Elwha River Dams in western Washington State, near Port Angeles. Referred to as one of the largest environmental restoration projects in US history, this will demolish two electricity-generating dams and let the Elwha River run freely to the Straits of San Juan De Fuca for the first time in 100 years. Salmon will be able to spawn again and will repopulate their depleted ranks. This fight to demolish the dams has been going on for twenty years. Fish ladders were never installed on the dams and the salmon languished. When proposals were offered to build fish ladders they were rejected by environmental groups because, they said, the water was too warm and the fish needed a restored habitat. Critics said that it wasn’t about the salmon—it’s about Wildlands. Apparently the old dams don’t generate much electricity. But it is clean, locally generated energy, and the cost of demolition and habitat restoration is $325 million. The amazing thing about this demolition project is that no one knows what will happen. From the actual demolition methods to the potential flooding and sediment to the potentially unusable septic systems downstream the project is one big question mark. One thing is definite: the dams will be gone and they won’t be the last to be destroyed in the big push to restore the Wildlands.

The second story is a bit sinister. Drake’s Bay is in northern California on the Point Reyes Peninsula. This gorgeous ocean front peninsula is part of the Point Reyes National Seashore. The Drake’s Bay Oyster Company has harvested oysters from the bay for over 70 years. Their lease with the National Park Service is about to expire in 2012 so they asked for an extension. Unfortunately for them, the National Park Service wants to declare the area a ‘designated wilderness area.’ According to the National Forestry Service, US Department of Agriculture, a ‘designated wilderness area is defined this way:

Wilderness is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” An area of wilderness is further defined in the Wilderness Act to mean “an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at

least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.”

There’s a problem there, as you can see. The Drake’s Bay Oyster Company has been at that location for seven decades, about three decades more than the National Seashore had been in existence. The area is now a ‘potential designated wilderness’ so the Park Service wanted to do its inventory and see if it could further restrict uses to ‘visitors who do not remain.’ If they could remove all permanent improvements in the National Seashore they’d be able to change the status to ‘designated wilderness.’ To that end they planted a surveillance camera on the bay and recorded the movements of the employees of the oyster farm hoping to find violations. Although they recorded more than 250,000 images none of them showed damage to the harbor seals or the environment. So what did the Park Service do? They hid that information so that they could say that the oyster farm was a threat to the environment and should lose their lease. The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper reported on March 24, 2011 that:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein accused the U.S. Department of the Interior on Wednesday of downplaying evidence of misconduct by National Park Service scientists who apparently wanted to get a popular shellfish operation kicked out of Drakes Bay.

The Interior Department’s office of the solicitor released a report Tuesday outlining what it termed biased, improper, mistake-ridden work by scientists. But it concluded that the behavior did not rise to the level of intentional “scientific misconduct” - and that nothing criminal occurred.

The headline called it a “mistake” but it wasn’t, was it? It was deliberate, and it was done in order to declare an area ‘wilderness.’ Untrammeled. Primeval. Primitive. Wildlands.

In rural areas where people are living and working other methods are used to remove them from the land. Water well monitoring and denial of septic tank construction are part of the determination that you don’t own to the center of the earth and the sky above, as you thought. Environmental protections are important to ensure clean water and healthy animal populations, but often this is a veneer of the Green Mask that hides the fanaticism and control of UN Agenda 21. The total inventory and control of all natural resources is in process now. An example of another way to remove rural human populations is the decision by Sonoma County Supervisors in December 2010 to pave only 150 miles of the more than 1,380 miles of rural county roads. A December 31, 2010 article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat states that federal funding favors more urban, populated areas and there is not enough money to pave in rural areas. The plan is to pulverize many roads and return them to gravel (hope they got an Environmental Impact Report for all that dust!) Think that will have an impact on rural property values? On farming? On access to markets? This creates more candidates for conservation easements or outright sales to land trusts. Less private ownership. Less people on the land. Less land in production. Less independence. Less freedom. And also less property taxes generated for county budgets, which will contribute to a spiraling deficit.

THE ROTTEN TOMATO AWARD

Goes to the White House Rural Council. Apparently established on the lines of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, this extra-governmental board made up of over twenty-five government agencies will put rural America back to work, make your tractor street-legal, micro-chip your cows, and…well, I’ll let the White House Rural Council website tell you:

To address challenges in Rural America, build on the Administration’s rural economic strategy, and improve the implementation of that strategy, the President signed an Executive Order establishing the White House Rural Council.

The Council will coordinate the Administration’s efforts in rural America by performing three core functions. It will:

1. Streamline and improve the effectiveness of Federal programs serving rural America

2. Engage stakeholders on issues and solutions in rural communities

3. Promote and coordinate private-sector partnerships

There are those public/private partnerships again. Does ‘promote and coordinate’ mean picking winners and losers? ‘Engaging stakeholders’ sounds like Delphi. ‘Streamline the effectiveness of federal programs’ sounds like creating a whole new level of bureaucracy, regulation, restrictions, fines, penalties, and oversight. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say they want to get America working again. Local UN Agenda 21 enforcement jobs.

HOW DOES REGIONALIZATION FIT IN WITH THIS?

Regionalization. If you don’t know what it is yet, you will soon. It’s the interim step on the road to globalization. The creation of another layer of government that is unelected, and unaccountable to you. A conglomeration of municipalities who are making new laws and goals that supersede their local laws---then they’ll go back to the local community and say that they are required to bring their local laws into line. A manipulation designed to remove the sovereignty from local governments who have been grabbing for grants instead of noticing that they’re walking off a cliff. Now, some planning should be regional. Transportation, for instance wouldn’t make sense if the roads didn’t connect to each other when they left your town or county. But regionalization is linking housing with transportation funding for the first time in a play-ball-or-starve effort. The regional agencies are working with the federal government and non-profits like ICLEI to entrap the locals. Why? Because the goal is one world government. Really. Regions can refer to groups of counties, groupings of states, and, ultimately, clusters of nations---like the European Union. Finally it will move to a single government. This is an incremental transfer of rights and it starts locally.

The following story is set in the San Francisco Bay Area but it could be in your area already. If not it will be soon.

Delphi meetings are going on all over the nine county San Francisco Bay Area right now. The public is there for a propaganda session and to give the illusion that there was public buy-in. You know that being ‘Delphi’d’ means that you were subjected to a visioning meeting where the outcome was a done-deal before you walked in the room. They’re calling it ‘YOU CHOOSE’ but the reality is that the only thing that makes it yours is that your taxes pay for it and it will be imposed on you. In this case it was OneBayArea but in your area it will be called something else, something regional. It’s a transportation plan primarily but that’s just the excuse for creating a huge master plan based on redevelopment that includes land use restrictions. Basically it’s a stack-em and pack-em housing model for an enormous UN Agenda 21/ICLEI plan. Moving you out of your rural and suburban home into a tightly designed, easily monitored apartment or condo with no space for your car and lousy public transportation. The story you’ll hear is that the only way that people will take public transportation is if they are crowded into downtown areas, and giving up cars is the main way to stop greenhouse gases. What about electric cars? We’re told that driving is anti-social and besides WE NEED EXERCISE! The facilitators, by the way, are complete hypocrites who live in single family homes…just ask them. And they drove to the meeting, too.

THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT LOGO

The Green Mask

The Green Mask is that you’ll have cleaner air, less pollution, more time for your families, green jobs, lower costs, and a better, more vibrantly walkable, bikeable life. The goal is to homogenize the Bay Area and the nation with ‘Smart Growth’—housing and retail developments subsidized by your property and transportation tax dollars. The idea is that when everyone is living on the tracks or on a bus line it will be more cost-effective to run that transit. There will be fewer places to go and more people to ride it. There will be less pollution because no one will have a car. Rents will be cheap because the units are small. Small units mean low energy use. You don’t have a yard so you won’t waste water on plants. It will never rain or snow no matter where you live, so everyone can ride their bike everywhere. Everyone will be happy, kids will be safe, there will be lots of time to drink coffee in the downstairs coffee shop, and there won’t be any crime because everyone is watching everyone else. All the time.

OK, let’s go to the meeting. If you’ve never experienced a Delphi meeting you’re in for a shock. Although the facilitators SAY that it’s all about hearing your opinion, in fact if you dare to say anything or ask any question that doesn’t agree with the steamrollering propaganda machine you’ll be shouted down. Yes, supposedly decent Americans from your own town will shout at you like a feral mob and scream that THEY DON’T WANT TO KNOW where the funding for the project came from. THEY DON’T WANT TO KNOW how much the project is costing them. THEY DON’T WANT TO KNOW why the entire plan/project was pre-designed even though it’s supposedly being shaped by the public. How much is it costing? $200,000,000,000. That’s 200 billion dollars over the next twenty-five years just in the San Francisco Bay Area.

If you want to keep your city the way it is now it’s called ‘Business As Usual’ and they’ll shame you. The choice you are supposed to pick is ‘Planned Future’ with more and more urban development and more government control. The facilitators go to work on you if you don’t want to go along with the program. Expect scorn, shaming, isolation and snide remarks. The room is packed with elected officials, government employees, non-profit groups, board and committee appointees who make sure that the outcome was the ‘right’ one.

How do I know this happens? Because it happened to me. Just last week. I was shouted at by people I know, people in government and non-profits, who were angry that I was asking questions to which anyone should expect an answer. Did I make a scene? Was I shouting? No, I was calm, dressed in a business suit, and speaking the truth. This is a threat in meetings of this type. The last thing they want is an informed audience. It happens every time I go to a meeting. Actually, I’m getting used to it, and it’s vaguely amusing to see your mayor shouting at you that she doesn’t want to know what the impact will be to the city. The meeting was being filmed---there were several camera crews there. I went back and asked them if they intended to edit out my remarks and those of others who had raised objections. They wouldn’t look at me or respond. I recognized the director of the local public media center and asked him if this was going to be on public access television but he said he didn’t know. He looked ashamed.

You may wonder to yourself if your government officials know about UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. Yes. They do. In a bit I’ll tell you how to Anti-Delphi a meeting. But now let’s look at regionalization.

Regionalization is the intermediate step in globalization, and the method by which laws, rules, and regulations can be standardized so that you can’t escape them. The regional push is to restrict future development to redevelopment areas and Priority Development Areas. ONLY. Did you get that? If you own land outside of those areas you may not be able to build on it. Now I didn’t say ‘land outside of the city limits’---no. Land outside of a redevelopment area, outside of a small section of a narrow 1/4 mile wide transportation corridor may not be buildable. This is stunning. If your city wants to get a piece of the big funding pie for transportation and planning it has to agree that for the next 25 years residential development will only happen within the Priority Development Areas. Why are they doing it mostly in redevelopment areas? Because they have the power of eminent domain there and can take your land against your will. All of the new construction to accommodate population increases for 25 years will be in a small area. That’s why they call them Priority Development Areas. The city/county can take the property taxes in that area for the next 30-45 years and use it to pay off bond debt and pay their cronies to develop Smart Growth. Hear that thunder? It’s sellers running to dump their property outside of redevelopment or Priority Development Areas and buyers racing to buy within those areas. But quietly, stealthily, because you haven’t woken up to it yet.

In the San Francisco Bay Area these public-private meetings are organized by two regional groups; Metropolitan Transportation Commission and Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). In your area they will be called something similar, like a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), and a Council of Governments (COG). These two regional planning groups are comprised of selected city council members and county supervisors from all over the ‘region,’ who are responsible for putting UN Agenda 21 Sustainable Communities Strategies into place. They partner with non-profit groups like Greenbelt Alliance which are themselves comprised of member organizations like Pacific Gas and Electric, the Sierra Club, US Environmental Protection Agency, and others. By partnering with a private group like Greenbelt Alliance your government can give grants to private organizations as consultants who will design trainings without your oversight or knowledge. Members of these groups bounce back and forth between government and non-profit groups and then can set public policy which they will personally benefit from when they’re back in the private sector. The lines blur between public and private. There are very strict laws governing public access to information, and strict laws governing the proper conduct for elected officials. The laws say that everything that affects the public has to be conducted publicly. But the way these groups are configured makes it nearly impossible for you to keep up with them and your newspaper won’t inform you of their task forces, study groups, board meetings, retreats, and strategy sessions.

These agencies are working with a model they have received from ICLEI that urbanizes every targeted area and gradually empties the rural and suburban communities into the city. It’s happening faster and faster as they near their goal. Planning documents for each and every city and county are standardized and brought into alignment with this idea. Mixed use only works in highly urbanized areas where there are enough residents to support the retail. San Francisco is an example of a place where this can work but even there the planned densities are much higher than what is there now. Typically, smaller cities cannot support this model.

While appraising a shopping center in a very small city recently I found an interesting article in the local paper, The Valley Mirror. The November 28, 2008 story by Doug Ross is an unusual transcription of a joint meeting between the council members and supervisors of three small cities and a county in Central California. This rural area is talking about abolishing the local police departments and having a countywide law enforcement agency, public works department, and library system. One county supervisor said “We may have to dis-incorporate the cities and form a single city-county government. We are left on our own. We are—I don’t want to say it---’screwed’ financially. I hate regionalism, but unless we can pull a pie out of the air, Glenn County is going to get wiped out financially by larger areas.” These small communities are going away. Significantly, these miserable elected officials were treated to a threatening little pep talk from a woman from a non-profit group that arranges grants for energy programs. Here’s what she said: “San Bernardino and Stockton were sued by the attorney general when they rolled out their General Plans with no mitigation plan for emissions. Stockton met with the attorney general and agreed to inventory greenhouse gas emissions by category. Now they’re one of the greenest cities in the state.” Yes, Stockton had just joined ICLEI.

As more and more regions are created, identified, and superimposed on the local and state governments there will be more regional legislation and less local control. Local government will exist solely to implement regional regulations administratively. Separate sovereignty will slip away. As clusters of elected officials from different areas join together in regional boards you’ll have no way to vote them out as a body, and you’ll find yourself having to travel to a regional hub to attend meetings or make objections to new laws. Your rights as a voter will be dissolved into the consensus of Communitarianism.

WE KNOW WHEN YOU’VE BEEN SLEEPING

This is social engineering. Moving you from your rural or suburban home where you know all the neighbors and have real community to an artificial transient illusory ‘community.’ The reality is that lots of people crammed together in a small space is a strain on services, requires huge expensive new sewer and water lines, and can lead to high vacancy, crime, and poor maintenance. These developments are designed for the minimum of privacy, and to allow controlling energy and water agencies the option of limiting your usage without your consent.

In the guise of environmentalism the stress of living will increase through greater regulation and restrictions. Every town will be the same. Where will you be living? In an apartment or a condo with a homeowners’ association board or a residents’ board overseeing your behavior. If you play a saxophone, fight with your partner, burn incense, hang your wash out or any number of forbidden activities you can lose your place or be fined. You’ll have very few places to go that are completely private. Our culture now is conditioning us to be accustomed to the loss of privacy. Isn’t that what Facebook is? And what about texting constantly? And tell-all reality TV? You’ll be shamed if you want privacy. Even 12-Step Programs expose your most intimate issues to whoever shows up. Does that bother you? What are you hiding? Covering up the built-in camera on your laptop?

The young people in the world are growing up with a completely different view of life than their parents. And the obvious must be said: This is a youth-driven movement. If you’re under 35 your expectations are greatly different from those of your parents. You may never get a decent job. Your college degree is in sustainable, green unemployment. You may never have your own home. You may never work for the same company for more than five years. Your concept of loyalty may be compromised. Your sense of dependence on government programs will be elevated. You may never be free of debt. Young people are being indoctrinated through Outcome Based Education to accept an inferior quality of life, a collective life. They are taught to be obedient, to give the ‘right answers’ to the test questions, to work in a ‘cohort,’ and to see themselves as a threat to the planet. Unless you’re wealthy enough to attend an Ivy League private school, you’ll be learning just what is on the test. You won’t learn how to learn or how to think independently. This is fundamental to the Agenda 21 plan to widen the gap between rich and poor. Yes, that’s the Green Mask, too. It’s a Communitarian model to embrace a loss of individual rights as being part of the greater good; part of one planet.

I noticed that ICLEI-USA, if you search on it as an employer, shows that it employs about 220 people, median age 29, and 55% female. Are these young women paid a decent wage or are they only able to afford an apartment in one of the high density urban rental buildings next to a train track?

Recruitment for the splinter groups seems to focus on those who are misfits, extremists, zealots, and generally rigidly regimented and controllable by ‘group leaders’. The environmental groups have morphed from those who like to hike and appreciate the outdoors to those with a social engineering agenda. There is a program put together by Sonoma County Conservation Action, a political environmental group which endorses candidates, called “Know Your Neighbor.” This program is also being pushed at Neighborhood Summits, those city/NGO sponsored workshops where neighborhood leaders are selected. A very nice young woman was in charge of it. She came to my door to talk to me about it. The goal was to have someone on every block that would know everyone and also know their political opinions so that they could be engaged when issues were coming up for a vote. NO KIDDING.

There’s something else that needs to be said about social engineering. Most of us, about a minute after we first heard about the Holocaust, wondered if we were the kind of people who would commit such crimes. If we were being honest with ourselves we said no, but then had a sort of vague uneasy feeling. Could we be sure? In the 1970’s Professor Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment at Stanford University. He was a psychologist who wanted to see if students would torture each other if given permission. He set up a ‘prison’ in the university basement, randomly assigned some students to be prisoners and others jailers, and watched. The experiment had to be ended because of the brutality of the jailers---just ordinary students. How long did it take? Six days.

Well, guess what! You’re going to get your chance to see what you’re made of, if you haven’t already.

Maybe you’re one of those weak ones who has already jumped on the bandwagon of spying on your neighbor for ‘their own good’ (Community Oriented Policing, Asset Based Community Development, Neighborhood Watch, excluding people from neighborhood groups, reporting a neighbor for smoking in their apartment…). Flattery is a big manipulator.

SAY ROD, WOULD YOU MIND IF I BORROWED A CUP OF CARBON CREDITS? I’VE EXCEEDED MY MONTHLY QUOTA.

Maybe you’ll be asked to reason with a neighbor----you’ll be told that you’re such an important insider, hey, the mayor will thank you!

Maybe it will take just a little more to push you over the edge. When your child comes home and says ‘Billy’s mom says you’re crazy if you don’t support the Bike Boulevard, and she’s mad that you’re not going along with the neighborhood’ will you go along?

Maybe you’ll just hide in anonymity since it could maybe cost you your job to stand up.

Are your kids 100% indoctrinated into UN Agenda 21--Sustainable Development? What’s that going to mean for dinner table conversation? Will you be silent?

It doesn’t take much to destroy a social fabric. Just a willingness to go along with it. And a fear that if you don’t, you’ll be hurt, or unpopular. There are studies that show that people would rather suffer physical injury than be rejected by their neighbors. The resistance to this movement is growing. You’re reading this. You’re thinking about it. It’s not a TV show, it’s not a drama, and it’s not a game. This is your life. Anyone can be a good German. The Nazis did it slowly. They took years to get up to speed. They weren’t taken seriously at first, but they manipulated the system strategically. They tightened the screws, narrowed the choices, rewarded the snitches, and took out the brave ones. Will you be part of the resistance?

OUR JOURNEY TO THE TRUTH BEGINS

I’m going to tell you the story of how I discovered UN Agenda 21. I think it’s important to see how two unsuspecting people fell into the snake pit and survived.

I am a Democrat, and have been since I first registered to vote in 1974. The relevance of my party affiliation is that I have always been a liberal. I’ve only voted for a Republican once, and that was last year, after I reported Democratic Assembly candidate Michael Allen to the Fair Political Practices Commission for a serious conflict of interest. He was found guilty and fined…after he was elected.

I am pro-choice, anti-war, a feminist, and gay. Kay and I were legally married on our 16th anniversary in 2008 in California. For over thirty years I had hosted speak-outs, marched in demonstrations, and passed out petitions. I thought Bush stole the election. Twice. I knew about 9/11 the minute I watched the towers come down, and never believed the official story. I’ve always been involved in national issues but, after reading Dude, Where’s My Country by Michael Moore, I resolved to take his advice and get involved locally.

In 2004 and 2005 Kay and I purchased some investment property in Santa Rosa, CA about an hour away from where we lived. It seemed like a good investment and we liked the small town appeal of Santa Rosa, a town of about 170,000. After we transformed our property with paint and landscaping it inspired our neighbors on the small downtown commercial street to do the same. The area was becoming known as a quirky art district with local galleries and studios. In 2005, neighboring property owners came and asked me if I’d like to run for election to a citizens’ oversight board for the new Gateways Redevelopment area being created downtown. Apparently this had been in the works for a while but, since it is not a real estate disclosure issue, we hadn’t known anything about it. The neighbors thought that since I’m a commercial appraiser with decades of experience with eminent domain and land use issues I’d be a great representative for them on the committee. This looked like my opportunity to do some community service, and I agreed to run for a seat.

Although I’d appraised hundreds of properties including shopping centers, vineyards, car dealerships, golf courses, a lumber mill, sand and gravel quarry, oil refinery, and office buildings in all nine counties of the SF Bay Area as well as Los Angeles County, I didn’t know much about redevelopment. Of course I had been stunned when, just a few months before, the US Supreme Court decided in Kelo v City of New London, Connecticut that it was not necessary to determine that a property or an area was ‘blighted’ in order to create a redevelopment project area. The Supreme Court, in a shocking decision that outraged the nation, had sided with the City and decided that if a municipality thought that it could make more tax revenue by taking your land by eminent domain and giving or selling it to someone who would put a more profitable, higher tax generating use on it, they could do it. Yes, the decision was that if you had a small business on your property and a bigger business came along and said ‘Hey Mr. City Manager, we have a ‘vision.’ We really like that location and we can pay you a lot more sales and property tax than the little guy who owns that property now,’ the City could proceed to take you even if you had the most well-maintained profitable property on the block. It’s for the ‘greater good’—a real Communitarian decision.

As you’ll recall, the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution gives government the ‘right to take’ property by eminent domain for a public use as long as the property owner is justly compensated. I approve of this, and for most of my career I have worked for the California Department of Transportation appraising property needed for roads. It is necessary for government to use eminent domain for projects that are clearly in the interests of the public, such as road or utility projects. But the new Supreme Court decision changed the definition of ‘public use’ to mean that anything that made more money for a city was a public use. I remember thinking at the time that maybe those Supreme Court justices would think differently if a developer offered to tear down their houses and put up a factory, as was the case in Kelo. By the way, since we’re on this, Suzette Kelo did lose her house, along with everyone else in her neighborhood, but later the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer, which had planned to build a plant there, changed its plans, closed down its operations in New London, and the entire neighborhood is now one big vacant lot. How much property tax is the city getting for it now? None.

Let’s get back to my story. When I ran for election to the Gateways Redevelopment Area Project Area Committee on August 5, 2005, I had already done some homework. I knew that California’s law was tougher than the Connecticut law, and Kelo didn’t apply here. In California, a finding of blight was required before an area could be redeveloped. The project area was huge. Over 1,300 acres, it ran from the south end of town all the way up to the north end, on both sides of the freeway that splits the city in half. Over 10,000 people lived and worked in the area. I was surprised that the City could say that so much of its central core was blighted. There were already four other redevelopment areas within the city limits that were ‘blighted.’ With the addition of this new area it would bring the total blight to five and half square miles. Blight is a very complex jargon term that refers to the physical and economic condition of an area. You’ll find that definition in the California Health and Safety Code section 33030-33039 if you’re interested, but basically it says that to be ‘blighted’ the area must be characterized by a condition so severe and so prevalent that it’s a burden on the community, and no one will invest in it or do anything to improve it unless government steps in and offers incentives. Sounds pretty serious, right? I didn’t think I’d seen anything like that but I figured they knew what they were doing. I also figured that the City would be thrilled to have me on the committee since I’m a professional and could help them explain things to the others in the group. I sure was wrong.

As I was waiting in the packed auditorium to make my ‘campaign speech’ I was amazed that so many people wanted to get onto this committee. Developers, owners of engineering firms, attorneys, permit expediters, former council candidates, and a talk show host all vied for positions. When it was my turn I told the crowd about my experience and then I said “It’s all about the blight. If there’s no blight, there’s no justification for the project.” Kay told me later that the city staffer for the project jumped up and started pacing agitatedly at that point. I told the crowd that I had been a land use and property valuation expert for many years, and that I am an expert witness testifying in litigation over these issues. I vowed to listen to the citizens and make sure that all was in order for this tremendously large area. We deserved to know what was being planned for it, and so far no one from the city had given us any information. I got some big applause and was elected with the largest number of votes. We were to meet monthly in a small back room in an auxiliary city building, after it had closed for the day.

AN AWAKENING

Even though I’d never heard of the Delphi Technique I could tell that something was wrong with the monthly committee meetings. Intuitively, Kay and I decided that although she would attend every meeting with me, we would drive separately, never arrive together, and never acknowledge each other. She was the only citizen audience member, at first. The meetings were run by two attorneys that the city had hired for the project, and were transcribed by a court reporter. We were told that there were no actual plans for the area but that the city would tell us later what they were going to do. The attorneys wasted every meeting with mundane, boring details and said that we would be voting within a month or two on the project. It was just a formality, they said, and we could suggest things we’d like to see in the project area, like park benches and bike racks. Our vote and recommendations would go on to the City Council, which would then pass the ordinance. They seemed to be in a hurry for us to do some cursory recommendations and vote for the project.

At the second meeting I asked for the project books. I’m accustomed to reading Environmental Impact Reports and project plans and it just seemed weird that we were getting nothing from the city. The attorney said it wasn’t necessary. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I looked at the law and it says that it’s our job to vote the project up or down on its merits. We need those project books.’ The attorney was getting angry. ‘We don’t have copies for you,’ she said. ‘If you want them you’ll have to pay for them.’

Kay and I bought a set and they were our coffee table books for the next four years. Full of maps, copies of code enforcement logs, financial analyses, property value charts, and rental data, these books held the answers to my questions. When I was a kid my mom gave me a book called ‘How To Lie With Statistics’ so that I wouldn’t be fooled by data manipulation. It quickly became apparent that the research firm the city had hired to find blight was familiar with the techniques.

We started by looking at what they said about our own properties. We own some small multi-residential investment property on the city’s largest park. The data was wrong. It showed that there were outstanding code violations on the property. We knew, because we’d gone and checked with the City Building Department before buying, that there were no outstanding code violations. Years earlier there had been, but that had been cleared a long time ago. Kay and I looked at each other and realized that if the first properties we checked, basically at random, had falsified information on them, that chances were that there was a problem with the blight, and a problem with the whole project. As we continued our analysis we found that there were literally hundreds of ‘errors,’ and nearly all were in the favor of the project.

Here’s an example. You recall that blight is a condition that is such a threat to health and safety, such a physically and economically depressed situation, so prevalent and substantial, that no one would invest any money in the area unless the city assisted them with subsidies. One way of proving that is to show that the area has many vacant lots. The thinking goes that if there were investors in the area they would buy those lots and build on them. So we took a few days and, with the maps from the project books, went out and looked at every single ‘vacant lot.’

The first one was a middle school play yard. From there we saw lots with five year old buildings on them, parking lots for shopping centers, a city park, more school yards—you get the idea. Most of the ‘vacant lots’ had buildings on them or were in use. My personal favorite was the three story office building directly across the street from City Hall. It had been there for seven years, and was a ‘two-fer’; besides including it in the list of vacant lots, it was also on the list of building code violations.

Speaking of building code violations as a justification for blight, we have friends and colleagues who tell us that they were victims of excessive and punitive code enforcement fines (with liens). In the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ world of neighborhood stabilization and revitalization projects, properties are targeted to help make a case for blight. In the lead-up period to declaring an area blighted the city often does increased code enforcement. It’s not uncommon to red-tag a property because it has supposedly no permit for a garage, for instance, and harass the property owner with fines and penalties. When the property owner produces the permit the code enforcement agency can claim to have ‘lost’ it thereby explaining their incompetence or deliberate abuse. Another common situation is the red-tagging of legally non-conforming buildings that pre-date the zoning code. Then it’s up to the property owner to prove the age of the building or pay fees and penalties and possibly be required to demolish the structure.

Meanwhile, back at the meetings, things weren’t going too well. I had alerted the attorneys and the committee to the fact that there were serious errors that jeopardized the blight findings. I was told by the Chairman, a permit expediter who worked with the city, that ‘it was not within our purview to determine if there was blight or not.’ When I pointed out that the exact duties of the committee were in fact to approve the creation of the project area or to VOTE IT DOWN, things started to get hot. Frankly, I wasn’t used to this kind of manipulation. My employer, a government agency, trusted me to determine property value and potential severance damages without bias. When I testified I was under oath. I felt that I was working for the people of the State of California and my integrity as an expert witness was vital. Now I was being railroaded and my integrity was being compromised.

I had brought documentation about redevelopment to the meetings and handed it out but few on the committee seemed interested. Kay also, without acknowledging that we knew each other, was writing comments and distributing them to the group. I could see that there were a number of ‘shills’ on the committee. They appeared to be there solely to vote in favor of the project. There was never any discussion of what the actual project plans were—it was a mystery what the heck the Gateways Redevelopment project was going to be, and it was over 1,300 acres. What were they going to do with all of those property taxes? The attorneys suddenly said that we would have to vote very soon even though the City Council public hearing was scheduled for four months away. They changed our monthly meetings to every week. And they brought in a professional meeting facilitator who immediately zeroed in on me.

While we were doing all of this investigating, I was spending every night researching redevelopment until the early hours of the morning. What I found confirmed my fears. Redevelopment was a racket. The best, most informative data source was ‘Redevelopment—The Unknown Government’ by Chris Norby, then an Orange County Supervisor but now a California State Assemblyperson. The booklet is available online; put the title into your search engine or go to our Source information page on our website. This little forty page book lays out the ugly truth with charts, cartoons, and hard data showing that Redevelopment is the vampire that never dies. Supported by powerful lobbyist groups fronting bond brokers, lawyers, and debt consultants, the trend of designating more and more redevelopment areas is also supported by government agency staff members and private businesses that profit from redevelopment. Diverting property taxes to these bloodsuckers is big business: by 2006 redevelopment agencies statewide had amassed $81 Billion in bonded indebtedness, a figure that is doubling every ten years. And don’t think this is only in California—it’s in nearly every city and county in the United States. Because the agencies can sell bonded debt without voter approval (unlike school boards), and the city’s general fund is responsible for any over-extended debt, these are cash cows for bond brokerage firms.

An article appeared in the newspaper saying that the county objected to the city creating such a huge redevelopment project because it would divert a projected half billion dollars away from the county during the forty-five year term. As I read that article a thought occurred to me. I would invite the area County Supervisor to our meeting and have him present the county’s case. I told the Chair that I had invited the Supervisor and he said he’d invite the head of the city’s Redevelopment Agency to the meeting as a counter-measure.

Kay and I agreed that it was time to alert the public to what was happening, and we made up a flyer that we distributed on foot to hundreds of businesses and residences in the project area. It started out like this:

NOTICE

THIS PROPERTY HAS BEEN DECLARED BLIGHTED BY THE CITY OF SANTA ROSA

The flyer went on to define blight under the Health and Safety Code, give the boundaries of the proposed redevelopment area, and tell property owners and residents that if they wanted more information they should come to the Gateways Redevelopment Project Area Committee meeting. I had deliberately designed it to look official. Well, you can imagine the response. People who should have been informed about this by their city were hearing about it for the first time from this flyer. We had inadvertently stumbled onto the best way to reach large numbers of people with a call to action. Flyering.

The City was absolutely blindsided by the large number of people crowding into the small meeting room assigned to our committee. I never acknowledged that I was the one who had written and distributed the flyer, but of course they knew. Business and property owners were furious that people were ‘visioning’ about what was going to happen with their properties. How dare the city identify ‘opportunity sites’ where their livelihoods were made? There was such uproar from property and business owners that the City decided to hold a ‘town hall’ meeting in the Council Chambers to coincide with the next Redevelopment Agency meeting. Since they met at two in the afternoon maybe the City figured that no one would show up.

Kay and I got busy. We made hundreds of flyers, drew up a petition for two neighborhoods asking to be removed from the project area, and held an informational meeting at a local restaurant. We walked the petitions around to every single property in the neighborhood where we were owners, and an activist in the adjoining area did the same. We had nearly 100 percent of our areas signed up. I submitted the petitions to the City Manager’s office, making sure to have them officially date-stamped, and got copies from the clerk. We weren’t taking any chances.

The five appointed board members of the Redevelopment Agency were totally unprepared for the huge crowd of angry people at their normally empty meeting. There was no facilitator there and I took advantage of that by taking the microphone and telling the crowd what was going on. They were losing their property rights without their knowledge. Small businesses were in danger of being zoned out or moved out, and these arrogant, officious bureaucrats had the nerve to say it was “Our Plan.” The board lied to the crowd but it just didn’t work and it was a complete rout. Kay and I noted, however, that it was not an ‘official’ meeting and no decisions were made. It was a bold move by the City to let everyone blow off steam and then fade away. They could just pretend it didn’t happen and carry on with their plan as before.

While researching the project I had found an official letter to the City Manager from the owner of the two big malls in the center of the city. Simon Property Group is the world’s biggest shopping center owner with $42 billion in holdings. They had recently purchased a half ownership in Coddingtown Mall, an older center that had undergone a major renovation in the 1990’s. In the letter, Simon Group had asked that Coddingtown be included in the Gateways Redevelopment Project saying that they were going to need a new parking garage. Since mall parking garages don’t generate any income, Simon wanted the City to ‘help.’ I had recently calculated the construction costs for a parking garage and knew that what they were asking for could run into the tens of millions. This was big news. We flyered about it and I was invited onto a local drive-time radio show. On the show I told people that Simon Group had a subsidiary company that specialized in getting property taxes reduced for huge property owners, including themselves. So there was a real possibility that our property taxes would go for a private parking garage while the owner was arranging to reduce his property taxes. We later put the letter on our Santa Rosa website and you can read it by going to Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition dot com, and then More, and then go down to Rosa Koire/Kay Tokerud—the letter is in a link called Simon Says Build Me A Parking Garage.

After the radio show the City was flooded with calls from outraged citizens. The newspaper wrote a story that definitely was damage-control and once again we were confirmed in our belief that the paper was a City mouthpiece. I hounded the editor until he published my Letter to the Editor saying that citizens did not want big business benefiting from our property tax dollars while small local businesses were run out of town and subjected to the threat of eminent domain for twelve years.

During all of this the City had apparently been looking for ways to get me off of the committee. The facilitator had her hands full trying to shut me up (I was always calm, reasonable, and professional—they hated it) but I politely insisted on answers to my questions. The attorneys were angry that what should have been a slam-dunk was getting messy, and the Chairman, who I suspected was trying to trick me into a Brown Act violation, was frustrated. When I got a call from the City Attorney’s office saying that they were investigating a report of a Brown Act violation on me, I wasn’t surprised. The Brown Act governs meeting access for all public bodies and says that they must be conducted in full public view. It’s a violation for more than fifty percent of the members of a group to get together privately. I was accused of sending emails to more than fifty percent of the members. Several times some of the members had tried to trick me into doing that, but I didn’t fall for it. I was cleared.

It was nearing time to vote on the project and I had done my utmost to lobby the ‘non-shill’ and fence-sitters on the committee. It was important to vote the project down, even if the City Council would pass it anyway. Many people on the committee thought that if they voted the project down their recommendations for it would be ignored. The attorney misled them, although I tried to pin her down. She said it would ‘send a mixed message’ to the council and she further confused the committee. We were still flyering and had hooked up with some business owners in the area who wanted to be more active. One of them, Sonia Torre, owned a smog repair shop that was being targeted by city code enforcement. Another was Jim Bennett, the owner of a beautiful BMW used car dealership that he had transformed from a run-down shop to a gorgeous showroom after going through months of stalling from city planning.

A few days before we were to make our final vote I was contacted by the City Clerk’s office with the news that our petitions had been approved and 235 acres were being dropped from the project area. A commercial section of my area along the main street was still in the project plan since only the residential areas had been carved out in accordance with the map we had drawn and submitted with our petition. I was relieved but suspicious. Were they trustworthy? I got the documents and it looked legitimate. There was a catch, however. I would be removed from the committee and wouldn’t be able to vote. I was a business-owner representative and another business owner who was still in the project area could take my place. An election would be held but the only ‘voters’ would be the committee members. I recruited Sonia Torre and told her to come to the meeting, run for the seat, and not acknowledge that she knew me. My last act as a committee member was to vote for my replacement. Although once again local attorneys, developers, and power brokers ran for the seat, I had lobbied my fellow committee members, and Sonia won.

I decided that since they hadn’t completed the process of removing my area from the project, I would keep my seat and vote anyway even if it was just symbolic. By now I knew that they would trick me if they could. Sonia took her seat next to me and the voting began. The City had made a big mistake on the last day. Staffers had rewritten the committee’s suggestions and some of them were the complete opposite of what we had agreed on. They also sent a couple of junior attorneys instead of the head honcho who had been at every meeting propagandizing. Perhaps they felt that they had it all locked up. One of the ‘fence-sitters’ asked the new attorney if it was true that all of our recommendations would be ignored and discarded if we voted the project down. ‘No’, he replied, ‘why would they?’ This piece of truth rippled through the committee like a cold breeze. They were each given three pieces of paper; a red one (No), a green one (Yes), and a white one (Abstain). The room was dead quiet as one by one the ten members held up their votes. Kay, in the audience, was the first one to get the count and leapt up crowing. It was five no, four yes, with one abstention. As the abstainer literally ran from the room and the Chair called for a re-vote (with Kay objecting), Sonia and I did a high five—we’d won!

As I reflected on the past several months I realized that the biggest shock for me was that I had ended up being an enemy of City government. At the beginning I had expected to be a liaison between the City and the committee, a helpful insider assisting with explanations of project plans, environmental impact reports, land use analysis, and eminent domain. Now I had had my awakening. The City had behaved dishonestly and knowingly was submitting a project to the people that was compiled with fraudulent data, perhaps at their direction. City staff had maligned me in meetings, had conspired to remove me from the committee, and had sent out ministers of disinformation to try to discredit me. The fact that a project area committee had voted down a redevelopment project was incredible. I thought it should be national news, since it was so rare. The big fight was ahead, however, and we began to get ready.

TAKING ON THE CITY

I knew that the City Council had every intention of passing the ordinance at the public hearing in early June, 2006, but I needed to find out if there was anything to be done to stop it. Kay and I had agreed to stay in the battle because we felt ashamed that we had carved up the map for our petition and left the main commercial street in the project. We had figured, rightly, that the City would never drop that ‘gateway’ street out of the project. Now we had many friends on that street and they wanted us to help them. We decided that it didn’t matter if our own property was no longer in the project; we had to do what was right. I researched the fight against redevelopment, which had been heating up since the Kelo decision. States across the country were passing laws that limited eminent domain powers and initiatives were springing up. Although we were working on a proposition for the California ballot it wouldn’t help us since Gateways would be passed before that. It looked like our best option was to try to get enough signatures to put a referendum on the local ballot after the City passed the ordinance. The law said that we only would have three weeks to get ten percent of the voters, about 8,000, to sign our petition to get the initiative on the ballot. I called a law firm in San Francisco and retained them to prepare and print the petitions, which would have to be perfect. If the Secretary of State found one mistake in the wording of the ordinance, if we didn’t have every word exactly as the City issued it, our petitions would be invalid. Jim and Barbara Bennett, Sonia and Wolf Torre, and Kay and I put the three thousand dollars together for the law firm, agreed to split the petition books and, together with about ten more supporters, get those 8,000 signatures in three weeks. Yes, we only had 21 days. We had to wait for the ordinance to be passed before we could get started, but we intended to go to the public hearing and try to convince the City Council not to go forward with it. That was our faint hope. We flyered the area with hundreds of newsletters explaining why everyone needed to go to the hearing and speak out.

It was a long night at the packed Council Chambers on June 6, 2006. The Council heard a long explanation from city staff about how necessary the project was and how important it would be to have that ‘tool’ of eminent domain, although ‘they’d never use it.’ I scanned the chambers as the staff droned on and tried to identify the crowd. Kay and I had recently bought a house and moved to Santa Rosa and we still didn’t know many of the players. I saw people from the Chamber of Commerce, Neighborhood Associations, heavy-hitter developers, the shills on the project area committee, and city insiders there to speak for the opposition. On our side I saw lots of small business owners and concerned citizens who were waking up to the evils of redevelopment. The room was tense.

We had submitted long detailed letters in opposition to the project and made sure to get date-stamped copies. We knew that all of our objections had to be entered into the record prior to the vote or we wouldn’t be able to enter them into the administrative record later—they wouldn’t be part of the lawsuit. I’d found a law firm in San Jose that had sued to stop a redevelopment project there and won. I read everything on their website and then I contacted them for advice. I never really thought we’d sue but I thought we should avoid any mistakes that would kill our chances in case we did. So when the City Clerk announced the names of those who had submitted letters and we didn’t hear our names, Kay jumped up and called out that she had submitted a twenty page objection: Where was it? The Clerk left the chambers and came back a while later with our letters. Later we learned that they had ‘lost’ every other page in an effort to keep it out of the administrative record. Hours passed as we each took our three minutes for public comment and had our say about the project. The opposition, supported by Council comments, kept saying that we were ‘afraid’ and holding back progress. It was no surprise when the Council unanimously passed the ordinance at the end of the night.

The next day I went to the City Clerk to get the ordinance. It wasn’t ready she said, and we’d have to get it from the newspaper when it was published. I was nervous because we had so little time to get so many signatures—380 a day for 21 days. I asked the law firm to get it, and it was a good thing I did, because the City published a fake ordinance in the paper. I’ll say that again. The City of Santa Rosa published a fake ordinance in the newspaper in order to invalidate our referendum signature petitions. The City Manager, City Attorney, and City Clerk knew what they were doing when they tried to stop us. The SF law firm was experienced and had seen that before (can you believe it?), so they were able to force the City to give them the actual ordinance. We got our petitions and took to the streets.

We stood in the hot sun all over town and couldn’t get more than a few hundred signatures. It was pathetic and frustrating how ignorant people were about redevelopment and the Gateways project. After one day it became clear that unless we got paid signature gatherers we would never come close to getting 8,000. I tried professional signature gatherers but they wanted a dollar per signature, and we could only get one person to do it. I called around and talked to Sonoma County Conservation Action, a liberal environmental political advocacy group that was often out with petitions, but they wouldn’t return our phone calls. Later I would look back on that and laugh because, like so many of my early attempts to find allies, I had no idea that I was going to my enemies for help. I was interviewed in the newspaper saying that we were confident that we were going to have the signatures, but it was a bluff. The Council was considering removing the power of eminent domain over the owner-occupied residential properties in the area in order to split our support. I hoped they would, and they did, later. But so what? Owner-occupied only? A lousy compromise that excluded all of the tenants, non-owner occupied houses and apartments, and commercial properties from protection against eminent domain.

We had been holding informational meetings for the property and business owners in the project area, and had formed the Santa Rosa Avenue Area Business Association. As we were flyering the main commercial street we’d been followed by city employees who told business and property owners that there was nothing to worry about. Our first meeting was invaded by the head of the City’s Redevelopment Agency and the Chair of the Project Area Committee. They had brazenly commandeered our meeting, held at Jim’s BMW dealership, and tried to discredit me, with lies that there was no need for the small business owners to be concerned. They had also seeded our meeting with shills who heckled me. I couldn’t kick them out because I didn’t feel that the audience knew me well enough to know that they were being misled by our gate-crashers. We concluded the meeting and Kay told them to get out and not come back.

Now, with the deadline looming and still thousands of signatures short, I called the San Jose law firm, Brooks and Hess, again. What would it take to sue? Virginia Hess told me that we had a case based on fraudulent blight findings and that if we could get $50,000 together within the next week we could file a lawsuit. Their last redevelopment case had cost $400,000 in legal fees, but they had won. We agreed to retain Brooks and Hess to create a 501 (c) (4) non-profit organization for us so that the donations would be tax deductible for our donors as a business expense. Although it seemed hopeless and I was exhausted, we prepared for the big push. I would have to raise $50,000 in a single night.

Back when we had started the referendum process I had put out press releases to over a hundred news outlets: radio, TV, and print media. I had tried to interest public interest law firms in our potential case but had gotten no response. Aside from a few stories in the local paper and a couple of radio interviews, we hadn’t gotten much press. Now that we needed to file this suit we had to get people in the room. We bit the bullet and bought a half page ad for a thousand dollars in the North Bay Bohemian, the weekly arts/entertainment/alternative paper. Our ad had a great graphic from Chris Norby’s Redevelopment—The Unknown Government, and advertised our meeting. At the bottom of the ad I had written: We reserve the right to refuse entry. That piqued the interest of a popular morning radio show host and he had me on discussing the fight. Eminent domain was still a hot topic after Kelo, and a statewide proposition was in the works. I was glad to have a chance to advertise our meeting on the radio and hoped it would help.

A few nights later Kay, Sonia, Jim, Barb, and I kept our fingers crossed as the chairs in Jim’s immaculate showroom started filling up. I noted a couple of ‘spies’ including one lawyer who had tried to get on the committee but hadn’t gotten enough votes. As people settled in and I started the meeting I pointed them out to the crowd and got a shot of confidence when someone shouted “Do you want us to throw them out, Rosa?” I said that they could stay but if they tried to disrupt the meeting they’d have to leave. After briefly going over the project boundaries, eminent domain, redevelopment, and the history of the issues, I put out the plea for money. At this point, I said, we had no other choice but to sue. We had tried everything else. If we were going to stop the City from having the power to pick and choose who would stay and who would go for the next twelve years, they had to step up with checks, now. I made it clear that we were volunteering, took no money for ourselves, and in fact had already spent thousands of dollars. Business owners were concerned that the City would retaliate against them for funding the suit, and I assured them that their contributions and their involvement would be confidential. We would never share the names of any of our contributors with anyone. We went through a question and answer period for a while and then one of the older men stood up and said “I’m in! Here’s a check for $2,000!” A minute later it was like an auction house! ‘Here’s a thousand over here! I’m in for five hundred! I can go three thousand!’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—we hit our target and had to keep going.

ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

I’d like to take a break here and editorialize for a minute. Although I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck as they say, I was disheartened by the City’s behavior. It was a fight, that’s true, but did they have to play so dirty? I realized that if they didn’t play dirty they wouldn’t have a project and they apparently felt that the end justified the means. This was a philosophy that I would encounter again and again in my education on UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. If the end could be painted in a pretty scenario, a ‘vision’, then whatever it took to get there was okay. ‘For the greater good’ is the rallying cry of Communitarianism. That ‘greater good’ can be defined any way that suits those in power, and the definition can change at any time.

One of my heroes has always been Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is best known for On Walden Pond, his meditation on self-reliance, but my favorite of his works is On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. This short essay is often published in a collection with Walden and is usually referred to as ‘Civil Disobedience.’ I don’t know why the title is shortened in that manner by publishers, but I wish it weren’t, because his message is that there is a civic duty to be disobedient when you know something to be wrong. A DUTY. Frankly it’s amazing that this piece is still studied in schools, at least I hope it is. The beauty and clarity of On the Duty of Civil Disobedience lies in Thoreau’s curmudgeonly insistence on declaring his right, and ours, to our independence. Not just in body, but in thought. In deed. In belief. The individual declaration of independence. The acknowledgment of personal responsibility for putting civic duty into action. A civic duty to be disobedient when actions that your government takes are known to be wrong. Recognition that there is a clear moral standard and that it is important that we adhere to it. This is my guide.

Now, some people might read that and think that I myself am ‘immoral’ because I’m gay. We have a great tradition of thought in America. One not burdened by centuries of adherence to kings or churches, popes or dogma. Why should issues of gay rights and gay marriage have confused and separated the country? Better to look at ourselves as a moral people in terms of our individual actions. We need to examine our desire to be part of a group. I speak of the need to be part of the herd, to not raise our voice because our neighbor may hear, to cast a stone because the crowd surrounds us. To avoid asking the hard questions, such as: Why have I tolerated the restrictions of personal freedoms because of a perceived external threat? Why have I accepted that individual rights must be abridged for the overall ‘good’ of the nation? Why am I so afraid of not being liked that I will stand by when someone is being attacked for speaking the truth? Why would I try to impose my religious beliefs on others? Why am I willing to accept corruption in government if I see it in my own political party? Or my place of worship? Or my social movement? Thoreau’s most famously quoted statement that ‘a man must keep pace with his own drummer, however measured or far away’, is part of a deeply American tradition. A tradition that we are proud of for a reason. It takes courage, and we honor that. Communitarianism can be very subtle and hard to see, even in your own behavior. It operates in tandem with social pressure. We owe it to ourselves as a nation to be vigilant.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE

With the lawsuit filed and our commitment deepened to assist the attorneys, we felt that we had our hands full. The newspaper had written several articles about the suit, mostly misquoting me, and in one the city manager said that I had a ‘fundamental opposition to government.’ I thought that was really funny considering that I was celebrating my 23rd year as a government employee.

A ballot proposition, Prop 90, seeking to drive a stake through the heart of redevelopment and regulatory takings was filed in response to the 2005 Supreme Court Kelo Decision. I was on the advisory board for the development of the proposition, and was on the local television station doing election night coverage in November, 2006 on the redevelopment issue. Unfortunately, the proposition was narrowly defeated by a less than five percent margin.

We were enjoying our 1880’s home in a charming historic neighborhood outside of the redevelopment area and were looking forward to making new friends and having some pleasant experiences. Kay read the neighborhood newsletter and saw that the annual Junior College Neighborhood Association meeting was coming up in February 2007. The JCNA is the largest neighborhood association in the city. On the day of the meeting I was working so Kay went with a couple of neighbors. A few hours later she came home and told me that she’d been elected neighborhood president. The former president, Jenny Bard, was not continuing, and no one had wanted the position. Kay gave a short speech about her desire to get historic status for the neighborhood and her willingness to do the hard work in representing it. She didn’t talk about our redevelopment fight because the neighborhood wasn’t in the Gateways area and she only had a couple of minutes to introduce herself. We felt happy that now we would be involved in a more peaceful connection with our town. Wrong!

A few days later, our neighbor across the street, the one who had nominated Kay for president, came over and said that he’d been approached by Jenny Bard and some ‘leaders’ from other neighborhoods—people within the redevelopment project area---and been pressured to withdraw his nomination of Kay for president. He said he would, if they could prove that the election was invalid. The so-called leaders had a law student with them who said that Kay hadn’t been legally elected under Robert’s Rules of Order. I’m going to talk about all of this briefly, mainly because I think you’ll be shocked, as I was, at how vicious, deliberate, and relentless the attacks on us became. What we didn’t know was that the former president, Jenny Bard, was the assistant director of Communications and Advocacy for the Lung Association of California (an official UN non-governmental organization.) She was a paid lobbyist for Smart Growth—and no one knew it. Before we moved to Santa Rosa she had hired Dan Burden, a well-known Smart Growth advocate, to come to the neighborhood and give a seminar on redesigning Mendocino Avenue, the main street through our area. It is the main alternate to the freeway and is four lanes. Jenny and Dan, however, thought it would be much better with just two lanes and a big median planter: traffic calming! Four wheels bad, two wheels good.

Well, Jenny apparently went into a panic when Kay was elected, and in a few weeks quickly mustered up twelve (12) people to be on the neighborhood board—they held that ‘election’ when we were at my niece’s graduation out of town. A friend recorded the meeting for us and it was scary. Attendees were primarily bike coalition people, no way to know if they were actually neighborhood residents in the audience voting, and the shouting and yelling was stunning. Any neighbor who objected to the ‘election’ of twelve officers in 18 minutes was shouted down. We did not know any of the twelve new board members (except for Jenny, and we didn’t really know her). Their first move was to declare Kay’s presidency invalid based on Robert’s Rules of Order. I don’t know about you but we had never read Robert’s Rules of Order. We bought a copy and started reading. I had heard that one of the young Democrats in the neighborhood was a junior parliamentarian and called himself the parliamentarian for the Sonoma County Democratic Central Committee—he was also on the city planning commission. I called him to ask his opinion. I had another shock when, about three minutes into the conversation, I realized that he was giving me the ‘board’ line that Kay wasn’t legally elected because we couldn’t prove we’d paid our $10 membership fee (I’d paid it in cash.) Later I found out more about him and had a chuckle—another mistake! Next I contacted the State Parliamentarian (hadn’t known there was one ‘till I found him on the internet) and sent him a fully factual letter with the details of the election. We were relieved when he sent back an official letter saying that Kay was legally elected.

We were in another fight and hadn’t expected it. I don’t know if I can convey to you the deep feeling of disappointment we felt, along with the conviction that we had somehow dropped into the Twilight Zone. This all seemed to be connected to our fight against redevelopment. The twelve board members were out for blood, angry that they couldn’t just vote her off the island. They met secretly, blocked Kay from posting on the neighborhood website (and then took the site down altogether), sent us vicious emails, and called for a trial. They said she was a ‘disagreeable character.’ You’d have to know Kay, as many do, to realize how ridiculous it is to call her a ‘disagreeable character.’ She is calm, serious, soft-spoken and fair. She’s not a stubborn person and is able to hear all points of view. She’s quite agreeable, unless there is a violation of justice, and then she firmly speaks out and doesn’t back down. So, what had she done to earn this label? She had asked to represent the neighborhood at the Neighborhood Alliance.

The Neighborhood Alliance is something that you may see in your town, too, if you look, though it may have a different name. It’s a confederation of all of the neighborhood associations in the city. This block of ‘neighborhood leaders’ is very likely to be pro-redevelopment, pro-Smart Growth, and pro-Agenda 21 even if they don’t call it that. Since it ‘represents all of the neighborhood leaders’, by extension it represents all of the residents—and it speaks for you.

In our town it was created by Jim Wilkinson, formerly a career diplomat assigned to the United Nations by Gerald Ford. Wilkinson settled in our town after ‘retiring’ though he was the president of the Sonoma County chapter of the United Nations Association USA, a sort of glee club for UN aficionados. There are chapters all over the US. It also sponsors middle school, high school, and college students in mock UN Summits where the students learn about UN Agenda 21. He later was to write letters to the editors of several newspapers attacking us, and to give an interview to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in an article entitled: Koire The Face of Shadowy SR Coalition. The other founder of the Neighborhood Alliance was Jenny Bard, the Lung Association Smart Growth advocate.

So Kay had made the disagreeable move of asking former president Jenny Bard where the meetings were held, saying that she wanted to represent our neighborhood since she was clearly a ‘neighborhood leader’ and this group purported to be made up of such people. Jenny Bard refused to tell her and said she wanted to continue to represent the neighborhood. John Sutter was the chair of the NA at the time. I called him and asked where the meetings were held and he initially refused to tell me, saying that the meetings were private. After I talked with him for a while he said proudly that the NA was ‘the shadow city council’ and finally gave us the address. They met in a back room at Keller-Williams Realty offices on Stony Point Road.

Kay and I, along with Sonia Torre (from our business association), went over to the meeting and were coldly brought into a room with about ten people, including Bard and Wilkinson, who were there ‘representing’ their neighborhoods. One of the ‘leaders’ was Fred Krueger. I later researched him and found out that he is director of a religious tree cult, Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation (RCFC), which advocates for an end to commercial logging. They’re an NGO that advises the United Nations.

The ‘leaders’ decided that we could be there for the first couple of items on the agenda but would have to leave. I noticed that there was something about city council candidates on the agenda, which was snatched away from me. Next, my partner was attacked systematically by each person for as long as that person wanted to speak. Kay objected saying it seemed to be a trial of some kind, a kangaroo court, but it went on. Kay and Sonia and I were each given one minute to respond, and chairman John Sutter, a building contractor of ‘Human Habitations’ (a UN Agenda 21 term) per his website, took off his watch and placed it in front of him on the table so that he could be sure not to give us more than one minute. We spoke calmly and articulately about our concerns, Kay’s as a neighborhood leader, Sonia’s as a business owner, and mine as an American. After we spoke we were told to leave, we were escorted out, and the door was locked behind us.

This group was not open to the public and was not open to all neighborhood leaders. It was a travesty and a shameful embarrassment to all who participated. I was stunned that such a group purporting to represent all neighborhoods in Santa Rosa could operate in this manner in our country.

By using these few people to represent the entire city, the local government can say that they have community buy-in when they want to push through a land use plan or a new policy that wouldn’t be popular. By putting the word out to these hand-picked so-called leaders, the city can manipulate the public and sideline those real citizens who come forward to object. Kay went down to city council the following Tuesday and informed the city, on camera, that there is a group in town calling itself the ‘shadow city council.’ It should have been in the newspaper.

Just after this there was a neighborhood meeting called by the board to label Kay a ‘disagreeable character’ and ‘investigate’ her. No kidding. Kay and I went early to the Odd Fellows Hall and we rearranged the chairs so that there would be a long table in front for the board and audience seating facing it. We brought an American flag in from another room. When Kay, as President, called the meeting to order she announced that we would all say the pledge of allegiance. The board was clearly annoyed and angry but grudgingly stood while Kay led the pledge. She had wanted to remind them that in America we stand for truth and justice for all. There were only about a dozen ‘neighbors’ in the audience, along with a Santa Rosa Press Democrat columnist who had written a libelous column about Kay the week before. The board got down to it quickly and wanted to vote to investigate her without Kay or anyone else having a chance to speak. I stood up and said the board action was shameless and an outrage. I repeated that as the whole board screamed at me to sit down and shut up. As I looked at their red faces and open mouths the sound of their shouts was like dogs barking. It was a surrealistic moment that I will never forget. I turned my back on them and said that they could call the police if they wanted but I would not sit down and would not shut up. This was an outrage. I had never in my life seen anything like it. The few neighbors in the audience sat paralyzed and silent, to my disappointment.

Kay remained calm and managed the meeting. Minutes later the board voted 12-1 to investigate Kay, with her vote the single dissent. The idea of an investigation was crazy. It was pure harassment. There was absolutely nothing to ‘investigate.’ The Press Democrat columnist wrote another article and named me as disrupting the meeting with my shouts of ‘shameless.’ Later when I read Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai I realized that we had been the victims of ‘struggle meetings’ such as were used in Communist China in the 1960’s to break down society.

After this I got serious about finding out who these board members were. They were either shills or toadies or stood to gain from redevelopment or were on the boards of environmental groups. A couple of them seemed to be mentally unstable; one of whom sent us a vicious email saying that we ‘could continue to live in the neighborhood’ but would not be allowed to participate in leadership. I think he was even too crazy for the board—he was purged a few months later. I drew charts and put organizations, people, groups, non-profits, government officials, and ideologies on them with lines linking the connecting elements. The strange thing was that redevelopment seemed to be at the center of everything. I wondered if I was just obsessed or if we had inadvertently stepped into the heart of a snake pit.

The main board member of interest was Gary Wysocky, formerly the president of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition. The bike coalition had been very aggressive in supporting the Gateways Redevelopment project. Wysocky had attended a ‘training’ by the Thunderhead Alliance, where he was so impressed that his quote was used on their literature. It still is—here’s his quote:

“A how-to kit for influencing public policy. I learned methods and tactics I have used on a regular basis. It’s now Board policy that at least one Member each year attend a Thunderhead Training.” — Gary Wysocky, President, Sonoma County Bike Coalition

Many national environmental and transportation advocacy groups sponsor candidate and leadership trainings. This is one reason why you’ll find the same jargon and reasoning used throughout the country. They’ve been trained. That attitude of superiority is fostered in weak people. They are told that they’re better than others because they live with less. They’re told that ‘wealth-building’ is bad because it creates an ‘unbalanced’ society (social in-equity) and it’s better to work for a non-profit earning low wages. Hey, it’s the New Poverty—it’s hip, it’s cool, it’s the new wave of the going forward. Riding a bike shows that you are ‘redefining progress’ (I’m not making this up). Anyone who objects to whatever is defined as ‘social equity’ is called a ‘hater.’ Remember that bullying is becoming a crime. So it’s a short jump from being labeled a ‘hater’ and user of ‘hate speech’ to being identified as committing a community crime. There’s a term called flipping. That’s when you’re accused of doing or saying what is actually being done or said to you. We have had this tactic used on us. Yes, this is part of the tool kit for influencing public policy. Methods and tactics.

So, what did they teach him? Thunderhead Alliance/People Powered Movement calls this ‘the only professional campaign training series for leaders of bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations.’ You learn to promote ‘complete streets,’ fundraise, and—this is my favorite—’map out the power structure in your community, support and leverage allies, and neutralize and convert enemies!’ Knowing this, plus knowing that Enterprise Community Development (the huge national government-subsidized low-income Smart Growth developer) was on the board of Thunderhead Alliance, made my blood run cold. The bicycle coalitions are the shock troops for redevelopment, agitating for Smart Growth and complete streets.

Here’s Thunderhead’s flyer for the 2007 training:

Thunderhead Training

Winning Campaigns

Washington, D.C. • October 5-7, 2007

PLUS Lobby Training on October 8 and Hill Visits on October 9

The only professional campaign training series for leaders of bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations.

Join your fellow bicycle and pedestrian advocacy leaders to learn from expert coaches and each other through Thunderhead’s proven curriculum on choosing, directing, and winning campaigns to promote complete streets, where walking and bicycling are safe and commonplace.

After three days of fun and inspiring work with the country’s leading experts in advocacy, you'll come away with the tools and confidence to be a leader in your community-one who knows not just how to advocate for improvements, but win them!

You’ll learn how to:

- choose the right issue;

- set realistic but visionary goals, choose the best strategies and tactics, and stick to timelines;

- map out the power structure in your community, support and leverage allies, neutralize and convert enemies!

- communicate effectively, reaching the right audience with the right message through the right media,…and

- raise money, to strengthen your organization for the next bigger victory!

In the end, you’ll have a detailed campaign blueprint that will assure a victorious campaign and set up your organization for greater victories in the future.

Registration is only $250 and includes Friday’s reception, Saturday’s breakfast, lunch, bicycle tour and party, and Sunday’s breakfast and lunch. Lobby Training on Monday and Hill visits on Tuesday are INCLUDED. $100 for Lobby Training and Hill Visits only. Discounts are available for additional representatives from the same organization.

Register today at www.thunderheadalliance.org

“A how-to kit for influencing public policy. I learned methods and tactics I have used on a regular basis. It’s now Board policy that at least one Member each year attend a Thunderhead Training.”-Gay Wysocky, President, Sonoma Country Bike Coalition

“Even though I have a Master’s Degree in Public Administration and many years of experience, the training was all new information to me, and well worth the time, travel, and cost!”- Emily Drennen. Acting Executive Director, Walk San Francisco

“What’s unique about Thunderhead trainings is that it is custom tailored; everything was applicable to us as a bicycle advocacy group. It’s one of the best things I’ve done as the Executive Director of my organization. This will energize you and return you home refreshed and ready to do things with a new perspective.”-Adam Fukushima, Exec. Director, San Luis Obispo County Bicycle Coalition.

If you want to have some fun put ‘Natural Resources Defense Council’ and ‘Smart Growth’ in your search engine. You’ll see a photo of a non-descript street somewhere titled ‘Picturing Smart Growth.’ This is fun, really. Click on it. It will change to a vibrant, walkable, bikeable, fully developed street with buildings constructed right at the back of the sidewalk on both sides. Gee, what happened to the buildings that were there before? Who owns that land now? There are seventy cities pictured on their interactive map. Take a look. It’s headed your way. ‘Complete Streets’ is a program/legislative plan that is funded through your transportation and income taxes and remakes streets according to the Smart Growth requirements. By painting a bike lane in the street (transportation corridor), running a bus or a train down that street or near it AND by putting Smart Growth on both sides of the street they are then ‘complete.’ That’s a lot of money for Smart Growth developers and operators of low income housing. Did I mention that about 20% of redevelopment money is supposed to go to low income housing? Do you see how the bike coalitions and low income housing developers are connected in redevelopment?

I wouldn’t blame you if you were thinking to yourself, this woman, Rosa, and her partner might really be everything they say she is, how would I know? Well, we got a surprise one day when we were contacted by the former president of the West Junior College Neighborhood Association, a very sweet man who writes a newsletter for his church. He told us that the same thing happened to him the year before in his neighborhood, right on the other side of Mendocino Avenue. Why? Because he supported the construction of a parking garage for students at the Junior College. You see, the UN Agenda 21 local groups don’t want more parking garages because they want you to ride your bike and live in Smart Growth. In fact the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition had sued the Santa Rosa Junior College to stop the parking garage. And our new friend, the former neighborhood president, didn’t want students parking all over his neighborhood, so he supported the garage. He was hounded out, felt that he was a victim of racism (he is African-American), and lied about by neighbors who just happened to be Smart Growth planners. Everything was coming into focus for us, and it wasn’t pretty.

A few weeks went by and in August 2007 the board summoned Kay to a hearing of the results of the investigation at the home of a board member. They, of course, had never interviewed her or anyone we knew. She had asked to have a lawyer present, but her request was denied because he didn’t live in the neighborhood. No members of the neighborhood were there, and no one knew about it. At the hearing, which was like some kind of secret court, she told them that it was more about them than it was about her, and that she would take this as a declaration of war—we and our business association would publicize this everywhere (we did later flyer the neighborhood.) The board was so aggressive in continuing the process that she felt she did not want to go on fighting them. She had just taken a job with Habitat for Humanity to lead their Women Build program and didn’t want to have this controversy continue. (The Habitat for Humanity experience is another surreal political story but this is long enough.) She agreed to release her position as president to Gary Wysocky and finish out her two year term as a board member at large. As the nightmare continued, Wysocky sent an email to the JCNA board where he said that it should sponsor a picnic to ‘stifle dissent.’ Just a couple of weeks later the picture cleared when Wysocky announced his candidacy for city council as ‘Your Neighborhood Leader.’ That explained much of the harassment. Wysocky’s backers had apparently decided that he needed a current position from which to run for council. He hadn’t run against Kay when she was democratically elected six months earlier, so now he needed to take the position ‘by appointment.’

Can you imagine the stress we had been dealing with in our charming quiet neighborhood? At some points I had literally been afraid. A beautiful small city in the wine country of northern California, and it was rotting inside. The worst part of it is that I now know that it’s not unusual.

A COALITION OF FRIENDS

We became regulars at city council and planning commission meetings for years, going to bat for our new friends. We helped stop the Business Improvement Area tax that would have funneled small business money to a non-profit, Main Street USA. By the way, Main Street USA holds ‘trainings’ for city community development employees and in one seminar teaches them how to overcome their biggest obstacle: Property Owners. Among our many issues, we helped to keep the city’s senior center open by helping seniors argue their interests with the city. We noticed that it seemed that anyone who aligned with us would get what they wanted because the city didn’t want us to gain more support from an agitated electorate.

We did quite a bit of fundraising for the lawsuit and I met with some fantastic people who generously donated to our non-profit, Concerned Citizens of Santa Rosa Against Redevelopment Law Abuse. As always I guaranteed anonymity for our donors, who were hard-working business people. They had to work with the city to get their permits and contracts; they didn’t want to jeopardize that. One of our attorneys had a gay daughter and the firm generously decided that they would be able to do some of the work for free if we would agree to continue to fundraise, do legwork for the firm, and review all of the briefs. I did power lunches, private meetings, presentations, and direct mailings besides our regular newsletters.

These newsletters, which we wrote, printed, and distributed for three years, were quite unusual in our city and covered many topics ranging from redevelopment to the pending closure of the senior center, to the Sonoma Marin Area Rapid Transit (SMART) train debacle to General Plans and zoning. The neighborhood associations in the city had their newsletters printed for free by the city, but they had to have the content approved. How do we know? We tried to put an ad in one of the newsletters in the Redevelopment Area. The ad was for our business association and it was very simple. Just an announcement that our group had formed plus a business card with the name: Santa Rosa Area Business Association and the website address. It was turned down; the city refused to print it. So we wrote and printed our own four page newsletters, and paid for them ourselves. We distributed them on foot to hundreds of businesses and properties. We got to know a lot more people, and I started to think that I now knew some of the finest people I had ever met, and some of the worst.

Someone had made sure that my bosses, California Department of Transportation Deputy District Director Robert A. Macpherson and Office Chief Mark Shindler, got a copy of the several newspaper articles and columns that named us. I am grateful that they never said a word to me about it except to ask me how I was holding up. The culture of integrity in Caltrans District 4 Right of Way is strong. Later the City of Santa Rosa would directly ask the director not to allow me to appraise anything in Santa Rosa for the freeway widening project here. He said OK, but that was because I was handling a bigger project further south. The City didn’t know that, though, and it was obvious that they wanted to hurt me. I got the information by filing a Public Records Request with the City requesting any documents they had concerning me.

Things were quiet for a while with the neighborhood association—they had gotten what they wanted and Gary Wysocky was elected to council. The city council was now controlled by bike coalition supporters. Of the seven members, four were in that faction. One of those, Veronica Jacobi, was a Sierra Club board member who didn’t have a car—or a refrigerator. Too many greenhouse gases.

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER AND IT SPELLS UN AGENDA 21

During this time our case, Tokerud v City of Santa Rosa, went before the Sonoma County Superior Court and we lost. Our arguments were excellent and our support was strong including some dynamite ‘gotcha’s’ that we thought might blow the city’s case, but it was like we lobbed bombs and they came down as feathers. Nothing swayed the judge. There was no jury in this case. No justice either. Although the city had used outdated information, had totally fuzzy math and outright fake data in the report, and had kept in the statistics from the neighborhoods (15% of the total area) that they had removed from the project area, the court still ruled in the city’s favor. My dad, an attorney, used to tell me, when I was a kid complaining that something wasn’t fair in the law, ‘Fair is what comes to town at the end of the summer.’ That’s the hard truth as I have seen it in my litigation support work as well. You can be right and lose. The one silver lining to the loss was that the judge ruled that we had exhausted our administrative remedies, meaning we had done everything possible to have our case be heard, and we could move up to the Appellate level. Our attorneys advised us to do that, so we kept up the fundraising—harder to do now that the economy in 2007/2008 was collapsing. Ultimately we raised about five hundred thousand dollars in donations and pro bono legal work. The city spent about twice that to fight us—maybe they had to work twice as hard.

I had been doing research to try and put everything together and I was learning something new every couple of hours, it seemed. We’d gotten connected with some other property rights groups in the area, one of which was called Sonoma County Land Rights Coalition. Primarily made up of rural property owners who were resisting having their ground water monitored (well monitoring) by the Sonoma County Water Agency, this group was generally on the opposite end of the political spectrum from most of us but we didn’t care. The point was to reassert our private property rights. Through their leader, Orlean Koehle, we had found out about UN Agenda 21 and the light bulb went off. This was the dark heart of what we were fighting.

I read the UN Agenda 21 plan documents, researched ICLEI, looked at government contracts, watched videos, read books, examined environmental group and government websites, and educated myself about the United Nations plan that was shaping our world. I went from being skeptical to recognizing that the ‘planning revolution’ that I’d been observing and arguing against in my meetings with planners all over the nine county San Francisco Bay Area for about 10 years was UN Agenda 21. I looked at the charts I’d made of connections in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County and it was clear to me that redevelopment was at the heart of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, and is a funding and implementation arm for it. Lucky for us we’d been attacked by so many different groups—it helped me see those connections and identify the players. It was big. As before, I had to laugh at myself for my early ignorance in trying to make allegiances with certain people who I would have expected to be allies. Democratic Party insiders, environmental groups, labor unions, civic groups, (did I mention that the Chamber of Commerce and the local low-income housing developer had joined the City against us in the lawsuit?), politicians, the list was expanding. I had even been thinking of running for council and had met with a political consultant, the husband of our state senator. He must have thought it was pretty funny. His wife, Senator Patricia Wiggins, was the founder of the California Smart Growth Legislative Caucus!

This isn’t just a ‘Democrat thing,’ though. I don’t want to suggest that any one party is better than another. People in power want to stay in power. People who want power try to get it. If you follow the trajectory of Barack Obama you will see that the Republican Party made it possible for his move into the presidency. A little bit of digging on his move from state Senate on up will show you that he was maneuvered into his US Senate seat through the collapse of incumbent and frontrunner Jack Ryan’s campaign (Ryan’s wife accused him of moral turpitude during their divorce proceedings; the court records were sealed; the Chicago Tribune newspaper sued to have the records unsealed, which was unprecedented in a divorce case; after the scandal the Republican Party pressured Ryan to drop out of the race where he was leading Obama with a huge 70:30 margin; the Republican Party stalled on identifying a new candidate and finally, 3 weeks before the election, brought in Alan Keyes, an ultra-conservative Catholic African-American from Maryland who is used by the Republicans as a spoiler in races). Keyes lost by a margin of 30:70 against a formerly obscure state Senator from the outskirts of Chicago: Barack Obama. In my opinion further maneuvering ensured his election to the presidency. I don’t want to get into a partisan thing. My purpose in mentioning this is to say that we are being manipulated. Political parties are part of the dialectic. Power has no party. United Nations Agenda 21 is non-partisan.

I learned about the Hegelian Dialectic from Niki Raapana, the world’s foremost critic of Communitarianism. Her book, 2020: Our Common Destiny, is an excellent analysis of the supranational movement of Sustainable Development. The Hegelian Dialectic is the philosophical basis of Communitarianism. The idea is that true freedom only comes through slavery to the state because then all free will is relinquished to a higher order (government).

Paradoxically, slavery brings freedom. This brain twister appealed to Karl Marx and he used it politically. Submission to the state, for the greater good, brings the joys of carefree living, theoretically. In practice, not so much. The Green Mask has to stay on in order to implement this ‘for the good of the collective’ otherwise there will be domestic chaos and an interruption in the business of exploiting the labor of the masses.

And just a note regarding Totalitarianism and Fascism—because that’s what we’re talking about here. Every totalitarian state is based on these five elements:

- Total information on inhabitants and resources

- Total control of movement, speech, labor unions, universities, churches, production, and markets

- Terror

- Vision of a glorious future

- Spartan control of the present, scarcity

Fascism differs in that it allows for corporate controls and private ownership with government subsidies (public private partnerships) and is essentially government controlled by big business. The rest of the elements are the same.

Terror in our country is considered external (the 9/11 story), internal (the anthrax story, the ‘shoe bomber’ story), and global (the climate change story.) Whether these stories are based in truth or not is irrelevant. We’ll still be arguing about that in 2050; it’ll be like the JFK assassination. The story justifies control i.e. the USA Patriot Act, increased domestic surveillance, searches, no-fly lists, and land use, energy use, transportation and education restrictions and indoctrinations.

UN Agenda 21-Sustainable Development is the glorious future enabled by the Spartan present. That’s the Green Mask. The future is an artist’s rendering of blue skies, green common areas, and lots of smiling people on bikes in clean shiny cities. The present, near term, is increasingly more austere, more restricted, and imbued with the panicky apocalyptic rhetoric of global warming. With the tools at their disposal, cities and counties implement the UN Agenda 21 plan. They use redevelopment, code enforcement, bike boulevards, green building retrofit programs, fees and fines, General Plans and whatever else wastes time and resources for ‘the common good.’

Yes, I said ‘wastes time and resources.’ That is a goal of UN Agenda 21. Wasting resources, whether they are human resources or natural ones, is purposeful. As George Orwell said in his brilliant book, 1984, constant war is necessary to absorb the products of everyone’s labor so that shortages and a culture of scarcity can be maintained. Austerity measures will increase. Natural resources will be off-limits. Caloric intake will be reduced (you’re obese!). Manufacturing will be concentrated in quasi-slave labor camps as it is now in China and India. In fact that image fits quite well doesn’t it? The Chinese model? Ground floor factory at the transit village with units upstairs for the workers. Today you’re looking at the pastel drawing and tomorrow you’ll be in a Smart Jail ®. Green!

DEMOCRATS AGAINST UN AGENDA 21

Shortly after I started researching about UN Agenda 21 I began to wonder if we were the only liberals who were aware of it and were taking it seriously. How could that be? Democrats own property. Liberals don’t want to live in a corporatocracy. Free people don’t accept totalitarian rule. Civil rights are a vital element of our freedom—why were people saying that UN Agenda 21 was a right wing fantasy? What was this polarization all about? Was it to keep us from looking behind the Green Mask? We definitely knew we were onto something because of the tremendous amount of effort that was put into trying to discredit and attack us.

I thought of calling the website Villagers with Pitchforks but someone already had it. Politically, I realized the importance of broadening the spectrum of awareness. Being Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 was disappointingly unusual, but I hoped that it was a foreshadowing of the future movement against totalitarian control that will hopefully soon come from the left. The realization that the environmental movement has been hijacked should shake up and wake up liberals to get on board against UN Agenda 21. This is a non-partisan grassroots movement. Whether you drink tea or coffee doesn’t matter—just stay off of the Kool-aid.

THE CITY LOSES CONTROL

The quiet ended in early 2009 with the Humboldt Street Bicycle Boulevard. Humboldt Street is a moderately busy north-south collector street running through our leafy historic neighborhood for about 1.5 miles. It is our local alternate to the busier main road and all of our quieter streets feed into it. The Bicycle and Pedestrian Board decided to ask the City Council to make Humboldt Street a ‘bike boulevard.’ A bicycle boulevard is supposed to be a low-speed, lightly traveled street that prioritizes bikes. It may include roundabouts, diverters, and other obstacles to impede and discourage motor vehicle traffic. A visioning meeting (Delphi) was announced to get ‘neighborhood consensus’ for the plan. Kay put out flyers notifying the neighborhood of the meeting and this upset the board terribly. Had they not wanted anyone to go to the meeting who might not want the street closed to through traffic?

The meeting was a typical Delphi meeting with ‘visioning’ directed to the pre-determined outcome of having the bike boulevard constructed. There was no way of knowing whether participants actually lived in the neighborhood or were coming from somewhere else to influence the ‘vote.’ The plans included removing all of the four-way stop signs on the fairly busy street, installing roundabouts in the intersections, removing some parking, and possibly closing the street to through traffic entirely. This looked like a potential for serious accidents. Some of the middle-aged and older residents who raised objections were called ‘grumpy old men’ on the city website. You can imagine how infuriated they were.

Kay’s two year term on the neighborhood association board was about to expire and it was obvious that the board members didn’t want to take any chances that someone else might get onto the board who they couldn’t control. What did they do? They voted (with Kay’s the only dissenting vote) to change the by-laws to, among other things, not allow anyone to nominate someone for office unless the person had been approved by the board in advance. What does that mean? There will never be a democratically elected board again. The board held the election under the new bylaws, and I stayed home. The ‘grumpy old men’ and their wives contacted us after the neighborhood meeting, and said that they were appalled at what appeared to be a rigged election of bicycle coalition enthusiasts. Did we want to start having our own meetings? Finally we weren’t alone.

I made a website using the extremely easy Weebly dot com website builder and we decided to call ourselves the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition. Our motto is Get Involved—It’s YOUR City! We flyered the neighborhood announcing a neighborhood meeting about issues of concern and held the meeting in our home. From about 400 flyers we got just 30 people at our meeting. That’s the state of civic involvement these days—we’re all so busy. But it was an excellent core group. Besides the bike boulevard we included something very important on our agenda: the proposed Mandatory Green Building Energy Retrofit Program. This was a shocking proposal that had been studied for a year by a city ‘task force’ called the Green Building Advisory Committee. Made up of builders, environmental groups, the chamber of commerce, realtors, and the area’s low income housing developer, this group would write the new green building requirements. Under this proposal all existing commercial and residential buildings in the city would be subject to mandatory energy inspections from the attic to the basement. To enforce this there were requirements that the inspections occur when a property was being sold or remodeled. The energy upgrades would have to equal or exceed 1.5% of the sales price if it was being sold, or the value of the remodel. No property transfers or remodeling permits would be processed until the inspection and upgrades were approved by the City. Wow! Santa Rosa would be the first city in the United States to make this mandatory. The committee was advising the city council to pass this proposal and there were only a handful of dissenting voices (a realtor and some builders) on the nineteen-member committee.

We wanted to wake up the citizens of our city. Some of the people in our new group still thought that ‘the city wouldn’t do a thing like that’ and they invited the representative from the board of realtors on the Green Building Advisory Committee to our meeting to talk about what had happened at the committee. When she came to talk with us it was clear that the only reason the realtors opposed it was because it might slow down sales---not because it was a search of our homes without a warrant. Not because it would cost each property owner an estimated $750 for each inspection. Not because it was a violation of our right to privacy. After she made it clear that she only cared about her commissions I said “Look, we’re not getting any help from the board of realtors or anyone. The only thing we can do is flyer the city and get the people on this. Let’s do it.”

I wrote the following flyer and we made 7,000 copies. About fifteen of us split the city into four quadrants and strategically put the flyers on doorsteps for several weeks. Here’s the flyer:

NOTICE

THE CITY OF SANTA ROSA IS IN THE PROCESS

OF IMPOSING GREEN BUILDING REQUIREMENTS

ON ALL EXISTING BUILDINGS THAT WILL

IMPACT YOUR HOME AND BUSINESS

THE CITY IS CURRENTLY CRAFTING

GUIDELINES THAT MAY INCLUDE:

MANDATORY INSPECTIONS AND TESTING ($750)

OF EVERY PROPERTY IN SANTA ROSA

A REQUIREMENT THAT EVERY PROPERTY

OWNER PAY UP TO 1.5% OF THEIR PROPERTY

VALUE IN ENERGY UPGRADES PRIOR TO BEING

ABLE TO COMPLETE THE SALE OF THEIR

PROPERTY

A REQUIREMENT THAT EVERY PROPERTY

OWNER PAY UP TO 1.5% OF THEIR PROPERTY

VALUE IN ENERGY UPGRADES PRIOR TO BEING

ABLE TO OBTAIN PERMITS TO REMODEL

A REQUIREMENT TO INCREASE YOUR

PROPERTY’S ENERGY EFFICIENCY BY 15%

TRIGGERED EVERY TIME YOU EITHER SELL OR

GET A PERMIT NO MATTER HOW MUCH WORK

YOU’VE ALREADY DONE

Read portions of the Green Building Advisory

Committee’s Report:

www.SantaRosaNeighborhoodCoalition.com

CONTACT MAYOR GORIN: sgorin@srcity.org or phone: (707) 543-3010

GET INVOLVED------IT’S YOUR CITY!

We made sure to put flyers on the doorsteps in the wealthier areas of the city because we thought that they might have some influence at City Hall. Shortly after we started flyering we heard that the mayor and city clerk were inundated with calls. The mayor begged Kay to call it off but she said that it wasn’t her idea and that she had no control over the fifteen or so people who were flyering. I called the mayor without identifying myself to see what she would say about it and she told me that it was just some ‘troublemakers’ flyering and that the city had no intention of following through with the recommendations of the committee. We knew that this was not true because the city manager had ordered work plans and applied for grants. In one of the worst moves imaginable the city had tried to pull a fast one by trying to slip language into the General Plan that said that the city ‘must adopt a plan that requires’ the recommendations. Kay saw that on the agenda for the Planning Commission and ran down to the meeting. She told the Planning Commission that we would sue the city if this were inserted into the General Plan. Since we were currently suing the city maybe they knew we were serious. The language was changed to ‘consider adopting a plan.’

We posted all of this on our website. The news made it to the newspaper and there were many letters to the editor including ours and the mayor’s. The mayor was outraged that the flyers looked official, and said that we had deliberately tried to confuse people. Not true. Actually, if the city had publicized this program themselves we wouldn’t have had to do it. If the neighborhood associations and Neighborhood Alliance had been real citizens groups we wouldn’t have had to do it. Whenever a letter appeared in the paper criticizing the city’s plan I contacted the letter writers and invited them to our meetings. All of those letters were posted on our website. It’s all still there—take a look at Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition dot com, under Green Building. The ‘story’ was that the program was going to create lots of green jobs and revitalize the economy. The big prize though, goes to the Green Energy Loan Program.

Sponsored by ICLEI, this Green Energy Loan program has to be one of the biggest boondoggles ever created. Called Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), it’s a way to have the green dream. Let’s say you own a house and want to put solar panels on it. The cost is estimated at between $20,000 and $40,000. You don’t have the money and you can’t get a home equity line of credit because you’re already having a hard time making your mortgage payments. But the county, because it is an ICLEI member and has committed to reducing greenhouse gases, will arrange for you to get a loan of up to 100 percent of the equity value of your house. You can pay it off through increased property tax payments over twenty years. Doesn’t matter if your credit is bad, or if you can’t really afford to buy those solar panels, because the loan is guaranteed by the property taxes and the house. Either you pay them or the person you sell the house to next will pay. Sounds good, right? Well, the biggest immediate problem with this is that if your house is foreclosed on by the bank for non-payment of your mortgage, when the property is sold the first thing to get paid is the county taxes. Yes, you’ve essentially put your second mortgage in first position ahead of the bank. By calling it a ‘property assessment’ instead of a loan, PACE thought it could pull a fast one on the lenders. You might say to yourself, ‘What do I care if the bank doesn’t get paid off?’ You’ll care, all right, because the bank’s not about to take on more risk that their loans won’t be paid off. So the Federal Housing Finance Agency (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) proposed to reduce the potential loan amount for EVERY property in the county by ten percent. Amazing, right? It means that if you normally would have to put twenty percent down and get an eighty percent of value mortgage, after PACE, even if you have nothing to do with it, you’ll now only be able to get a seventy percent mortgage. So you’ll have to come up with an additional ten percent down payment on any house you’d want to buy in the entire county. If you just want to refinance your house FHFA (which owns 85 percent of all home loans) will require you to pay off the PACE assessment before they’ll refinance you. Still sound good? Didn’t think so. What do you think this would do to property values? They’d drop by at least ten percent, right?

There are a lot of other things wrong with the plan such as that you’d be buying old solar panels for more than they’re worth if you bought a house with ten year old panels on it and ten more years left to pay on the ‘assessment,’ re-roofing (what if you have a fifteen year roof and twenty year panels?), and your potential inability to pay increased property taxes. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) was sued by Sonoma County and they’re in litigation now, but the county is still making loans, I mean assessments. ICLEI has launched a vigorous campaign (put ICLEI and PACE in your search engine) to get the director of FHFA to resign, and have PACE move forward. This is a pilot program that they want to start up all over the nation.

You were wondering where the upfront money comes from for the ‘loans, uh, I mean assessments.’ Simple. They’re facilitated by the issuance of private lender bonds. What’s that? If you’re someone with some extra money for investing you can get a great return on your investment by lending someone else the money to put those solar panels on their roof. The debt is guaranteed by the property taxes, so it’s a safe investment. Here’s what Environmental Finance dot com reported on April 1, 2010:

The first PACE bond was issued by Berkeley, California in January 2009, but 20 states have legislation allowing their cities and municipalities to implement PACE programmes, which are voluntary for homeowners.

“This is fundamentally a game changer,” Alan Strachan, a co-founder and managing partner of Green Energy Loan, a firm that facilitates PACE bonds, told attendees of the Wall Street Green Trading Summit in March, 2010.

“Cities are not structured to be lenders, they have neither staff nor money to do this,” Strachan said. “We can’t wait for each local jurisdiction to get it together. Wall Street could help solve this problem by “coming in strongly and aggressively with money that is commensurate with the very low risk”, Strachan said. “I think we can put PACE on steroids and I think we have to.”

The potential market for PACE bonds – sometimes known as voluntary environmental investment bonds – could exceed $500 billion, but some proponents believe that estimate is conservative and it could reach as high as $5.5 trillion.

As I said, there’s big money in green. Besides the big money backers you’ll find electrical (solar installers) and other unions funding politicians who try to mandate these programs. Lisa Maldonado, the executive director of the North Bay Labor Council AFL-CIO, on her Twitter page, says she’s ‘just your average labor boss, working for the revolution, all about the class struggle and waiting for the great leap forward.’ Yep, you just can’t make this stuff up. Did she mean Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward? What the heck is happening with the unions? I was proud to be a union member for almost thirty years, but I had no idea what they were doing with my dues. How about you? Are you paying dues that support candidates? Who decides who gets your money? Guess what? In 2001 at its national convention in Chicago, the AFL-CIO formally adopted a resolution denouncing sprawl and urging all unions to support smart growth. Why? Because they say that rural and suburban areas do not support union labor as much as urban areas do.

One other thing. Alan Strachan is well-known in this area because he built a lot of Smart Growth mixed use (also called New Urbanism) off the beaten track in southwest Santa Rosa. It hasn’t gone too well. In fact Mr. Strachan went bankrupt, was sued by investors in his project, and has a $6.5 million judgment against him. In another action, the people who actually owned some of the land he built the development on sued him, too. The Bonfiglis, who were 78 and 82 years old, alleged fraud and elder abuse in their lawsuit, which they won on appeal.

Strachan’s partner in Green Energy Loan, Dennis Hunter, besides being involved in oil exploration, garbage hauling, banking, real estate developing, and owning a fifteen passenger Gulf Stream jet, had also made a deal to broker the Sonoma County Climate Exchange (SCX) where he would buy and sell carbon credits, for a fee. Like a stock exchange, traders would use SCX to establish the trade price. Cap and trade. SCX had a memorandum of understanding with the Climate Protection Campaign (ICLEI affiliate that designs energy reduction plans for cities, and runs school programs training students in climate change) to coordinate the program and be the ‘third party auditor’. This is to be a prototype for other climate exchanges around the nation. Another fun fact is that Sonoma County Tax Collector/Auditor Rod Dole was pushing this program hard, and now he’s about to retire with the highest pension in County government…and go to work with Strachan and Hunter. The new company is called Ygrene and they’ll be arranging PACE loans to retrofit commercial buildings using this program in Sacramento (California’s capitol). Retrofitting office buildings leased to the government. Who’s got the tar and feather concession in Sacramento?

By the way, Dennis Hunter is the same guy who provided office space to Sonoma County Climate Protection Campaign, Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, Solar Sonoma County, and the Post Carbon Institute. Dennis Hunter’s Global Legacy Center’s logo is a globe sitting in the palm of a (white) man’s hand.

An interesting thing about the building (31 D Street, Santa Rosa, CA) is that it was owned by Hunter’s partner in the garbage hauling business. It’s an old bank building constructed in the 1970’s and is what appraisers call ‘functionally obsolete.’ It’s a lot of dead space with a mezzanine and low ceiling’d rabbit warrens upstairs, no elevator, was vacant, and not easily adaptable to an office building use. It’s across the street from City Hall and the City bought it in 2009 (for ‘offices’) for a million dollars more than the appraised value, and that was high. It had sold for $3.5 million at the height of the market, and the City paid a million more than that. For a period of time before the City’s purchase Hunter used it for his center. Now it’s vacant and he moved his Global Legacy to another site.

Here’s a photo of the tenant list still up on the door:

Along with the Sonoma County Climate Exchange, Green Energy Loans, the Bicycle Coalition, and Climate Protection Campaign, and their accountant, this cluster of buddies also includes the Post Carbon Institute. This group is based in Santa Rosa and prints publications and supplies speakers on the Green Mask. They say that they’re ‘leading the transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world.’ Post Carbon (what could that possibly mean?) Institute was interviewed for a recent article in the North Bay Bohemian that smeared me, Kay, and those exposing Agenda 21. The reporter also quoted Supervisor Valerie Brown (the ICLEI-USA national board member) as saying that she didn’t know of any connection between Agenda 21 and property rights. Besides being absurd, this statement is notable because she acknowledged that Agenda 21 exists. Up until recently government officials would pretend that UN Agenda 21 was a fantasy or a conspiracy theory. Now it’s out of the closet.

Called “Hidden Agenda,” this article printed lies about us and made up the term ‘Agenda21’ers’ in an attempt to marginalize the issues. Short on facts, long on personal attacks. You can read the article, my response, and see my video of the telephone interview with the Bohemian reporter at our Democrats website under Video/Smear Article or on YouTube. The Bohemian did publish my letter to the editor but they left out the link to YouTube and our website. It’s very powerful to video yourself when you’re being interviewed by hostile press in order to preserve a true copy of the interview. These articles never die, thanks to the internet, so you’ll be attacked repeatedly over the years by people using these articles as ‘proof and support’ for their smears. Counter with your own documentation.

We’ve already covered how the bike coalitions tie in with Smart Growth and redevelopment. You recall that I mentioned that I had reported Michael Allen to the Fair Political Practices Commission while he was a candidate for State Assembly. He was subsequently elected (with union backing.) After he was elected he was found guilty of the allegations and fined. The reason I reported him was that he had a serious conflict of interest while he was serving on the City Planning Commission. The conflict? He was on a paid contract with the Sonoma County Water Agency to lobby for a change to the Santa Rosa General Plan for some property they owned. That General Plan change came before the City Planning Commission, while he was on it, and he voted in favor of it. He never mentioned that he was being paid to lobby the city. His contracts totaled about $95,000, and his invoices showed that he did meet with City officials as a representative of the County. Besides being on the City Planning Commission he was also the Field Director for Senator Patricia Wiggins. I mentioned her earlier--she was the founder of the State Legislative Smart Growth Caucus. Another one of Michael Allen’s jobs was president of the North Bay Labor Council, primarily representing electrical unions (solar installers). Another of his jobs was founder of Solar Sonoma County. You’ll recognize Solar Sonoma as one of the tenants in the Global Legacy Center. This is a public-private partnership with non-profit, business, labor, and government members. Here’s what they say about themselves on their website:

Solar Sonoma County (SSC) is an organization that supports solar and energy efficiency-related policy issues, educates and trains community members in these fields, advocates for a rapidly growing industry, and acts as a clearinghouse for clean energy activity in Sonoma County.

SSC is part of an unprecedented countywide solar and environmental effort that has captured the attention of President Obama and the Department of Energy, who often refer to Sonoma County as a national model for cutting-edge programs.

One of the things they do is recommend installers for solar panels and solar hot water heaters.

OK, stay with me here, I’m going to take you on a ride. Michael Allen worked for Senator Patricia Wiggins while she was rapidly deteriorating mentally. She is presumed to have had Alzheimer’s Disease. I called for her to submit to competency testing or resign after a series of public incidents (see our Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition website/More/Senator Pat Wiggins) and was interviewed in print, on the radio, and on TV regarding my personal observations of her behavior. The Democratic Party did not want to remove her because it was still over a year to the election and they didn’t want to have their plans disrupted. The Senate pro-tem, Darrell Steinberg (author of SB 375, the anti-sprawl bill) refused to replace her and had her serve out her term from home. They brought her in for votes only when they needed her and she had to be shown which button to push for a vote. My statements to the press were ‘Who is writing the legislation she has been sponsoring? Who is acting as our Senator?’ Remember that I said that Michael Allen, her Field Director, had been on contract to the Sonoma County Water Agency when I busted him on a conflict of interest? I’m an eminent domain appraiser and I was really puzzled about the reason that the Water Agency said they hired him. They said they wanted a General Plan change for their headquarters property. My experience told me that there was no need to lobby for a change from an institutional use to a residential use when the county vacated their building. It should have been fairly routine. So I kept digging. Why would the Water Agency want to give Michael Allen money?

Well, there was a bill, sponsored by Senator Patricia Wiggins, going through the Senate, SB 730, which would have required the installation of 200,000 solar hot water heaters in Sonoma County by 2017 (average cost $8,000). It would be paid with rebates that come from increases in ratepayers’ bills. A sort of tax. That alone is a mind-blower, but guess who was going to administer the program? Sonoma County Water Agency. And who else would benefit? Remember I mentioned that Michael Allen also represented the electrical unions? Just a few days before I filed my formal complaint against Michael Allen, Senate Bill 730 was pulled. Did they panic? I didn’t just report Michael Allen. I had also reported the General Manager and Chief Engineer of the Sonoma County Water Agency. The Fair Political Practices Commission did not pursue the case against the Water Agency, but they never told me why. Doesn’t it seem odd that it’s OK to pay for influence but not OK to take the money? Shouldn’t both be wrong?

Guess what happened right after I reported Michael Allen? The Santa Rosa Press Democrat put it in the paper. But what else did they do? They published a vicious article about me, with my photo, calling me and my group shadowy, and printing slurs about us from Neighborhood Alliance members. Why were we ‘shadowy?’ Because none of the other members of the group wanted their names used publicly. Can you blame them? One other thing that comes up in this Northern California bastion of diversity and acceptance is that these attack articles always mention my partner, Kay. Why? They want to let you know that I’m gay, just in case that would negatively influence you. I never mentioned Kay to either of the two major attack article reporters but they put her in the articles anyway. What they say about her is a lie regarding her experience as neighborhood president. These articles, as I stated earlier, will be used again and again to ‘justify’ future smears.

What is the significance of legislating mandatory energy retrofits? In Seattle, the city has discovered that the promise of thousands of new ‘green’ jobs for weatherization and retrofit workers has failed to produce results. How many jobs had they created in the first year of the program? Fourteen—most of which were administrative. The city estimated that in order to fully utilize $20 million in federal weatherization grant money before it expires in 2013, it would have to retrofit 200 houses a month (about 10 houses per work day). That would be the only way that the city could produce those 2,000 jobs it had envisioned. How many homes had it retrofitted in the first year? Three. It sure would be easier if the retrofits were MANDATORY wouldn’t it?

Is this all getting clearer?

After seven thousand flyers had stirred the citizens the city dropped the plan but never officially made any decision. The council people said we had a ‘fear of change.’ That’s a common insult—that we’re afraid so that’s why we’re objecting to having our rights trampled on. They’re playing the Shame and Embarrassment card. The rhetoric never ends. There was enough of an outcry, however, that it was clear that the Mandatory Green Energy Retrofit program was dead, for now.

WHEN IDEOLOGY COLLIDES WITH REALITY

Unfortunately, the Humboldt Street Bicycle Boulevard was very much alive. Are you getting tired? We sure were. It seemed like we were always fighting something and it was wearing us out. I’ll give you some pointers on how to avoid that in my section on What Can I Do? at the end of the book.

You’ll see bicycle boulevards, traffic calming, and road diets popping up all over the US as part of the Complete Streets plans. After witnessing the removal of the stop signs and installation of the temporary circles in the middle of the intersections I decided to stop riding my bike. It was just too dangerous. This plan to complete the streets by supposedly making them safe for bicyclists was way more dangerous than leaving them alone. Besides the installation of the confusing traffic circles, the plan called for removal of the crosswalks and narrowing the streets at the corners by putting barriers out from the curb. Bicyclists who seldom stopped at the stop signs anyway now could just sail right through intersections. Pedestrians were not able to safely cross at the corners since the circles in the middle of the intersections pushed the cars into the crosswalks. The city sandblasted the crosswalks off. Now pedestrians were supposed to cross mid-block. What a mess. The center line was removed from the street. The idea was that everyone would just ‘share’ the street equally. It became a really scary obstacle course.

We had done our own survey by counting the number of bicyclists on the street for several days and it was clear that there was no need for it. The bike coalition organized big crowds of bicyclists to ride down the street since it was hardly ever used by bikes and the city’s statistics reflected that. The Junior College Neighborhood Association put out a call to the 1,000 member Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition to come on down and ride on our bike boulevard.

As things started to heat up two bulletin boards were installed in the neighborhood, paid for with Community Advisory Board funds. These bulletin boards were controlled by the JCNA and were locked. Inside there was propaganda for the bike boulevard and for the Neighborhood Summit. We requested that our own poster go in there, but they refused and said no political information could go in the bulletin boards. Just the fact that we existed was ‘political.’ Somehow their propaganda wasn’t political even though it was on the same issue. We posted our flyers on the back side of the boards that we had paid for with our taxes but couldn’t use. We made a couple of YouTube videos of the boards—go to YouTube and type Humboldt Street Bike Boulevard Fight into the search line. I also suggest that you look at our website: Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition under Humboldt Street Bike Boulevard.

Well, this turned into a war. I’m not kidding about that. Neighbor against neighbor. There was a tremendous amount of fanaticism from the traffic calming /bike faction. Just reasonably pointing out that restoring stop signs and a center line in the street would be safer was enough to set them shrieking. They wanted to be known as a city with a bike boulevard and if we put the stop signs back in it didn’t count. They wanted diverters which were barriers that would effectively make the street a dead end for cars. That was definitely unpopular. Gary Wysocky, the former Bike Coalition president who was vice-mayor at the time and was pushing hard for what some referred to as his Bully-Vard, went in person to some of the people in our group and told them that we were not trustworthy and should be avoided.

Anonymous groups of men in spandex, helmets, and sunglasses were yelling at people in cars and tearing our flyers down from phone poles. We had bright yellow flyers that said ‘Restore Humboldt Street’ and they got posted over with ‘I (heart) Humboldt Bike Boulevard’ stickers. Kay got a tall ladder and went up and down the street posting our flyers about 10 feet above the ground. Someone posted some funny but outrageous flyers that said The Bicycle Taliban Are Here. We got accused of posting them but we had nothing to do with it. I made a video of the flyers on the phone poles and it’s up on YouTube (Humboldt Bike Blvd. Fight.)

We ran into someone else late one night while we were out posting flyers who was also posting. Her flyers said ‘I (upside down heart) Humboldt Bike Boulevard.’ It was obvious that there were a lot of people who were upset. A group of disabled neighbors was angry that the curb cuts were now in the wrong place—they couldn’t cross at the corners and they felt vulnerable. This gave us an idea. We made a formal complaint to the Federal Highways Administration saying that the street was not Americans with Disabilities Act compliant. The city had just been required to do two million dollars in upgrades for non-ADA compliant city buildings. Maybe our complaint would stop this dangerous street redesign from becoming permanent.

This was supposed to be a six month trial but it was still up 18 months later when, after a dozen Delphi meetings, letters to the editor, presentations to the individual council members, and neighborhood meetings, we met for the final showdown at the city council chambers. We had sponsored a petition to restore the street, and it had nearly 700 local signatures on it. We wanted those circles out of the street and the stop signs back in. Many, many near-misses had taken their toll. The city staffer was incompetent and had apparently misrepresented the statistics for the numbers of cars and bikes on the street. The fire and police had grumbled about the circles but had gone along with it. The ambulance service hadn’t been consulted. The elementary school parents and administration were against it. At the all-evening-long council meeting lines of people spoke out. I went down and said “This is what happens when ideology collides with reality.”

We believe that our report on the ADA issue combined with our publicizing the information that the completed project was supposed to cost another EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS and had already cost nearly $200,000 did stop the project. While we were fighting this, it was election season. The opposition used this as a campaign issue, overwhelmed the bike coalition majority on the council, and won. The new council committed to removing the circles and putting back some of the stop signs. No diverters. The new council majority also supports redevelopment, though, and has refused to reverse the former council decision to eliminate broadcasting public comments at council meetings on community television. Although we had gotten our street back, it was at the price of peace in the neighborhood and it effectively exhausted our coalition members after 18 months of fighting.

A PEEK BEHIND THE LOOKING GLASS

The reason I’ve been telling you all of this is because this is the way that communities are torn apart. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of UN Agenda 21 things are the opposite of what they’re said to be. So if the new consensus is supposed to solicit participation from ‘stakeholders’ then the reverse is true. In fact the appearance of participation is all that is necessary. You’ll be there, and you’ll be asked for your opinion, but only on whatever questions the Delphi-er decides are important. Your objections will be over-ridden and the outcome will be whatever it was planned to be when the City notified you that they had a plan. In order for that not to happen you’ll have to make a major effort, and do it carefully or you’ll be perceived as ‘disagreeable’— we know how bad that is. The real goal is to sideline you and shut you up. At the end of the book in the What Can I Do? section you’ll find out how to anti-Delphi a meeting.

One of the big lies about UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is that it ‘builds strong communities.’ It does, but not in the way that you would expect. It is managed democracy, and manufactured consensus. The ‘strong neighborhood’ design came out of Seattle where they had a Department of Neighborhoods run by Jim Diers. He came to our town last summer to speak at the first Neighborhood Summit about how to create neighborhood associations. He’s going around to communities all over the US to teach them how to have ‘strong neighborhoods’ with this template. The Sustainable Cities Strategy Plan is a UN Agenda 21 project. If you look at the UN Agenda 21 document you’ll find that ‘capacity building’ for strong neighborhoods is part of it.

The idea is that neighborhoods need a ‘voice’—that’s the ‘problem.’ The ‘solution’? As Seattle did, the City will help them vocalize by creating another government department and actually hiring private facilitators to head up neighborhood associations. Yes, that’s right. No messy actual neighbors running the neighborhood association. Taxpayer-funded Delphi’ers handle you. Supposedly because some people’s voices are not heard when stronger personalities are running things, this way the neighborhood has a direct pipeline into the City, and vice versa. Now, don’t think that the take-over of our neighborhood association was a natural, organic thing. It wasn’t. It was a manufactured neighborhood association stocked with team-players for Team Smart Growth. Their control gives them the access to pick winners and losers using non-governmental means. That way they can change the city without accountability and direct the change without acknowledging that it’s being done.

Jim Diers is now working with the Asset Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago. They’ve got a pretty extensive faculty. Guess who’s on it? Michelle Obama. Yes, she and Barack were trained in Asset Based Community Development.

Here’s what I had to say about Asset Based Community Development on our Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition website:

“Last summer there was a Neighborhood Summit here in Santa Rosa. It was run by Tanya Narath, the director of a private non-governmental organization (NGO) called Leadership Institute of Ecology and the Economy (LIEE) that entangles itself in partnership with the City (it’s stated purpose is to ‘educate leaders to create public policy’). The LIEE is the source group for the ‘green’ members of the city council, a political incubator, and espouses the virtues of Smart Growth, form-based zoning, visioning, redevelopment, transit-oriented development, high density development, UN Agenda 21, et al. Tanya Narath is also the chair of the city’s Community Advisory Board. The Community Advisory Board is in a position to decide who gets what money when neighborhoods apply for ‘grants’ from the City. A bit stinky.

Last summer, at the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Summit, Tanya Narath hired Jim Diers of Asset Based Community Development, to come and give a seminar (in the city council chambers) on ‘Making Neighborhood Associations.’

What’s a City/NGO-sponsored Neighborhood Summit, you ask? It’s a trumped-up group of hand-picked ‘neighborhood leaders’ who have been instructed in Asset Based Community Development and the Delphi Technique. Their goal? To create neighborhood associations that are managed and manipulated by facilitators who have learned ‘consensus building’ and are using it to further the city’s plans. They call it ‘strengthening Santa Rosa’ and ‘balancing the individual’s rights with the community’s needs.’ This is Communitarianism. You are manipulated into thinking that your ideas are shaping whatever it is the city is creating, but really you’re just window-dressing. What do they want to do? Besides the old favorites of getting you out of your car and trying to get you to put over-priced solar panels on your roof, they are pushing Asset Based Community Development (ABCD).

OK, what is it? And why should you care? Your skills, hopes, dreams, plans, talents, financial viability, and physical condition are recorded on an eleven page questionnaire that they call a ‘capacity inventory.’ They inventory YOU.

Vital to ABCD is the process of mapping community assets. What is that? Mapping: actually putting you on a physical map with the link to your questionnaire. Asset: YOU are the asset. ‘Mapping community assets’ is a way of controlling and managing a group of people and directing them to use their skills in a pre-determined way to ‘benefit’ the community. Who decides what benefits the community? The hand-picked ‘leaders’. By mapping a community are these groups determining who has something to offer the collective and who does not? Have you noticed that students are expected and sometimes required to do ‘community service’? Petty criminals and law breakers are often required to do ‘community service.’ Is that volunteering? What happens to those who do not contribute to the collective? How are they ‘leveraged’ into contributing?

Who is going to get your services for nothing? The favored, team-player, Agenda-driven non-profits. These are the groups that push Smart Growth, New Urbanism, governance by unelected committees, and fake neighborhood associations.

Notice that the words Vibrant and Walkable have appended themselves to every activity in the city? This is due to the SMART GROWTH movement. Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy (notice those are two of the three interlocking circles of UN Agenda 21), a private local non-profit group supporting this movement, is using techniques to find out as much about you as possible in order to get you to volunteer. They call it MANDATORY VOLUNTEERING. If you find that funny now you won’t when they get done with it.

Another thing to notice is how Portland and Seattle are always held up as the model for Santa Rosa. Never mind that each of these cities has over 600,000 inhabitants, and Santa Rosa has about 170,000. We are supposed to use them as a model. In what way? Bikes and energy, and now, VOLUNTEERISM.

Now, all of this seems unrelated and maybe even a big ‘so what’. But if you put this into the context of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development, you’ll see that the end game is to know everything about you and to use that information to manipulate and manage you. Through the use of Global Information System (GIS) mapping techniques, volunteers (church groups, neighborhood associations, bike coalitions) will be used to MAP you, provide your skill set to the ‘community’ and enforce MANDATORY VOLUNTEERING to favored organizations through social pressure. “

Pretty interesting, right? You can see that questionnaire on the Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 website. Go to the 12/17/10 blog post (The Way We See It) called ‘How to tell if you’re a Good German.’ The reason I called it that is because in Nazi Germany the everyday citizen either loved Nazism or ‘went along to get along.’ There was even a local neighborhood ‘block leader’ who was at the bottom rung of the Nazi hierarchy, and was supposed to make sure that you did just that. He was responsible for about 50 houses in his area, and it was his job to spread propaganda and drum up support for the Nazis. He was also a spy, and anyone who spoke against the state was reported to the Gestapo. This allowed the Nazis to keep control over everyone—everyone had a ‘file.’ Today, in common parlance, a good german is a ‘go along to get along’ type. Nationality is irrelevant. Anyone can be a ‘good german.’

A criticism of Kay that came from the neighborhood board when they were fighting to get her out of the presidency was that she was opposed to the City, since she was suing the City. It was news to us that we were all supposed to be going along to get along with the City, but that’s the new consensus. From their Through-the-Looking-Glass viewpoint anyone who objects to UN Agenda 21 is a disagreeable character. If you don’t want to go along with the pre-approved, pre-determined outcome you are a troublemaker who should not be representing your neighborhood. It appears that the real goal is to dismantle and reconstruct neighborhoods, both physically and emotionally. To break down allegiances, identify dissenters, and encourage mob rule. Social engineering is powerful and has a tremendous impact. Like the ‘grumpy old men’ who objected to the bike boulevard, many of those who oppose these methods have to brave labeling, rejection, and outright aggression to be heard.

THE END OF THE LINE

We got our day at the San Francisco Court of Appeals in mid-2009 and it was clear that we had lost. Although our attorney argued the case and we had the facts on our side it wasn’t enough. When one of the judges asked about assessed values I could see that she didn’t understand the blight issues or was deliberately demonstrating a bias in favor of the city. Our case was unusual and required specialized knowledge but I thought we had provided that for the judges. It was over. We may have lost the case but the city had been stopped from proceeding with their plans for three years. Those three years, 2006-2009, had seen the most precipitous drop in property values and economic activity since the Great Depression of 1929-39. Because of our suit the potential for redevelopment-funded for-profit housing and mixed use projects had disappeared for a long time. We watched as many of the town’s big money men went bankrupt. If they had started redevelopment projects in 2006 it was likely that the projects would have failed for lack of funds. The city had used the recent vote (in Sonoma and Marin counties) for a sales tax increase for a high speed train to justify revising the General Plan for high density residential development in a ½ mile radius of the non-existent train stations. Now, in 2011, it looks like the quarter cent sales tax increase won’t come anywhere near to covering the cost of the trains (it does cover big salaries and pensions for staff), and it will be many years ‘till all-aboard.

So we lost but the economy stopped them from having a wild time with our property taxes. They still have the power of eminent domain for seven more years and the Gateways Redevelopment Project Area won’t expire until 2036, if it ever does. No redevelopment project area in the state of California has ever expired—they always get extended. It just takes a vote of the council saying ‘There’s still blight.’ The supposed blight just goes on and on. And gets expanded: In 2010 the powerful California Redevelopment Lobby attempted to redefine blight to include neighborhoods where diabetes, obesity, and lung ailments are at higher levels. They supported a bill for it in the Assembly. That’s part of the Social Equity element of UN Agenda 21. Assembly Bill 2531 was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger but it’s an example of the pressure to keep this cash cow going.

Remember: the money that gets diverted to the Redevelopment Agency and bond brokers is sucked from your city’s general fund and your county services. Don’t fall for the Redevelopment Lobby hype. It’s great that California Governor Jerry Brown ended redevelopment, but since cities can keep it going by opting to backfill some tax money diverted through redevelopment back to the state, the game goes on. Stop redevelopment and Infrastructure Finance Districts and you’ll smash a big tool of UN Agenda 21.

As we prepared the newsletters to inform our contributors and other citizens that we had lost the lawsuit I recognized that we had done the right thing in fighting. The dishonesty and deceit inherent in the management and creation of redevelopment projects was systemic. Within the context of UN Agenda 21-Sustainable Development my eyes were opened to the vast alliance of power and money hungry environmental groups, politicos, bureaucrats, planners, architects, lawyers, bond brokers, bankers, low-level toadies, developers, labor unions, and business groups who were truly the useful idiots of this plan. I could see how easy it was to destroy our country using the lure of money and power behind the veneer of doing good. By constructing the hardscape for human warehousing, the engineers of UN Agenda 21 have laid the foundations of the future. Build it and we will come. Infill development and Smart Growth, form-based codes and Smart codes, SMART train and Smart Meters, Transit Villages, One Planet Communities, and Sustainable Cities all are part of the Green Mask of saving the planet. But this isn’t just construction of hardscape. It’s construction of an ideology of regionalization, regulation, and surveillance for ‘the greater good.’ When the mask is off you find totalitarian control with restrictions on movement, speech, property ownership, and production.

HANG ONTO YOUR ‘GET OUT OF JAIL FREE’ CARD

You might need it. One of the fastest growing ‘industries’ in the United States is prisons. These are the ultimate in public-private partnerships. According to US Census statistics, about one out of every 130 Americans is in prison, and one out of 32 (about seven million) is under correctional supervision. The Corrections Corporation of America, along with other private prison companies like GEO (formerly Wackenhut), is a member of a powerful lobbying group called American Legislative Exchange Council. With more than 2,000 state legislators and nearly 250 corporate and private foundation members, this benign-sounding council is a formidable power broker in state capitols across the nation. Incarceration is big business. What do prisons need? Prisoners. How do you get more prisoners? Make more actions crimes, and push for longer sentences. The American Legislative Exchange Council lobbied for the three strikes legislation (life imprisonment for the third violent felony) which passed in eleven states. It is being misapplied to non-violent felonies.

Deportation is part of the big business of private prisons. It is typical for undocumented workers/illegal aliens to spend up to six months in jail prior to being deported. That’s six months of government payments to private prison operators. Think about that. We have porous borders and a catch and release program with a little concrete hotel stay in between. Corporate welfare with some on-the-job training for future criminals. Overcrowded prisons create demand for new facilities. Plus, prison populations increase the overall population count in the census for redistricting and calculation of legislative representation. The more prisoners the more representation for the district—even if those prisoners can’t vote. Social equity? Or public-private triple bottom line? Planet, people, profit.

THE SMART MASK

Smart Meters. Smart Train. Smart Codes. Smart Food. Smart Growth. Smart Card. Smart Grid. Smart Home. Smart Yard. Smart enough to see through it? Scarcity and control of resources. Siphoning off money to non-profits or NGOs with elected officials sitting on their boards. Never trust anything called SMART.

MINISTRY OF TRUTH

If you’re like me you use Wikipedia along with lots of other sources and find it helpful with many fact-based questions. It’s the ‘people’s encyclopedia.’ That is, until you decide to update the Agenda 21, Communitarianism, Sustainable Development, or Asset Based Community Development listings. Then you’ll find yourself censored and pounding at the gates. I was successful with a few of these, for a while, but then the gatekeepers found my additions and censored them. They said I was a conspiracy theorist and if I persisted in posting I’d be barred from making any changes or posts to Wikipedia in the future.

OUR SPARTAN FUTURE: NEO-FEUDALISM

I do want to talk about how we’ve been pumped and dumped as a nation (the EU has also experienced this) and set up to fail. I’m not going to go into the Federal Reserve and the banking institutions’ manipulation through the creation of fiat money. G. Edward Griffin’s book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, is a great resource for that. We’re experiencing a devastating engineered collapse in our economic system. Credit default swaps? Don’t get me started!

In an interesting interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program, Gretchen Morgenson, NY Times Financial Columnist, was talking about a book she’s written on the ‘Financial Apocalypse’ as she calls it. Particularly notable about the interview is that although she doesn’t mention UN Agenda 21 and probably has no idea that it exists, she brings up many of the seemingly anomalous elements of the melt-down and bailout. She says that it was almost like the regulators were deliberately not protecting the borrowers and were enabling the banks/Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) to create a situation where they would fail. In fact legislators were being bought off by FNMA.

Of course this is a plank in the Agenda 21 platform of leveling the wealth of Americans to the level of the developing world. In the world behind the Green Mask, making home ownership affordable for everyone in the US meant bankrupting them so that they would lose their homes. Using the tactic of saying one thing but doing the opposite, the public/private partnership of FNMA (Federal National Mortgage Association) made a fortune off of bilking small borrowers, investors, and government sponsors alike. Yes, FNMA is what is called a Government Sponsored Enterprise which means that it is given preferred treatment, reduced reserve requirements etc. and government financial guarantees in exchange for presumably making home ownership more affordable for Americans. In 1999 FNMA was told by the Clinton Administration to loosen credit for low-income borrowers who could not qualify for conventional loans. This opened the way for the subprime market. For details you can read the September 30, 1999 New York Times article called Fannie Mae Eases Credit to Aid Mortgage Lending.

FNMA was a publicly traded company that went into conservatorship (government control) in 2008---after gross speculation on derivatives and the purchase of Countrywide Financial’s subprime mortgages.

Gretchen Morgenson said something very important in this interview. She said that it was a situation in which you couldn’t argue against the idea. That no one was against increased home ownership. It was like arguing against apple pie. ‘The idea was OK,’ she said, ‘it was the execution that was disastrous.’ This is a signature of UN Agenda 21. How can you be against clean air, public transportation, affordable housing, and protecting the beauty of the natural environment? The idea is OK but the execution--BY DESIGN--is disastrous. That is the point. The idea is the candy coating, the execution IS the desired outcome. As Joseph Conrad wrote in The Heart of Darkness: The horror.

You must know by now that every crisis we’ve seen (Stock Market, Housing Crash, Energy Cost Spike) has been engineered in accordance with UN Agenda 21. Gretchen Morgenson puts the blame on ‘greed’ but it’s much more than that. Greed was used as the leverage for drawing these high level thieves into position to allow the markets to crash. As long as banks were guaranteed bailouts, individual CEOs were made wealthy, and regulators looked the other way, UN Agenda 21 could be implemented. Another way to look at this is to say that everything that did happen was meant to happen by your government. Inflated bubbles that were enabled and created by lack of government oversight point to your government as the source. What are the consequences? None. Huge bailouts, no jail time, no confiscated personal assets.

This was the sinking of our country, the devaluation of our land, the crash of our economy, and the systemic vulnerability that we recognize as the antidote to the “unsustainable affluence of Americans.” Now we are ripe for Smart Growth (stacked apartments along transit corridors), public transportation (loss of individual mobility due to high costs), domestic spying (Community Oriented Policing programs), deep unemployment (willingness to do whatever it takes to feed ourselves), and loss of our basic freedoms.

Because in Communitarianism, the ‘problem’ is created, the ‘solution’ is the outcome that you never would have agreed to without the urgency of the problem. So the ‘problem’ is: not enough low income home ownership. The ‘solution’ is: trick a lot of people who don’t qualify for loans into escalating debt situations and bankrupt them. I got three real estate loans myself during the 2003-2005 period and my mortgage broker really pressured me to take adjustable rate loans. I asked him if they came with a handbook on bankruptcy and I took the fixed rate. But that was because I have some experience—even he has now lost his home to foreclosure.

The real result of the dialectic? The housing crisis (shift of private property ownership) and financial system collapse. Except the financial system didn’t collapse, did it? No. It got bailed out and the smaller players got absorbed into their larger rivals. Consolidation of wealth and power. And you’re paying for it with double digit unemployment and total market uncertainty for the long term. The poor became destitute, the middle class is evaporating, and the rich are partying on the moon. Wonder where the money went? Take a look at some of the fabulous buildings that have been constructed in Dubai. The famous rotating skyscraper is a good one. I hear that George Bush has an apartment there. Seriously. Private property ownership will be reserved for the super-rich only.

Now our cities have far-flung suburbs with many empty buildings that are not contributing to the tax base. Remember that one of the goals of UN Agenda 21 is to ‘reduce sprawl?’ Here’s something you may not have heard of yet: A proposed one trillion dollar federal program to enable local governments to purchase vacant residential, commercial, and industrial properties from banks and demolish them. Why?

So that more green space can be created in cities. They call this turning redfields (vacant bank-owned properties in the ‘red’) to greenfields (parks and open space).

In this fantasy world of more and more federal money created out of thin air, underperforming property held in private ownership will be converted to publicly-held open space. Your city, which now can’t keep your existing parks watered and maintained, will acquire bank-owned land. In this sort of perfect UN Agenda 21 spin, all of the people in Smart Growth buildings downtown need a place to play. It has to be a public place because government can’t observe you when you’re in your backyard. In another ‘rescue’ of banks and as a part of UN Agenda 21’s war on private property, existing buildings will be demolished and private land taken off of the property tax rolls. Demolition of buildings (how’s that for a greenhouse gas/carbon generating/landfill glutting solution) and building parks will ‘create jobs’ in this scenario.

Let’s say it again: ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of federal money is proposed for this ‘land-based approach to solving America’s economic crisis.’ That quote is from the Urban Land Institute’s January/February 2010 article From Vacant Properties to Green Space. It covers the ‘story’ that City Parks Alliance, of Washington, DC is developing a federal funding strategy for this scheme.

Can we put this together?

- Step by step: UN Agenda 21 sets the stage for high density development in cities.

- Redevelopment agencies subsidize development for Smart Growth. Only some favored builders are in on the money train.

- Banks were urged in the Clinton administration to loosen their loan criteria and let the money flow.

- Developers built more and more commercial and residential buildings, glutting the market.

- The economic collapse was engineered to cover the migration of business and production out of the US.

- The stock market crash was engineered to suck wealth out of the middle class and destabilize their retirement.

- The TARP bail-out was pay-back for the banks and consolidated their power by allowing them to take over smaller banks.

- The crashed economy is a staged event and encourages agitation for more social programs, along with the vilification of property ownership. Those who own private property are ‘greedy.’

- As people lose their homes to foreclosure and their steady employment vanishes, they will be more willing to live in government subsidized apartments in the center of cities. Neighborhood cohesiveness will be a thing of the past. There will be less people to object to loss of private property rights. Proposals to stop the federal mortgage interest tax deduction will be more easily accepted, thus threatening private home ownership. The press obligingly writes articles about the miseries of home ownership and extols the virtues of living in a condo (maintenance-free!) or apartment (move when you want!) next to the train tracks.

- Instead of ‘social equity’ we’re seeing a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich, as foreclosed property gets snapped up at deep discounts by those with cash.

- High unemployment and government assistance contributes to overall government indebtedness and continues the spiral of reducing our standard of living.

- Private car ownership will become unaffordable through high gasoline prices, high parking costs in city centers, and vehicle miles traveled taxes, and wages can be lowered to reflect the ‘savings.’

- The redfields to greenfields conversions in the suburbs allow cities to demolish buildings and close off services to those areas. Redevelopment dollars, your property tax dollars, will be used for these projects.

- Rural roads will not be paved, making rural property less valuable, banks will foreclose and local government will buy for pennies on the dollar. Less and less land will be available for agriculture, for production, for small scale living. Government-owned land will be managed by or given to non-profit land trusts in public private partnerships.

- Lands will be closed off to public use. Rural areas closed. Suburban areas closed. Forest areas closed. Rural roads closed. Logging roads closed. Camping areas closed. State park areas closed.

- Restrictions on travel. Personal identification required at all times. Health records. School records. Communication records. Email, Facebook, Global positioning mapping, Virtual Reality---all serve to narrow your world.

- Community oriented policing, Fusion Centers, expanded domestic surveillance powers for the FBI, redefining torture, continuous war for peace, eternal war on terror, regular renewal of the USA Patriot Act.

- Picking winners and losers is the official blood sport of the Agenda for the 21st century.

Regionalization of government will take the planning decisions away from local government and out of your control; the little you still have. Rural councils, regional boards, neighborhood associations, condominium boards, residents’ associations---all speak for you without your ability to stop them. They all want the same thing. Control, total information, and social engineering. Think you’ll be able to stop Smart Meters when you live in a 200 unit building owned by your local low income (government subsidized) housing developer?

More information is being indexed and categorized and retained about you than ever before in the history of the world. It is being used to sell, manage, monitor, control, and restrict you. Your government, through your elected officials, unelected boards and commissions, local neighborhood associations and groups is balancing your individual rights with the ‘rights of the community’, and you are losing. Keeping you quiet, sedated, passive, compliant, consuming, exhausted, distracted, frightened, ignorant, and confused is the order of the day. The New World Globalist Order.

The Neo-Feudalism of UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is reviving serfdom as the condition of the future. If you let it.

OK, I GET IT. WHAT NOW? WHAT CAN I DO?

First take a deep breath and realize that you are not alone in this. There are people all over your state, all over America, all over the world, who are with you.

You’ve gotten this far in the book, thank you. You’re feeling upset and concerned about your future and the future of your country. Good. There are a lot of issues that make it into the news but UN Agenda 21, Communitarianism, Sustainable Development and Smart Growth don’t show up much.

So you’re shocked about it. You may even be hoping that it’s nothing, that it will blow over, that you don’t have to do anything about it. But this is real and your voice is needed.

You may be looking for a leader. Take a look in the mirror. This is the real face of grassroots. YOU.

To start, the best thing you can do is to read more and open your eyes to the workings of your town. You’ve heard the slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally”? Yep, it’s UN Agenda 21 jargon. Well, take that to heart, to the real heart of what you see. Take your local paper. Read it. So many of us take the New York Times or the San Francisco Chronicle but not our local paper. It’s a rag, we say. Who cares? You should. Up above I said that UN Agenda 21, Communitarianism, Sustainable Development and Smart Growth don’t show up much in the paper, but they do, every day. You’ll see them if you’re paying attention and reading intelligently. Articles about redevelopment projects, bicycle boulevards, neighborhood summits, neighborhood elections, neighborhood revitalization projects, neighborhood stabilization projects, visioning, local boards, Smart Growth projects, low-income housing subsidies, transportation grants, green building retrofit programs, well monitoring, SMART electric, water, and gas meters, and the people who object to them come out every day. Connect with those people. Tell them about UN Agenda 21. Be a bridge.

Amazingly enough, flyering is one of the most effective ways of reaching a large number of people in a short time. We’ve written some KICK ICLEI OUT flyers for you. You can print them out from our Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 website. Go to the ICLEI page. Get up early on a weekend morning and take these around different neighborhoods for a few weeks. Go during the week while people are at work. Drop them on porches, don’t put them in mailboxes (they’re FEDERAL property, apparently). Don’t let people waylay you and draw you into conversation or you’ll waste your Saturday arguing instead of putting out the info. Tell them to go to the website on the flyer if they want more info. If they want to help tell them to make copies of the flyer and walk them around. Take the flyers with you to the store, coffee shop, meetings, and give them out. It only costs about $5 to make 100 black and white copies. Go for it!

We also have a New World Order flyer that you can print and distribute if you’d like. You’ll find that on the Democrats website under What Can I Do?

Who is running your city? Be a sharp researcher. If you read about a group in your town that is advocating for Smart Growth, for instance, take a look at who’s in the group. Google the names of the people running the organization. Follow those links. Who funds them? What influence do they have on your city? Try putting their name plus ICLEI, or United Nations, or Smart Growth in your search engine. You’ll be amazed at what you find. Then expose that information on your flyers.

Connect with others who are feeling that their property rights are being limited or taken away through excessive regulations. Most people who do own property don’t own more than their own home, but if you do own a piece of improved or vacant land, whether it is rural, urban, suburban, commercial, residential, or industrial, you’ve been affected. And you probably know it. So do others in your situation. Political parties are a diversion. Don’t make that an issue. You’ll find allies by watching the Planning Commission meetings on your local cable station, or by going down to the meetings yourself, listening for a few weeks, giving your card to those who are in a similar situation, and meeting them. Tell them about UN Agenda 21.

You might get a shock, as we did sometimes, when you think you’re meeting with allies but find out that you’re mistaken. Take the chance. Spread the word. Ask us for some bumper stickers or business cards with our website address on them. Go to our ‘Contact Us’ page on the website.

Try to get a group together. Yes, it takes some courage to point out actions being taken by your neighbors, by your town council, and by your community when you feel alone. For an example of a small group that has made a big difference go to Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition dot com.

I’ve been very impressed by the Tea Party movement. I am frequently invited all over the US to speak to different groups about UN Agenda 21. These independent groups are made up of people who want to be informed. They arrive at my speeches with notepads, and take notes. They are active, go to government meetings, and ask the hard questions. They are non-violent, law-abiding, inclusive, hard working upstanding American citizens who are alarmed at the changes being implemented all around them. I have nothing but respect for these people who sacrifice their time, energy, and money to preserve the most fundamental rights we have enjoyed in this country. They are performing their civic duty, and I appreciate that. This is what we want: an informed populace who will speak out and take action. The better informed we are, the better our elected officials will be.

Network with other groups. While you may only agree on one issue, such as KICK ICLEI OUT, or Refuse Smart Meters, for instance, get together with other small groups for actions. Support each other in your actions. Show up at a county meeting or council meeting in solidarity with your neighbors in other towns. Offer to help their flyering efforts. Fresh faces, fresh ideas, and fresh energy support everyone. How about a Coalition to Kick ICLEI Out that is made up of people from every city with ICLEI membership within a 100 mile radius? Do a blitz of all of the cities during a two or three week period. Powerful!

Use social media. Make a Facebook page, use Twitter, and direct people to websites like ours where they can find more information. Announce meetings, expose Delphi’ers, and link to videos and articles. Use electronic media to your advantage. Clip Nabber or Clip Grabber can help you take a video from youtube and download it to a DVD for showing at your meetings.

Get involved locally. Go to your neighborhood visioning meetings. Remember though, they use tactics like the Delphi Technique at local meetings to marginalize dissent. These meetings are often called charettes, workshops, visioning meetings, stakeholders meetings, and task forces. They might call it ‘Your Plan 2020’ or ‘Vision Your City.’ Here is a very effective way to monkey-wrench their tactics:

Anti-Delphi’ing a meeting. A Delphi meeting can either be a one-on-one or involve many people. The purpose of the meeting is to direct the outcome while giving the appearance that the attendees are having an impact and the outcome is their idea. If the meeting goes smoothly, the attendees will not be aware that they have been railroaded into agreeing to the plan that was designed prior to the meeting. Your goal is to show that the plan is not the plan of the people, and to resist being duped. In order to do this effectively you will need to stay calm and make the facilitator treat you rudely in front of the group. This is political theater. The facilitator relies on the compliance and obedience of the group in order to run the meeting to the desired outcome. Your job is to break the mesmerizing cadence of the totally orchestrated meeting and expose the gears behind the screen. The facilitator will lose control of the meeting at that point and the spell will be broken. At that point the entire audience should be asking questions and demanding answers from the facilitator. There will be no ‘consensus.’ This works but you have to do it right. If you make the facilitator look like the victim, the audience will think you’re abusing her/him and you will lose.

Before you attend the meeting, go on the internet and read about it. Look at who the groups are that are sponsoring it, and read their stated goals. Know your opponent. Share this information with your group.

Gather your group together and meet the day before the meeting. The larger your group the better chance you will have to reveal the working of the charade. It is best to have at least four. You have to work together as a team, and remember, this is political theater: you are playing roles. You have reviewed the meeting material and you understand the goal of the meeting. Let’s say it’s organized by the regional metropolitan transportation/planning organization, a council of governments, and a couple of non-profits. You have looked at the meeting announcement and it’s about establishing Smart Growth in the center of your towns with a regional transportation system linking them. It envisions a huge population boom coming and the goal is to pack as many people downtown as possible. The new buildings will line the newly reconfigured streets in the Smart Growth mixed use model: built right at the edge of the sidewalk, ground floor retail with twelve foot high ceilings, two or more stories of apartments or condos above that. One parking space or less for the units, and very little common area.

You and your group decide that you will be asking questions such as: How much is this project going to cost? Where is the money coming from? Who gave the regional board authority to make these decisions? Why isn’t this on the ballot? Are the property owners here? Why aren’t you asking them what they want to do with their property? Are you planning to use the power of eminent domain to remove the existing buildings? What will happen to the local businesses? It looks like this is a done deal—why did you have this meeting if you have the entire project planned already? You see that these are extremely adversarial questions that the facilitator is not going to want to answer. Her goal is to embarrass you, shame you, shut you up, and inflame the crowd against you. Your goal is to send the facilitator packing and reveal to the crowd that they are being manipulated. This is not their plan.

Back to your group. These Delphi meetings are generally either in an auditorium with seating in rows or at tables. In order to effectively anti-Delphi you must:

- Enter the meeting separately and leave separately.

- Do not acknowledge the other people in your group; don’t speak to each other. You are pretending that you don’t know each other at all.

- If you can avoid signing in, do so. You want to remain anonymous. If you have to sign in give a fake name and email address. The reason is that if you are successful and want to anti-Delphi other meetings you don’t want to establish your identity for them. Someone in the group should use a real address so that you can get updates from the organizers.

- Don’t put your name tag on.

- Do not identify yourself as being part of a group. You are there as an interested citizen, just like everyone else in attendance.

- Dress and groom yourself neatly. You are a rational, reasonable, intelligent member of your town.

- If there are video cameras going try to avoid being filmed.

- Stay calm.

Enter the auditorium and sit in this formation:

If the auditorium has theater-style seating you will sit in a diamond pattern; depending on the size of the meeting you may have more than one diamond. One person in front center, behind her a few rows a person on her left towards the aisle, and another on the right towards the aisle. Then continue this pattern by putting a single person in the center a couple of rows back from that row. If the meeting is large and you have enough people repeat that pattern. You can see that you are covering a large area with your people and not bunching up. Observers will not see your connections with each other and will not see a team effort. You are giving the appearance of having opposition in all parts of the auditorium—unconnected and yet supportive of each other. Remember you are there as totally independent members of your town and will not make contact with each other during the meeting, at the breaks, or after the meeting within the gaze of anyone else at the meeting.

If the auditorium has tables set up you will sit at different tables until you have someone at every table, and then, if you have more people than the number of tables, you will sit at the same table with your people but you will not acknowledge that you know each other. You will introduce yourselves as if you are strangers.

You are pleasant. You are friendly. You are calm. You are reasonable and concerned. You don’t express your opinions to anyone near you. Remember that many of the people in the audience or at your table are either paid to be there (members of the organizations sponsoring it or government employees) or in some way connected to the plan. Just like you, they are there to play a role. So, as the meeting is getting settled, check out the people around you in a friendly way. Introduce yourself with your fake name and find out who else is at the table with you. How did they find out about the meeting? Oh, they work for the city? What do they do? Or they may be a developer, planner, architect, environmentalist, council person etc. Is their group sponsoring this event? Where do they live? What city, in a house or apartment? Do they live in the suburbs? Did they drive to the meeting? These should be asked in a friendly way, casually, and not in any way aggressively. You are just an interested neighbor, chatting. Say as little about yourself as possible; you are gathering information and identifying shills.

Depending on how sophisticated this meeting is, you’ll be ‘voting’ with either an electronic device or by raising your hand. Keep your eye on the shills. Are they voting? In a little while you will expose them as not being ‘a member of the public.’ Often they will start at one table and then move to another table later and be table facilitators. Identifying them will assist you in exposing this.

The meeting is tightly scheduled and one of the ways that you can have an impact is by derailing the scheduling. Most facilitators are not accustomed to dealing with dissent and they will become nervous, angry, or dismissive in order to stay on their schedule. Even a delay like: ‘Has anyone seen my purse? I thought I put it down here’ can cause anxiety in the facilitator and make your job easier. Don’t overdo it though.

As the meeting begins you will be asked to ‘vote’ on a series of biased scenarios. Here is your first opportunity. One of your group raises their hand and asks a question. It could be something like “I am confused. I thought this meeting was about getting our input but it looks like you have it set up so that we can only vote on your pre-determined scenarios.” The facilitator will either say that they’re not taking questions now, or give a long rambling answer that is meaningless. The same questioner then says, in a calm, friendly way ‘But I don’t think you answered my question. I thought this meeting was about our input but it looks like you aren’t allowing us to discuss other options.’ The facilitator will try to ignore the question. NOW, one of the other members of your group says ‘I would like to hear the answer to that gentleman’s question.’ And another member says ‘Yes, I would also like to know.’ This will disrupt the meeting because the audience now also would like the answer, and will start to chime in. Remember, support each other but do it casually, nicely, and politely. You want to have the facilitator attack you, not the other way around. Take it easy at first.

The facilitator knows what’s happening but the audience doesn’t. The facilitator’s goal is to get you handled, shut you up and move on. So the first answer may be given again or you’ll be told that time is short and questions will be answered when you split up into groups.

Allow the meeting to continue briefly. When the stack and pack housing shows up on the screen someone else asks: ‘Excuse me but I really want to understand why it is that you say my neighborhood is Business As Usual like that’s a bad thing. We really like our cul-de-sac and one story home.’ Same thing as above. Another member from a different side of the room says ‘I would like to hear the answer to that.’ And others speak up. ‘We’re in a rural area, we don’t want housing like you’re showing.’ Remember your agreed-upon questions such as:

How much is this project costing?

How is it being funded?

Who hired your company and how much are you being paid?

Who owns that land that your plan is affecting?

Are the owners here?

What is going to happen to the local businesses?

Why are you trying to do this without a vote?

Do the mayor and council people support this plan?

Why is the regional board trying to take control of this area?

This feels like a Delphi meeting where you already set up the outcome before we came in.

Are you doing this in other towns?

What is the timeline for this project? (It always includes adoption of the project so then your follow-up question is: It looks like nothing we can say here will stop this project. Is that right?)

Ask those questions and back each other up. Don’t be like a wild mob, though! Keep it civil. Keep your tone of voice down. Don’t let them make you the bad guys and turn the whole room against you.

Let others speak. If it is obvious that you are taking over the meeting you will lose the support of the rest of the audience. Remember—you’re not going to change the minds of the facilitators. You are doing this to wake up your fellow citizens.

The facilitator will try to break the room up into groups, especially in meetings with individual tables. Resist this. Say, “I’d really like to hear what everyone’s comments are. I think it would be better if we stayed together.” Back that up. You probably won’t win but people will be thinking about the fact that they can’t hear other comments. At each of the tables each of you can say “How do we know what’s going on at the other tables? This doesn’t seem right.” Note who the table facilitators are. Were you next to one of them earlier? Did she vote? Say “Excuse me, but I don’t understand how you can say that this is a meeting for the public when you have facilitators voting.” Back that up. It exposes the lie. There is no ‘consensus.’

If things are going badly for the facilitator she’ll call a recess and then she and the other facilitators will watch to see who talks to whom. Their people will casually come and join in your conversation. Don’t speak to the other people in your group during the break. The facilitators will identify you as being together and they won’t call on you or will accuse you of ganging up on them. Instead, during the break you can go over to their groups and listen. They’ll call the meeting back to order quickly.

They’ll ask you to rank lists of environmental issues like Clean Air, Clean Water, Open Space, Gardening. Who doesn’t want clean air and water? Of course that goes on top. Then they justify removing private vehicle use from town centers or charging a vehicle miles traveled tax or a high parking fee. Ask: “What do you link these obvious choices to? Are you going to say that if we want clean air we don’t want private cars?” Charming smile. Back that up.

If you do this correctly they won’t be able to finish the meeting. Voices will be raised. Stay calm but keep asking questions. When the room turns against them and tosses them out, you’ve won. Now, at the door, just outside, hand out your flyers. These can be our flyers about ICLEI or AG21 or the anti-Delphi flyers called Are You Being Delphi’d? You’ll find these on the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition website under Delphi. It’s pretty powerful when people read that they’ve been victims of a RAND corporation technique to direct them to a pre-determined outcome. And they’re given that information courtesy of your group.

But don’t think you’ve won totally—keep your eyes and ears open for the do-over meeting that they’ll try to hold without your knowledge. Show up for that, too. And support other groups in your area who are being targeted by these facilitators for regionalization and UN Agenda 21. Share information you have about each of the facilitators and their groups, and about the program. If you’ve taken video of the meetings show that to other resistance groups. Don’t expect the facilitators to make the same mistakes over again. They will learn and get sharper at Delphi’ing you. You should strategize for the future.

Here’s a post I wrote on the Democrats blog in August, 2010 about a great anti-Delphi success:

I just read a newspaper article on-line that made me sit up and grin. Picture this: small town, supervisors’ meeting, 90 folks in attendance, consultant standing at the front making his pitch and delivering what the supervisors have paid him a small town fortune to come up with. Smart Growth. And guess what? Those folks won’t have it. Their comments surprised me. They have done their homework and they learned about UN Agenda 21 and THEY DON’T WANT IT.

From the Picayune Item Newspaper, May 19, 2010:

A public hearing on what has become a controversial county comprehensive plan, termed by some a “Smart Growth” plan, encountered tough negative opposition on Monday night at the Picayune High School auditorium. About 90 residents gathered to hear about the plan from county officials and approximately 17 voiced negative comments on the proposed plan.

The citizens at the meeting anti-Delphi’d the facilitators by naming UN Agenda 21 and talking about it. They each voiced their objections to Smart Growth and they were a very well-informed group. They were able to change the outcome with about twenty percent of the total number of attendees. The County Supervisors realized that they could not push the plan through.

Supervisor Hudson Holliday: “If they had termed this ‘Dumb Growth’ we would not have this problem. But these people really found a way to make money. This is a slick deal. You all (CDM) will get about $787,000 for a plan that is really worthless. It doesn’t fit here and you know it doesn’t…The old board gave them $300,000 to do a study. That study was about three-quarters of an inch thick. Mr. Carbo himself said it was not worth the paper it was written on. But they did not offer to give us our money back. It’s grant money but it’s our tax money. This board voted to give them $487,000 to do a plan. I have not seen this latest version. The United Nations is not taking our rights away; we’re doing it right here. As a supervisor I don’t want the responsibility to tell you what you can do with your land and I assure you I don’t want the ones who follow me to have that power and responsibility … These public hearings were supposed to be held on the frontend not on the backend…Every study that the government ever does or pays for winds up in more government control. I voted against paying these guys. CDM is a big company, and I think if your company, Mr. Carbo, has any integrity, they would give us our money back.

‘Visioning’ on a semi-rural neighborhood street—a morphing photo. What happened to those property owners?

Go to your City Council and County Supervisor meetings and get used to speaking out. It’s kind of scary at first but go for it. Our city, Santa Rosa, California, stopped broadcasting the Public Comments portion of the City Council meetings on public television last year. Yes, the screen went dark right as names were called to speak, and an announcement came on the screen saying that the televised portion of the public meeting was now concluded. We protested. We sent letters to the Mayor and council, and to the local newspaper. The response was that the city didn’t owe anyone a venue to express their views. They said that if people wanted to hear what other citizens had to say they could come down and listen in person. Since the city had gone to ‘action minutes’ for all of their meetings in 2005, you could no longer read the minutes and know what had been said. Merely your name was recorded. I checked the internet to see if other communities have censored their public comments. I was shocked. This is not the only city restricting its citizens’ right to speak and be heard. NO. It’s happening all over the United States. Town councils and boards of supervisors are not broadcasting public comments on their public television stations any longer. Is this a coincidence? NO. THIS IS UN AGENDA 21. Go and demand that your city broadcast your comments on public television with the rest of the council meeting. Bring everyone you can to the meeting and speak for your three minutes--keep your council and supervisors there all night. Every meeting. Until they restore your public comments portion of the meeting to the televised program.

What’s the major difference between the US and repressive régimes? Tolerance of dissent. Free speech. Open discourse. Public debate. Without information we are censored and in the dark.

If your city or county has shut down broadcasting of public comments don’t let that stop you. I’ll bet much of the agenda items are related to UN Agenda 21 in some way. Comment on those items. You are broadcasting the information to everyone watching on TV. We usually start and end our comments by stating our website address so that people can get more information.

It’s tremendously engaging to become involved locally, and you’ll get to know who’s who and how it all connects. It’s your town---get involved. But don’t let them snow you. Or use flattery to turn you. Don’t be fooled. Have courage—you’re speaking to your entire city and county, not just the board. You’ll give others the courage and information they need to join you.

Avoid burn-out. If you’re exhausted and quit you won’t be helping the resistance. So take care of yourself. Find time to laugh and enjoy your friends and family. Here’s a strategy I learned from an online seminar offered by an environmental advocacy group. It’s called The Power of 25. This is how it works: If you have 25 people in a group you can generate 200 contacts a year with legislators etc. Each person commits to do eight things a year: attend two meetings, send two emails, mail two letters, and make two phone calls. Each of these goes to a different agency or person, but the 25 people in your group focus on the same people. So that legislator, for example, will receive a few letters, some phone calls, a couple of emails, and meeting attendance from your group at different times of the year. You can get together as a group and decide how you want to focus yourselves. Whether it’s kicking ICLEI out of your town or informing others about UN Agenda 21, you’ll project a large presence with 200 contacts and no one will burn out. I haven’t tried this myself—I’m too busy!

Run for office yourself. From school board to water board to town council and statewide office, to your board of realtors or union, we need more informed people to serve. Even if you don’t win, and it’s hard to get there without money, you’ll bring UN Agenda 21 into the debate and out in the open.

How about making a donation? Operators are standing by! Seriously, though, if you don’t want to be active or can’t for some reason, your donation of any amount can help keep those of us who are traveling, writing, printing flyers, making bumper stickers, paying for websites and email outreach, and speaking to groups energized and active. We have a donate button on our Democrats Against UN Agenda 21 website (Donate/Contact Us page) and other groups do as well. Your donation is very much appreciated.

Host a Movie Night! There are lots of great movies, documentaries, and speeches that you can buy on the internet or just show from your computer. Do you have a small office or shop that you can show movies in after work? Invite a few people and watch them together, and discuss. Make it a regular once-a-week thing and you’ll be surprised how fast it grows. You can then move into more active participation.

Involve young people in the discussion. If you have children or grandchildren engage them in these discussions and show them how they are being indoctrinated. Listen to what they’re telling you about school programs and social media. Point out how they’re being manipulated. Ask them to show you examples, make it a game.

Have your group sponsor a ‘Best Video’ award for a video on UN Agenda 21. Offer a $250 prize for the best five minute video on UN Agenda 21’s impacts locally. Put your notices up at the local colleges and high schools. Then post the winner and the runners-up on Youtube. Have an awards banquet. Put it in the paper. Show the film as a short at film festivals. Put it on your community media channel. Sounds like fun!

When you’re discussing UN Agenda 21 with people who advocate for the sustainability movement think about their arguments. Are they logical? If they advocate for high density development in the center of your town, ask them: Why do you support vertical sprawl? Ask them: Did you know that low-income housing developments do not pay property tax? Did you know that they do not contribute to paying for city services? Ask them: Did you know that property taxes on new developments in an area that has been declared blighted contribute very little to the schools, hospitals, police and fire? The majority of their property tax is diverted to the Redevelopment Agency to pay off redevelopment bonds. If they bring up issues that raise questions for you, research the answers. Use it as a learning opportunity.

Read opposing viewpoints. I make it a habit to read websites for environmental groups, bike groups and as many of the Smart Growth advocacy sites as I can stand. It helps you clarify your thoughts and prepares you for debate.

Take advantage of any media opportunities that come your way. I never turn down an invitation to be on the radio or television. I just do my best and get the information out. I’m grateful to Maggie Roddin (The Unsolicited Opinion), Dr. Stan Monteith (Radio Liberty), Jeff Rense (Rense Radio), Ernest Hancock (Freedom’s Phoenix) and the many other radio talk show hosts who have had me on their shows. Glenn Beck posted my East Bay Tea Party speech on his website, and I didn’t even know who he was at the time! I think more people have now seen that video than I have met in my life. When I am interviewed by hostile press I conduct the interview by telephone and video it myself.

Use your group to attract media attention by doing some political theater. Put out a press release when you’re going to demand that your council KICK ICLEI OUT. Have a press conference at City Hall. Use a big cardboard boot! Nominate one knowledgeable member as your press liaison.

Here’s a way for your voice to be heard in every newspaper and magazine in the nation: Go on their online sites and comment on articles related to UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. Most sites will allow anonymous posting, if you wish to be anonymous.

Do you subscribe to a newsletter? Write something for it. Go ahead! Do your best and don’t worry if you don’t get it all in there.

Start a blog. Just do it, it’s easy! Weebly is a terrific web-building site. It’s free and you can easily have a website and blog in about 5 minutes. As you learn more, post it. Link to others. Get support by finding others, like us, who have awakened to UN Agenda 21 and Communitarianism.

Do you have a community media center in your town? At the college or high school there may be a local TV cable station with classes in how to do a local TV show. It’s fun, you learn a lot, and you get your show on the air. Try a ‘man on the street’ show. Ask everyone you meet: ‘Did you know that (your town) was a member of ICLEI?’ or ‘Did you know that sustainable development is a United Nations plan?’

Pull your financial support. If you are making charitable contributions, or paying professional dues or subscription fees to groups that support UN Agenda 21—stop paying, or pay under protest if you must, and tell them why!

There’s an election coming up. Go to the forums. Ask: ‘What is your position on UN Agenda 21?’ Hold up a sign. Find out if your town or county is a member of ICLEI. Ask: ‘What is your position on ICLEI? Will you commit to KICK ICLEI out of our community?’

Don’t look for a hero; don’t expect someone to do it for you. All hands on deck! You are part of a huge worldwide genuine grassroots movement. Being green is using energy efficient ways to conserve, and using intelligent means to preserve our lives on the earth. You don’t have to lose your free speech rights and give up living with a personal vehicle, a private home, modern conveniences, and good food to be environmentally conscious. We’ve been told by local groups that they don’t want electric vehicles to be successful because that will stop people from getting out of their cars and onto bikes. That even if all electricity came from renewables, people having personal vehicles are ‘anti-social’ and that streets should be bike only or removed. The work that we have to do to stop UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development has to come from all of us. If we wait for leaders we will fail. Everyone can do their part by doing what they can, and by joining together to raise our voices. We’re all heroes!

If you’ve been identifying yourself as progressive ask what that means. Ask yourself what it means. Think about it. About a year ago I decided to do some research on progressives. After all, I’d been referring to myself as a progressive and I realized that I had no idea what I meant. I was just being cool. Who doesn’t want to be progressive? I knew that there was a Progressive Democratic Caucus in the US Congress and I checked it out. What I found stunned me. The Democratic Socialists of America claim that since there is no possibility of a third party winning an election in the US, they work through the left wing of the Democratic Party. They specifically state that they work through the Progressive Democratic Caucus. According to Wikipedia the PDC, with 83 members, is the largest caucus within the Democratic Caucus of the US Congress. If you go to the Democratic Socialists of America website (www.dsausa.org) and then look at ‘What is Democratic Socialism?’ you’ll find a four page information sheet that includes this statement:

Aren’t you a party that’s in competition with the Democratic Party for votes and support?

No, we are not a separate party. Like our friends and allies in the feminist, labor, civil rights, religious, and community organizing movements, many of us have been active in the Democratic Party. We work with those movements to strengthen the party’s left wing, represented by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The process and structure of American elections seriously hurts third party efforts. Winner-take-all elections instead of proportional representation, rigorous party qualification requirements that vary from state to state, a presidential instead of a parliamentary system, and the two-party monopoly on political power have doomed third party efforts. We hope that at some point in the future, in coalition with our allies, an alternative national party will be viable. For now, we will continue to support progressives who have a real chance at

winning elections, which usually means left-wing Democrats.

You’ll also find a statement that they were founders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

So, what do they want? State and cooperative ownership of property and means of production. While they say that they do not support centralization of power their proposals belie that. I suggest that you take a look at the website, as I did, and start speaking out about this. It’s certainly legal and OK to be a Socialist in America, but if you’re running on a Socialist platform you should identify yourself as a Socialist and not as a Democrat. We do not support the hijacking of the Democratic Party.

Imagine the end result of Sustainable Development. In your mind, move into a condo. Get rid of your car and ride a bike. Take your time thinking about this. Stop eating any food that was not produced locally (within 25 miles). Limit your water usage to 10 gallons per day. Pay a carbon tax for any trip you take. Wash your clothes and bedding by hand and hang them up to dry (try this for a month). Answer your Asset Based Community Development questionnaire. Perform your hours of ‘mandatory volunteer work.’ Report on any violators of the Smart Growth Residents code.

Do you identify as a liberal? We own the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, too. It’s ours. We’re a big country with a lot of room and a lot of resources. We’re cleaning up our pollution, we’re reducing our energy use, and we’re more efficient with our water. We are a nation of rights. Not republican or democrat rights. National, civil, rights.

Have some compassion for those who are opening their eyes to the truth. It’s hard and painful to see that the Green Mask is an illusion. Those of us who have wanted to believe the pastel vision will not want to look at the cold reality of the manipulation of environmental concern by corporate globalists. Be compassionate.

Celebrate your wins! Counties and cities across the nation are kicking ICLEI out and being active. Join Carroll County, Maryland; Spartanburg, South Carolina; Amador County, California; Albemarle County, Virginia; Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; Las Cruces, New Mexico; Carver, Massachusetts; Edmond, Oklahoma; Garland, Texas; Georgetown, Texas; Sarasota County, Florida; and Plantation, Florida in saying NO to ICLEI. If they can do it, you can too! Remember to redo your General Plan!

Have the guts to speak out. Be an independent thinker. Our image of ourselves as a nation and our historical reality diverge deeply at times, but that great unifying force between the ideal and reality is the guarantee of free speech and ownership of ourselves and private property. These are arguably our most vital and unique rights, and those to which we must devote our vigilance. Standing up for these rights, the rights within our Bill of Rights, is vital. It is difficult to hold to an ideal, and we have failed at different times in our history. But we always come back to the Bill of Rights, and when we get it wrong, we correct it. Slavery, women’s suffrage, and other important issues that followed the first ten amendments to the Constitution sought to remedy errors or omissions in the original documents. We can grow and learn as a nation, and we should always be working to become more like our ideal. As Michelangelo said when he was asked how he could carve such a perfect statute in the David, ‘I just removed everything that was not the David, and there it was.’

We have a fine touchstone, a guide, a Constitution that defines us, that does not allow for loss of rights or restriction of freedoms. We have seen the tactics used to silence the truth, and they are ugly. Slander, libel, miscarriage of justice---we have lived with this for the past 6 years, because we have had the courage to speak the truth. This information is too powerful to ignore and cannot be silenced.

The Resistance is not something you join; it’s what you are. You are a part of a true grassroots movement to speak out about UN Agenda 21, about the co-optation of the environmental movement by corporate interests, and about the rapidly accelerating absorption of our government into the mega-corporations.

Let’s hew toward a more perfect union, a closer match with our ideal as a nation. Let’s not let ourselves be led to demand what the corporatocracy is in the process of giving us. Because as we become poorer we will shout for more government control, more government assistance, more restrictions on others, and if we are not wise and not courageous we will assist in that plan.

Let’s stand together. We will resist efforts to divide us and look for those elements of our American experience that unite us. The word is out, the mask is off. We are winning. We have broken the silence and demolished the myth that UN Agenda 21 is a conspiracy theory. We know it’s a conspiracy fact. Refuse to be terrorized by your government or anyone else. We can work together to defeat UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development through awareness and action. Now let’s get out there and call a halt to it.

YES WE CAN!

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

The City of Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa Press Democrat Newspaper, the Neighborhood Alliance, the Junior College Neighborhood Association, City of Santa Rosa Redevelopment Agency, City of Santa Rosa Advance Planning Department, Community Development Department, the Leadership Institute of Ecology and the Economy, Assemblyperson Michael Allen, Senator Pat Wiggins and handlers, Sonoma County Conservation Action, Accountable Development Coalition, and others who stood in the way of the truth: If it had not been for your villainy this book would not have been written. ‘It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.’ –Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787

Kay Tokerud, whose courage, insight, and perseverance have made her an ideal partner on this journey.

Mr. X, whose assistance and friendship has made much of this possible. Jenny Reed, Michael Koire, ADB and Dreamfarmers, Kevin Eggers, James Bennett, SRNC board members, Maggie Roddin, Karen Klinger, Heather Gass, Steve Kemp, Erin Ryan, BJ Kling, Mark Shindler, and Robert A. Macpherson. Barry N. Nathan, for his great illustrations.

Niki Raapana, whose books 2020: Our Common Destiny and The Anti-Communitarian Manifesto were invaluable in making sense of the source. Michael Shaw, whose dedication to providing information is unmatched. Orlean Koehle, whose book, By Stealth and Deception, is an encyclopedic compendium of data on the breakdown of the United States and the rule of law. Charlotte Iserbyt, whose book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, is an analytical expose of the true goals and methodology of the educational system. G. Edward Griffin, his book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, is a must read. I may not agree with everything they write, but these are great resources. And George Orwell, who knew and warned us.

UN Agenda 21 is UN American

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From the executive summary of Growing Smart Legislative Guidebook: Model Statutes for Planning and the Management of Change, 2002 Edition

It should be the responsibility of all sectors to provide for, and participate in, the design and implementation of public education initiatives. Although the issues and political circumstances vary widely, finding common ground among a wide spectrum of stakeholders and the public is essential. Part of this process involves building consensus. Educating targeted audiences about the value and benefits of planning and smart growth, and uncovering myths used by opponents to misconstrue smart growth, also are necessary.

Equally important is challenging interests that seek to pass new legislation expanding the activities that qualify as regulatory takings and, therefore, require compensation under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Translation? Your government is engaged in indoctrinating you into accepting social engineering in land use, and will fight anyone speaking the truth about it. If you attempt to pass legislation that will enable you to be paid for restrictions on your land use, the government will fight you.

FIGHT BACK. ASSERT YOUR RIGHTS.