Category: 1

This post and the one after it are for all of us who think that we could never have participated in the Holocaust.

Programs that are being instituted in your village, town, city, county etc. right now, are programs that carry the stench of the future, and the past.

Asset Based Community Development (ABCD)
Community Oriented Policing (COPS)
Neighborhood Revitalization
Neighborhood Stabilization
Know Your Neighbor
COPE

These programs are sponsored by your local government and are designed to find out everything possible about you. Why? Because you're being assessed and mapped. Your skills are being put on a map, searchable through GIS (global information system), so that you can 'contribute' to the well being of the community. Your assets---stored food, water, tools, weapons---are being recorded. Click on this paragraph to see the questionnaire.

These programs are being touted as something YOU want, that YOU asked for---at a visioning meeting, perhaps, where you were Delphi'd. They can't do this without your assistance...and your neighbor's, if you don't cooperate. What they don't tell you is that they also record your limitations, your handicaps, your resistance, your personal behavior, your private life, your habits. The skill-sharing is the candy-coating.

Now read this (from Wikipedia):
In Nazi Germany, a blocklieder (block warden) was the lowest official of the Nazi Party, responsible for the political supervision of a neighborhood or city block, and formed the link between the Nazis and the general population. He was charged with planning, spreading propaganda, and developing an acceptance to the policies of the Nazi party among the typically 40 to 60 households in his area. It was also the duty of the blocklieder to spy on the population and report any anti-Nazi activities to the local Gestapo office. This allowed for a Nazi terror state and was helped by keeping files on each household.

Climate Change: Getting Hotter 10/04/2010

The climate is changing in America and you've noticed. It's getting hotter. The water's boiling and the frogs are starting to look for a way out.

When we wake up the first question we ask is Why? and the second one is How? We've talked about both here in the blog and on the site, but of course there's always more.

Money. Now that the economy has crashed, and that's not a passive thing but we'll discuss that another time, government is starving. When you got your property reassessed it meant that less money is available for your local government. Buying less? Less sales tax for your local government. Traveling less? Less tax available to keep government employees paid. Obvious, right? So your local and regional governments, and even your state government, is looking for money. And is finding it.

Grants. Public/private partnerships. These grants come with conditions and requirements. They include Agenda 21 goals. In fact you might say that they exist solely to push Agenda 21. Greenhouse gas reduction goals, targets for change, milestones. They might require your local city council to set a greenhouse gas emission goal at 10% below 1990 levels by the year 2015. Schools are given programs that teach children that the earth is dying and they are to blame.

So the local government hires grant-paid facilitators to Delphi you with meeting after meeting where you're told that you're addicted to oil, to energy, to water. They tell you that you should be ashamed to drive, that you should be growing your own food in your yard, but by the way, you're a greedy user if you have a yard and use water. You should be on your bike, since you're fat and lazy and costing too much in health care, and you're anti-social if you drive anyway. All of this is mandated by the grants the governments need to stay alive. You need to get poor quick, and this concept is glorified as a kind of new age sainthood for whites. The new poverty.

A bike helmet immediately says you're cool, you care, you're doing your part, you're hip, you count, you're the wave of the going forward. Because the bike movement is the wedge. Trans-form. You see, if you only ride a bike you won't notice that you can't afford a car. If you are in a condo because you lost your home you can feel superior to those with a yard. If you grow your food in a community garden it will be easier to accept the new poverty. It's fun!

Be part of the dominant group, the group that is empowered to watch and 'community police' you. The ones who will shame you if you have too many lights on, or drive your car, or take a vacation in a plane. Have you paid for your Carbon Offset credits yet? So what if you recycle---everyone does that. Big deal if you have fluorescent lightbulbs---it's not enough. My kid is volunteering 5 nights a week at the Bike Coalition, and my husband is coordinator for advocacy at the Lung Association, after work, and I am doing a neighborhood survey to map the community for Asset Based Community Development. What are you doing?

Getting hot?

They're coming 09/21/2010

It's kind of an invasion of the body snatchers moment when you see the full face of Communitarianism coming at you, in your town.

That's the feeling I got when I saw the results of the Neighborhood Summit held just a month ago. See my 8/29 post. The plan is to start right up with Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). That's the smiley faced invader who knocks on your door and wants to know all about you 'for the community.' You'll be asked to answer a questionnaire about your talents so that you can then be 'volunteered' to do your part in the 'community'. This is called 'mapping'. Yes, you'll be entered into a data-base that is coded to your location, and identifies your responses as well as the observations of the 'interviewer'. These questionnaires are very detailed, extremely detailed, and break tasks down into many parts so that much will be known about you. The way you respond, your attitude, the condition of your home, who is in it with you, what books you have in your house, your comments, all will be recorded.
Why?
Because you'll be needed to do mandatory volunteering, or perhaps because you won't, or aren't able to do it, and that is important information.
Listen, my friend. This is serious. We truly are in a deeply dangerous time. Share this information with your friends, family, neighbors, in casual conversation. Spread the word. Asset based community development is here.
You are the asset.

What part of Mandatory Volunteering don't you understand? 08/29/2010

The City of Santa Rosa along with the Neighborhood Alliance, and the Leadership Institute of Ecology and Economy (Tanya Narath is the executive director and also the chair of the city's Community Advisory Board) put on a "Neighborhood Summit" about a week ago. They were very excited about it. For some reason they decided that they want to 'empower' the neighborhoods and create more neighborhood associations.

From our experience with the Junior College Neighborhood Association (JCNA) this doesn't seem to be a good thing. The JCNA is run like a closed club and has a definite agenda: high density urban development, transit oriented development, pro-redevelopment, pro-bike to the point that they would endanger all street-users in order to push their ideology, and a zealotry that allows no dissent. Anyone who mistakenly tries to take part in the neighborhood association by running for office is viciously abused, maligned and removed if they win without the support of the hand-picked board. The bicycle coalition (itself being used by various parties) uses the neighborhood associations as quasi-governmental boards to push a pro-Agenda 21 message into the community.

Jenny Bard, the defacto president of the JCNA, is employed as a spokesperson/advocate by the Lung Association, which advocates for these same positions on its website (see the following post). Ms. Bard has control over the only two JCNA bulletin boards in the area and refuses to allow anything that conflicts with these views to be posted in them, although they were paid for with community funds.

Back to the 'Summit'. This two day event included an evening lecture by Jim Diers, who was in charge of creating neighborhood associations in Seattle. Mr. Diers now works for Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). That is new-speak for figuring out ways to use the skills of residents in an area for free, apparently, and touting it as a new method of managing communities with those who are completely non-governmental and not accountable to the voters. Changing the community without accountability and directing the change without looking like it's being done. Picking winners and losers.

I looked up ABCD on wikipedia to see what it was.
Since wikipedia noted that the article sounded like a press release I made a few changes to it.
***

Asset-based community development: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article or section reads like a news release, or is otherwise written in an overly promotional tone. Please help by either rewrite this article from a neutral point of view or by moving to Wikinews. When appropriate, blatant advertising may be marked for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}.

(May 2010)Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a methodology that seeks to uncover and utilize the strengths within communities as a means for sustainable development. The basic tenet is that a capacities-focused approach is more likely to empower the community and therefore mobilize citizens to create positive and meaningful change from within. Instead of focusing on a community's needs, deficiencies and problems, the ABCD approach helps them become stronger and more self-reliant by discovering, mapping and mobilizing all their local assets. Few people realize how many assets any community has, for example:

Skills of its citizens, from youth to people with disabilities, from thriving professionals to starving artists
Dedication of its citizens associations — churches, culture groups, clubs, neighborhood associations
Resources of its formal institutions — businesses, schools, libraries, community colleges, hospitals, parks, social service agencies

By the late 1990s, communities around the country were mapping and using these resources in imaginative ways, bringing them out of the closet and into creative synergy with each other, with dramatic results. Asset-based community development has provided leaders and institutions in all sectors with an approach that is relatively cheap, effective and empowering, that avoids paternalism and dependence — an approach that can be supported by all parts of the political spectrum and initiated at any level of civic life.

The first step in the process of community development is to assess the resources of a community through a capacity inventory [1] or through another process of talking to the residents to determine what types of skills and experience are available to a community organization. The next step is to consult with the community and find out what improvements the residents would like to make. The final, and most challenging step, is to determine how the residents' skills can be leveraged into achieving those goals.[1]

Using this model, the communities who hire ABCD speakers to influence their citizens are looking for an opportunity to create artificial community consensus. By creating farmed neighborhood associations they sideline actual community participants who often do not agree with the city policies. These artificial groups use the Delphi technique to block participation by real community members who raise points that are avoided by city-sponsored neighborhood groups. Under the guise of creating 'sustainable communities' neighborhood associations will be developed that are run by hand-picked city insiders who will rubberstamp city programs like redeveloping neighborhoods and redesigning streets. This visioning is supposedly community based but is not. They shut down any dissenting voices and marginalize, ridicule, attack, silence, and ignore those who do not agree.

'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? What happens to those who do not contribute to the collective? How are they 'leveraged' into contributing?

The Asset-Based Community Development Institute[2] is located at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Its founders, John Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, are the major proponents of this community development philosophy.

I checked back regularly to see if my comments were still on the wikipedia site and, after a few weeks, they were removed. So I reposted them. This happened a couple of times, we went back and forth, and then they locked the entry so it can't be corrected.

UN Agenda 21 in Your Town 08/15/2010

We started this blog because when we were searching the web for info on Agenda 21 we found either UN sponsored pages or....right wing extremist stuff. Now, we were grateful that there were so many people who had become aware, and way before we had, but did they also have to be anti-gay, anti-choice, and in some cases, anti-semitic and seeing lizard people from outer space? Why? Why aren't we finding other so called progressive people who see what's going on?

After all, what's wrong with being 'sustainable'? What's wrong with thinking of us as 'one world'? Aren't we one world, really?

As one of us said recently, it's the tactics they use. Silencing dissent. Vicious verbal attacks. Slander. Taking over neighborhood associations. Taking over sections of a city. Using groups to create subgroups and more sub sub groups that then support each other and crowd out any real, actual community input.

Frankly, I feel that my civil rights have been chilled. Frozen. Speaking out is not tolerated. In a sense, a 1984 sense, I am concerned that the only ones reading this will be those who are watching. Funny, we've been called property rights advocates like that's a bad thing. Private ownership of property is a fundamental cornerstone of our nation. Is it that so few people own property now and they feel envious and angry that others do? I noticed that ICLEI, 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 freeway? Why wouldn't they want to share the wealth? They don't have any.

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 was a program put together by Sonoma County Conservation Action, a political environmental group which endorses candidates, a program called "Know Your Neighbor." 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 who 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.

Have you read 'LIfe and Death in Shanghai' by Nien Cheng ? A true account of Ms. Cheng's experiences living through the Gang of Four's control of Communist China in the 1960's. I read it and thought, I've witnessed some of this myself. Here. In Sonoma County.

Neighborhood Summit: It's not about watering petunias 07/21/2010

On August 21 the city organized 'summit' for neighborhoods will take place (see my 5/26/10 post). I attended the first steering committee meeting so that I could see who was in charge of this. The UN sponsored Neighborhood Alliance, a group of handpicked people who purport to speak for their community; the Leadership Institute of Ecology and the Economy (two of the three cornerstones of UN Agenda 21); and the city's Community Advisory Board, another supposed grassroots group sponsored by the city but appointed by the council. Not coincidentally, the chair of the Community Advisory Board is also the executive director of LIEE, and is also the main organizer for this 'summit.'

I have submitted a request for a table at this event. Let's see if I get it.

Why is the city doing this now? They want to identify and sideline opposition in the community while identifying those who want to be handmaidens of the groups manipulating public opinion.

Here's a model for this from Wikipedia:
In Nazi Germany, a Blockleiter (block leader) was the lowest official of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), responsible for the political supervision of a neighborhood or city block and formed the link between the NSDAP and the general population. Also colloquially known as a Blockwart (block attendant or warden), he was charged with planning, spreading propaganda and developing an acceptance to the policies of the NSDAP among the households (typically 40 to 60) in his area. It was also the duty of the Blockleiter to spy on the population and report any anti-Nazi activities to the local Gestapo office; this allowed a Nazi terror state. This was helped by keeping files on each household (Haushaltskarten). Due to such activities, Blockwarts were particularly disliked by the general population. Other duties included allocating beds in homes for visiting NSDAP demonstrators, the collection of subscriptions and charitable donations especially for Winterhilfe and organising the clearing of rubble after air-raids. It is thought that there were nearly half a million Blockleiter. Today, Blockwart is a colloquial German insult word for a person who feels the motivation to keep people in line, esp. by reporting them to officials or pressing the enforcing of rules (esp. petty rules) upon people.
(see my 6/09 post on the 'Know Your Neighbor' program)

Using Neighborhood Associations to manufacture consensus 06/24/2010

There's a group in our town, and probably one in yours, too. In our town it's called the Neighborhood Alliance. It purports to represent nearly all of the neighborhoods in the city, and by extension, all the residents. 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 North Bay chapter of the United Nations USA Association, a sort of glee club for UN afficionados. We found out about the Neighborhood Alliance in a round-about way, since they operate in secrecy.

Our experience with the Neighborhood Alliance (NA) was that my partner found out about it when she had been president of the largest neighborhood association in the city for about 2 months. She asked former president Jenny Bard where the meetings were and said 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 over on Stony Point.

Kay and I went over to the meeting and were coldly brought into a room with John Sutter, Jack Swearingen, Jim Wilkinson, Judy Kennedy, Fred Kruger, Jenny Bard, Denise Hill, Karen Macken, and a couple of others who were there 'representing' their neighborhoods. They decided that we could be there for the first couple of items on the agenda but would have to leave.

Then my partner was attacked systematically by each person for as long as that person wanted to speak. She objected saying it seemed to be a trial of some kind, a kangaroo court. She and I were each given one minute to respond, and John Sutter, as chair, 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, and mine as an American. After we spoke we were told to leave and 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 country in this manner.

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.

Tangents 06/19/2010

In reflecting on the newspapers' attack on me due to my reporting leading candidate for Assembly District 7 Michael Allen to the FPPC for conflict of interest violations I am disturbed at the insinuation that as a Democrat I should have overlooked corruption in my party. Corruption is non-partisan. Just because I am a Democrat does not mean that I should look the other way when a party member has broken the law. Blind adherence to an ideology does not serve us as Americans---no matter what party we are in.

I've heard astute comments regarding Communitarian/Hegelian ideology informing the current political and social condition and they are unfortunately descriptive of the behavior in this tightly closed Sonoma County community. I am beyond being shocked, as I was earlier in my political experiences here, that those with whom I expected to make common cause are actually avowed enemies. Even if I was unaware of their existence they had heard of me, and were 'gunnin' for me. All because I had inadvertently tread on the Agenda 21 lockstep creed.

For me it began when I was elected to an oversight committee for a huge redevelopment area here in Santa Rosa. Redevelopment is one of the tools of Agenda 21 because it places large areas of land under control of those with a 'vision' of social engineering. Private property rights are subjugated to the larger 'vision' which is sold to the public as being an improvement on the existing land uses. In fact redevelopment is used to actualize a plan of high density urban development (essentially stacked condos) with retail on the ground floor. These units, often hundreds of them, are situated adjacent to train tracks or bus corridors and constructed with minimal parking to discourage private vehicle ownership. In my opinion this is a way of controlling populations and restricting free movement. The property rights of those who own property within these areas are limited and encumbered with a further layer of regulations.

One interesting twist to the redevelopment/Agenda 21 methodology is to involve bicycle coalitions. The bike people range from just you and me and our kids to those who are fanatical about bikes and the fight against private vehicles. They are used as advance shock troops to demand redevelopment of areas where there are no bike lanes. Complete Streets is a national group which is composed of many member groups and lobbies for total redesign of streets to accommodate bicycles. I have a series of morphing photographs from their website showing a major arterial street in a generic city, which morphs as the photo changes from having no bike lanes to having them. That isn't all that changes, though. The buildings are completely replaced on both sides of the street. Where people once had viable businesses, shops, and homes, the new 'vision' is ground floor retail built to the edge of the sidewalk with two floors of condos above and parking behind in an alley. One car per unit or less. In some areas this design plan is a requirement for development. This is where the ideology of Agenda 21's social engineering and the actuality of the remaking of our cities through land use planning comes together. Smart Growth is an element of Agenda 21.

As an element of Agenda 21 and communitarian policy, the government wants citizen buy-in, but they actually manage it by creating their own government-sponsored neighborhood associations and manufacturing consent. There is a whole industry teaching officials how to manufacture consent (often using the Delphi Technique), and training officials in overcoming 'disagreeable' citizenry. The worst thing, in the city's opinion, is a free and vocal citizenry. We have seen this first-hand here in Santa Rosa, where my partner was elected as president of the largest neighborhood association in the City only to be hounded and demonized for over a year because she did not support redevelopment and was not a 'yes' woman for the city. She was actually threatened with a trial by the neighborhood board; she was charged with being a disagreeable character! Finally she agreed to serve out her term as a member at large and stepped aside to let Gary Wysocky, former president of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, take her place. He had not run against her originally, and in fact had not been active at all, but the local powers that control Santa Rosa had decided to run him for council and needed to refer to him as a 'neighborhood leader.' He declared his candidacy shortly after he took over the presidency from her and was elected and now is Vice Mayor.

Getting back to my service on the redevelopment oversight committee, when I saw fraud in the redevelopment documents justifying 'blight' and alerted the City to it (as if they didn't know) I was marginalized, attacked, maligned and silenced. A facilitator was brought in to meetings to manage me. They even accepted a petition we wrote requesting that 235 acres be removed from the project area (including our properties), and the City DID remove that area, hoping to shut me up.

Instead of shutting up and going away I lobbied the others in the group to vote the project down, and they did so. The City Council passed the ordinance creating the project, however, so my partner and I formed a business association for the property and business owners within the Project Area. These citizens did not want the threat of eminent domain hanging over them for 12 years and did not want to be declared blighted. We attempted to gather 9,000 signatures to place the ordinance on the ballot as a referendum. We only had three weeks to meet the deadline. We failed to get the needed signatures (the City had published a phony ordinance in the hope that we would use it and have our referendum thrown out of court, but we had a great law firm that caught this.)

Our next step was to sue. We formed a non-profit and raised a half million dollars in donations and pro-bono legal work to fight. Over the next three years we went to Sonoma County Superior Court where we lost but the court affirmed that we had exhausted our administrative remedies and so we were able to appeal to the San Francisco First District Circuit Court of Appeals. We lost there but were able to delay the redevelopment project for 3 years. At the end of the case the economy had crashed and all of the projects were shelved. Many of the cronies went bankrupt.

I have been on television and radio discussing this project and it has generated a great deal of outrage from genuine citizens. For instance I broke the story that the owners of Coddingtown Shopping Center, Simon Property Group, the world's largest shopping center developer, had told the city of Santa Rosa that they wanted to be in the redevelopment area so that they could get nearly $30 million dollars from the city for a parking garage. Coddingtown is included in the project area, and the community was furious. These issues don't stay long in the public eye however, and fade out. This was our introduction to politics in the north bay.

As a Democrat in Sonoma County I have been greatly disappointed to see that the political machine here is vicious, exclusive, and vitriolic. They have interlocking groups, sit on one another's boards, share office space, give each other grants, endorse one another, and generally disguise themselves as environmentally concerned do-gooders when in fact they are power-mad manipulators.

During the past few years I was upset that I couldn't hang a flag out without people assuming I was a Republican. It seemed that the Republicans had taken the flag as their symbol and it was no longer a symbol of all Americans. I resented that. Wasn't I an American too? The flag belongs to all of us, the country is ours. We need to wake up and see that this issue goes beyond parties, that those of us who are pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-war, and accepting of cultural and social diversity are also patriotic. I do not support the adherence to UN Agenda 21-imposed doctrine that limits my use of my property and my free speech rights. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution are the foundation, the cornerstone of our government, and transcend party lines.