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Using Neighborhood Associations to manufacture consensus

6/24/2010

 
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

6/19/2010

 
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. 

Welcome Home

6/9/2010

 
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. 

    And the winner is...

    What is UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development?
    It is the blueprint, the comprehensive plan of action for the 21st century to inventory and control all land, all water, all plants, all minerals, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all law enforcement, all health care, all food, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world
    .

    Your energy consumption will be controlled until you can't farm, can't manufacture, can't travel, can't fish, can't use your land. Productivity and businesses are limited now.

    You've heard that story about Tony Blair asking Angela Merkel how Germany could have such a high GDP when it was such a small country.  Merkel snapped at him: We still make things in Germany, Mr. Blair.

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NOTE: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Articles may be republished as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact. 2010-2020 COPYRIGHT ROSA KOIRE