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Your Future: Take a look at the EU

9/30/2010

Today's headlines are all about the rioting in Europe. Greece, Spain, Ireland...many countries are in an uproar. Why? Communitarianism is exemplified by the European Union. Higher taxes, less services, high unemployment, tight money, lower pensions. The squeeze. The suffocation. The realization that they are stuck, that these nations have given up their soverignty and are now in thrall to the huge EU combine.

Beware, Americans. Even if we don't have a North American Union we are still instating communitarian policies in every city in America.

Don't agree? Tell me where people are still free of new urbanism, smart growth, redevelopment, neighborhood stabilization programs and sustainability plans in America. Just yesterday we received an email from the ACLU (American Civil Liberty Union) asking us to protest the Obama Administration's intent to expand surveillance of Americans' internet usage.

Won't get fooled again?

Stop Agenda 21. Call attention to it, discuss it in public meetings. Be brave, don't worry if they ask you about your tin-foil hat (call you crazy). You're not crazy, and it's the first thing they do when you're right---call you a conspiracy theorist, a global warming denier, a hate speech person. Now anyone who disagrees is accused of using hate speech. Don't let them intimidate you.

Speak out. Let's stop Agenda 21 in Oakland, CA, in Juneau, AK, let's stop smart growth in Yellow Spring, OH, and in Detroit, Baton Rouge, Ft. Lauderdale. Oppose Agenda 21 in Cut Bank, WY, in Salt Lake City, in Redding, CA, in Tuscon, in El Paso, in every city, in every state.

Someone wrote and told me that it's difficult to identify as a liberal and start talking about all of this with friends who begin to attack. Listen, have compassion for them. It's hard to accept that a pretty candy-coated dream is a shell for the hard, ugly reality of Agenda 21. No one likes to feel that they have been fooled. It's humiliating. Help your friends to see the truth.

Stop Agenda 21 while you can. We are everywhere.

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They're coming

9/21/2010

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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.

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The 98th Monkey and YOU: CRITICAL MASS

9/11/2010

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A quick check of the internet will bring you to many hundreds of sites, and millions of pages on Agenda 21, ICLEI, communitarianism, and the impacts that we all see in our communities.

We are reaching critical mass. The question, of course, is what do we do now? You are doing it. Reading, talking about it, blogging about it, tweeting, facebooking---getting the word out more and more.

The Hundredth Monkey story is a good one. Lots of monkeys on an island, one learns how to open a particular kind of shell. He shows a monkey, who shows a monkey etc. Progress is slow on the shell-opening front. Then, the 99th monkey learns it. Suddenly, all the monkeys seem to know the trick.

We are at the 98th monkey. Read our page: What you can do! and do it! Let's turn back the tide and stop Agenda 21 in Sonoma County, Marin County, Los Angeles County, San Francisco ...Portland, Seattle, Boise, Las Vegas, Phoenix. Let's stop Agenda 21 in Chicago, in New Orleans, Atlanta, Asheville, Richmond, Tampa, Raleigh. Let's block Agenda 21 in Dallas, Houston, Galveston, and Detroit, Nashville, New York, Pittsburgh. Join us in kicking ICLEI out of Spokane, Cleveland, Georgetown and YOUR TOWN.

There is power in true grassroots activism. Don't be swayed by dogma. You can be green and conserve energy and be a responsible world resident without losing your rights and liberty. Just because others have used the communitarian trick of 'balancing your rights with the community good' doesn't mean that this makes sense. A + B does not equal F and you are smart enough to see it.

BE THE 99TH MONKEY. STOP AGENDA 21. JOIN US.

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Social Outcasts: Sticks and Stones?

9/5/2010

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Social censure is a key component of the communitarian system of control. What is that? Shunning. Social rejection.

While thinking about the attraction of communitarianism to some in our world, I asked myself why it is that the threat of social censure is such a powerful motivator? Even to the extent of allowing the corruption of liberty, people will avoid the potential pain of social rejection. Hence the willingness of your neighbors to persecute you when they fear rejection from the community if they defend you instead. I doubt many would admit to cowardice if they could blame the victim and gain the support of their community at the same time. I found this article and excerpted a portion here. It's very interesting to read that social outcasts actually suffer physical and emotional damage to their health. So a communitarian approach to social issues would likely result in serious health consequences for those who don't 'go along to get along', at the least.

Imagine, then, the threat to the communitarian from a citizen who is tough enough to stand up to social pressure.

The Anthropology of Belonging: The Need for Social Inclusion
July 3, 2006 by Gerda Wever-Rabehl

In this article, I will explore the evolutionary roots of our universal desire to belong to a group.

The Evolution of Belonging. The Threat of Social Isolation. The Need for Groups. Social exclusion is a complex and mysterious phenomenon that permeates all of our relationships and many, if not all, aspects of our lives. Social exclusion and rejection have inspired a rich legacy of contemplation from poets, writers, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. After all, human beings are deeply social creatures. We desire to live, love and work with others whom we know and who know us. And so did our ancestors, whose membership to small groups helped protect them from the weather and from predators. Belonging to a group gave them- and gives us- a chance to thrive.

The Evolution of Belonging. For our ancestral brothers and sisters, becoming a social outcast would have been disastrous. Rejection from the group and lacking the benefits that the group offered would have meant death. From an evolutionary standpoint, our survival has depended on the ability to prevent rejection, or to reclaim membership to the group once rejected. This is, in a way, still the case. Evolution has instilled in us a powerful desire to be part of a group of people we can know and whom can know us, and while our world has changed, and while our social ties to others have become less personal and more complex, social connection (and our fear of losing it) continues to be crucial to the quality (and in some cases, even quantity) of our lives.

The Pain of Being an Outcast. Social outcasts feel bad, are anxious and depressed, lack a sense of wellbeing, they harm their immune system and threaten to harm their cardio-vascular health. People who are socially isolated think about and do destructive things and die sooner than socially well-connected people. Extreme reactions to social rejection such as depression, suicidal behavior and violence, might be relatively uncommon, but throughout human history social exile has been tantamount to the death sentence. While some people react to their new status as social outcast more radically than others, rejection is pretty much universally experienced as negative and painful, and this experience affects the whole of us: behavior, emotion, perception and cognition. The reason for it, the desire to belong, is equally universal, although the way it is enacted differs depending on culture.

Read more at Suite101: The Anthropology of Belonging: The Need for Social Inclusion http://www.suite101.com/content/the-anthropology-of-belonging-a3931#ixzz0yiliKkDZ

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Why Communitarianism threatens a free society: You and Me

9/5/2010

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I have been reading articles by Amitai Etzioni, the professor at George Washington University, who is the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies. He founded the Communitarian Network, a non-profit 'dedicated to the moral, social, and political foundations of society,' and is the world's leading proponent of communitarianism.

It doesn't do you much good to criticize a theory without thorough research into it, so I'm doing my homework.

An article by Etzioni in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs entitled The Common Good and Rights, A Neo-Communitarian Approach (Winter/Spring 2009), is a concise argument for the central tenet of communitarianism: The common good must be a central part of our public morality, and human rights and liberty must be subsumed into the service of all members of the society. This is what he calls 'balancing.'

Etzioni states that where there is no 'community' the people are disaffected, lonely, anti-social, alienated, and prone to finding artificial community such as gangs and militias. Without community, in his view, there are no informal social controls that will serve to enforce the moral code and commitments of the residents. The antidote, he says, is to produce a community that uses censure, or pressure, to control behavior.

Here's an example of what's wrong with that concept.

Now, in an open society, such as the one we are now building, a gay person can live freely in many places. An outsider just 25 years ago (and of course, still, in many places), a gay person is now able to form loving attachments without fear of job loss, loss of children, or shunning by society. But if you take a look at the 'community' of Etzioni's making, you're looking at America in the 1950's. At a society that can shun you, shame you, reject you, attack you, and claim it's for the common good. And they truly believed that. And many of them were good people. And still are. And if you define the common good as producing uniformity, and regulated, wholly expected results, then I suppose homosexuality is not in line with the common good. But why would you want complete uniformity in your culture? There is a perceived threat. Whether it's valid or not, the group can decide to reject and stigmatize a whole segment of the population. For the common good.

Now, this is the kind of thing that was done in the name of religious persecution. Community morality. How many have been persecuted or killed because they didn't have the 'right' religion? This empowers mob rule. Enforcement of morals outside of the law is not serving the Constitution of the United States. Etzioni says that common moral beliefs make a community. That sounds like a religion. Like environmentalism? Has 'green' been hijacked and transformed to a secular religion? Is it being used as an excuse and justification for restriction of individual rights? Etzioni is defining the community as the planet. The global village. So, by extension, just your use of the resources on the planet can endanger it, and make you a threat to the common good.

Your rights have been 'balanced' against the rights of the community as determined by some. Whoever is the most dominant group. Some group is going to be making these decisions. How is the good of the community determined? By using the Delphi Technique to manufacture consent?

Our constitution guarantees individual rights for a reason. Because they are the first thing to go when a community takes on the role of the arbiter of behavior.

I do not feel comforted by the idea of community rule. I have been at the receiving end of community attack. Abuse. Cruelty. Why? Because I dared to speak out about what was wrong. Are these the people we want dictating what is for the good of the community? The only way you can get to what Etzioni is talking about is to overthrow our entire system of law. Our constitution and legal system are based on individual rights.

In Etzioni's article he states:
The neo-communitarian position seeks to understand as well as design society in light of the inevitable conflicts between rights, which privilege the person, and concerns for the common good, which privilege the community or society.

Did you catch that? Design society in light of the inevitable conflicts between individual rights and the common good.

Re-Designing society. This is happening now. In your town. Right in your neighborhood association, your PTA, your city council, your place of worship, your local planning department, your schools. This is not a remote, scholarly concept. This is being imposed and enacted across the nation.

The overthrow of our legal system is in progress by the election of politicians and judges who support communitarianism and Agenda 21. For the common good.

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UN Plan brings misery to Kenya communities

9/2/2010

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If you can see this film on your public television station, see it. Called 'Good Fortune', it follows a UN program that the people are fighting. A United Nations program to destroy a slum and build new homes is contrasted with a private aid project to build a dam. Both are failures destroying the villagers' way of life in the name of equalizing the poor with the wealthier countries. Here is the synopsis of the film on the Point of View website.
Film Description: Over the past 50 years, the West has sent some $2.3 trillion in aid to Africa, the poorest of the world’s continents. It would be difficult to find anyone who believes that money has significantly reduced poverty or succeeded in promoting social stability on the continent. Many, both inside and outside the international development community, are asking how so much money could be spent to so little effect. A more explosive question might be why some communities in Africa are not only disillusioned by the aid projects, but even fighting to stop them.

The new documentary Good Fortune delivers eye-opening answers from the point of view of the people resisting development projects that are supposed to help them. To capture this vantage point, director Landon Van Soest spent over a year and a half in Kenya, living on a shoestring and filming in areas he had been warned were too dangerous to enter. The result is a rare and intimate portrait of two vibrant Kenyan communities, one urban, the other rural. What they share is being square in the crosshairs of huge aid projects whose supposed benefits don’t impress them. In fact, people in these two communities believe the projects will devastate their lives, and they have organized to fight back.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki calls Nairobi’s Kibera neighborhood, Africa’s largest slum and home to an estimated one million people, an “eyesore.” Sara Candiracci of the United Nations Human Settlements Program says flatly, “It’s not acceptable that Kibera exists.” But for Silva Adhiambo, a midwife from an impoverished village, moving to Kibera 15 years ago has proved an economic boon. There is plenty of need for her services in the crowded community of mud shacks, narrow streets and open sewers. She earns a steady income, something unimaginable in her native village, and can even send her children to decent schools. There is “a lot of trash” in Kibera, she admits, “but life is good here.” A stroll with Adhiambo reveals a community buzzing with economic activity — commerce at rows of market stalls, mechanics fixing just about anything and other services on offer, such as Adhiambo’s midwifery. Far from being mired in hopeless poverty, Kibera is a community of strivers who have ingeniously created a life for themselves from the meanest of materials and opportunities.

As recounted in Good Fortune, the Kenyan government and the United Nations have joined forces in a massive “slum-upgrading” program, which calls for Kibera to be demolished completely and replaced with modern housing and infrastructure. The community’s residents have been told their eviction will be temporary and they will be able to come back to the area and live in the new housing. But they have good reason to distrust the government. Similar projects have resulted in housing being expropriated by government officials and their allies — in one case, by the president’s wife, according to Adhiambo — and sold on the open market for inflated profits.

Adhiambo, her husband, Fred, and her neighbors organize to stop the demolition. For the government and the United Nations, the Kiberans’ resistance is misguided. After all, says the United Nations’ Candiracci, “You need to have a big project to have a big impact.” As the project becomes increasingly politicized, Adhiambo rallies to safeguard her community and finds herself involved in the dispute over Kenya’s 2007 elections, which at the time spiraled into violence and led to over 800 deaths and 600,000 displaced people.

On the other side of the country, in a rural region of western Kenya that is often described as the country’s poorest, American businessman Calvin Burgess is investing over $21 million in a huge state-of-the-art rice farm through his Oklahoma-based company, Dominion Farms Limited. Burgess touts the project’s ability to create employment, build modern infrastructure and ensure food security in the area. “This is how you solve poverty,” he says, “instead of creating Band-Aids.”

But Dominion’s indigenous neighbors don’t see poverty being solved; they see quite the opposite. Farmer and schoolteacher Jackson Omondi and his family have flourished in the area for generations by growing crops and grazing cattle in the fertile wetland. “I am not poor,” Omondi insists. “I have a resource which can make me rich, but now he [Burgess] is taking that away and he’s making me poor.” Omondi speaks for more than 500 families whose homes and villages will be flooded by the reservoir Dominion plans to create. Refusing to abandon his property, Omondi begins organizing his community, writing letters, holding meetings and staging protests.

Good Fortune’s behind-the-scenes account of the struggles by Adhiambo, Omondi and their communities to protect their livelihoods, and the very mixed results they achieve, serve as a dramatic wake-up call to the international development community and its allies in local governments. No longer can poor people be seen as passive recipients of international aid programs — and the political and economic machinations that come with them. Good Fortune is a tragic, heartening, infuriating and revelatory report from the poor people’s side of the global development struggle.

“The film explores how the lofty ideals of Western humanitarians intent on solving world poverty play out on the ground in the developing world,” says Van Soest. “Though the film profiles two Kenyans on the receiving end of foreign aid, it is really meant to be a reflection on us as Western citizens and the sense of paternalism we project on the developing world, even when we have the best intentions.

“I was constantly amazed at the courage and conviction that Jackson and Silva showed in the face of immense hardship,” Van Soest continues. “Both helped organize their communities, contacted local politicians and fought for their communities.” Producer Jeremy Levine adds, “We really wanted to bring Jackson and Silva’s voices into the debate on international development. It’s our hope that the film can help advocate for more community leadership in development and local, grassroots solutions for Africa.”

Good Fortune is a production of Transient Pictures.

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Your Future: Take a look at the EU

They're coming

The 98th Monkey and YOU: CRITICAL MASS

Social Outcasts: Sticks and Stones?

Why Communitarianism threatens a free society: You and Me

UN Plan brings misery to Kenya communities

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