Saratoga Says No to Environmental Extremism

I submitted this piece to the Lincoln Eagle this morning. 

Saratoga Says No to Environmental Extremism

Mitchell Langbert

David Chew, a Saratoga freedom fighter, has flung himself into the Agenda 21 maelstrom, and he aims to show Kingston citizens how to resist Mayor Gallo's assaults on your freedom, which include Gallo's Block by Blockheads program and his comprehensive plan now discussed in City Hall under the chairmanship of Alderman at Large James Noble.  

Chew says that, like Saratoga's comprehensive plans, Gallo's comprehensive plan links with Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Cleaner Greener Communities regionalization scheme.  Gov. Cuomo's scheme, which he has funded through the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to the tune of $100 million, aims to force you to drive a smaller car and live in a smaller home.  It aims to end the American tradition of electing the officials who govern you, replacing local democracy with regional soviets.  

Chew believes that Saratoga County is a microcosm of what is happening nationally, including in Kingston.  With just under 27,000 in population, Saratoga Springs is about the same size as Kingston.  Just as, under Alderman Noble's leadership, Kingston is discussing adoption of a comprehensive plan linked to the Cleaner Greener Communities program, so has Saratoga Springs adopted one, and Saratoga County is following with its own.   

Chew says that Saratoga Springs has commissioned a 15-member comprehensive planning committee to review and update the city’s present plan.  The Saratoga Springs Comprehensive Planning Committee is stacked with insiders with extremist environmentalist agendas.  A third of the planning committee seats have gone to members of a radical environmental organization, Sustainable Saratoga.   “Sustainable Saratoga submitted an 11-page position paper that contained extreme ideas that are receiving undue attention from the paid consulting firm and the CPC members," Chew says. 

Chew says that another organization, Saratoga Preserving Land and Nature (PLAN), has had undue influence in the comprehensive planning process.  Saratoga PLAN is the local affiliate of the national Land Trust Alliance, and it has an organization member sitting on the comprehensive plan committee. The land trust is in the business of working with federal agencies offering grants and land restriction programs tied to crippling conservation easement contracts, sale of private property development rights, and the acquisition of lands for land-use-management purposes.  The land trusts' stock-in-trade is environmental extremism.   

Alderman Noble's son, Steve Noble, is chair of the Kingston Land Trust, which is listed as a local land trust on the website of the national Land Trust Alliance, the same national organization to which Saratoga Springs PLAN belongs.  As well, Julie Noble is on the comprehensive planning board along with Alderman Noble.  Julie bills herself as an environmental educator.  The Lincoln Eagle has called Alderman Noble for comment.

Chew points out that Saratoga's politicians are increasingly overt about transfer of home rule and local power to regional authorities.  In our region the regional soviet to whom Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Gallo aim to transfer political power is Engage Mid-Hudson; in the Capital Region Cuomo's soviet is called the Sustainable Capital Region. Both key off Agenda 21.  In the Capital Region, "The politicians, including 23 town supervisors, are talking openly of transferring power. The corruption is overt; the message has been reiterated in their minds for many years," says Chew.   

On July 11 and July 15 Chew led two groups of local freedom fighters to comprehensive planning meetings.  On July 11, 25 to 30 local freedom fighters showed up at the comprehensive plan meeting, overwhelming the mere dozen of green insiders.  On July 15 four local freedom fighters appeared, but given that ten green insiders were again present, the freedom fighters constituted nearly a third of those present.  

John Anthony has proposed a sustainable freedom pledge that he suggests all city planners and members of comprehensive plan committees sign.  To make a sustainable freedom pledge, elected officials make a public commitment to maintaining private property rights--the source of your standard of living.  Is Mayor Gallo willing to defend your right to live in your home? 

Some of the members of the Kingston Comprehensive Plan Committee who should sign a sustainable freedom oath are as follows:  James Noble, Julie Noble, Suzanne Cahill, Kyla Haber, Alderwoman Deborah Brown, Alderwoman Mary Ann Mills, Dennis Doyle, Kevin Gilfeather, Toni Roser, Ralph Swenson, Michael Schupp, and Judith Hansen.

America Needs a News Media

It is unbelievable that a country that has been developed for as long as the United States lacks a reliable information source that people concerned with current events can use to learn about what is occurring at the international, national, regional, and state levels.  At the local level we in Ulster County are blessed with The Lincoln Eagle, Mike Marnell's people's newspaper.  What is wrong with this country that there is no day-to-day information source at the higher levels?  Entrepreneur Marnell should consider going online and taking his Lincoln Eagle idea national.

Agenda 21--No

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

July 19, 2013

Senator Chuck Schumer

322 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, DC  20510

Dear Senator Schumer:

Agenda 21 is a mistake, and I oppose it and Andrew Cuomo's Leaner and Greener Communities program.  The concept of sustainability is vacuous.  Like freedom and equality, it can mean anything, and it can be used to institute tyranny.  The Agenda 21 document is based on a fallacy:  rich countries are rich because they make poor countries poor.   I don't know what they taught you at Harvard, but if that belief is consistent with what you know, then Harvard made you ignorant.

People become rich for four reasons:   (1) the marginal value of their labor is high because they have skills that make them productive*,   (2) they work hard, (3) they save their money,  and (4) government provides a stable, limited support to their hard work and  saving and does not arbitrarily interfere, steal or redistribute their earnings.   In contrast, the UN claims that people become rich by stealing from the poor.

The US already has a sufficient level of government.  While coordination among governments is a worthy aim, there is no need for the UN to be involved, even if through a non-binding agreement, with economic regulation.  In fact, though, the implementation of the economic illiteracy in Agenda 21 has not been non-binding.  Through policies like Andrew Cuomo's Leaner and Greener Communities program, one of which is Engage Mid-Hudson, government is turning Agenda 21 into law.

Andrew Cuomo's program is based on deception.  The regional leaders have lied and claimed that there was consensus at the meetings, but there was no consensus.  I was present when the leaders of the Engage Mid-Hudson meeting suppressed those who vocally opposed the ideas that the document expresses.   Opponents were not allowed to be involved in the process.   The document is based on a ridiculous aim, 80% reduction in carbon emissions, that cannot be accomplished without major technological breakthroughs and that, if implemented, will create an unsustainable economy that will make New Yorkers poor.  Who wants to live in a country that will support the Leaner and Greener Communities program, a program that establishes regional soviets to implement ignorant, socialist economic strategies?  My ancestors came here to escape tyranny, not to recreate it.  

The UN has no place in the governance of the American economy, and the US should rescind its association with the Agenda 21 document.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

*William Lewis observed that the organization of work is a critical factor to national productivity levels.  The phrase "marginal value of labor" assumes that hardworking entrepreneurs have, over a period of time, invented work processes with escalating levels of output. Such improvement cannot be accomplished through government because it depends on the ability to fail, go bankrupt, end programs, and learn--processes that no government can implement.

Pennsylvania Town Rejects Agenda 21

Lynne Teger forwarded a February Lebanon Daily News (LDN) article about West Cornwall, Pennsylvania's rejection of Agenda 21.  West Cornwall is in southeastern Pennsylvania's Lebanon County. LDN says that the town passed a resolution opposing Agenda 21 and then withdrew from the state's regional plan.  As the article points out, Agenda 21 is a UN-based plan to globalize the world economy and redistribute wealth from more to less economically productive nations' citizens.  It aims to eliminate property rights by imposing taxes that one-percent property owners can easily afford but that those with constrained resources cannot. The United States signed it under George H. W. Bush, and the nation has funded its implementation ever since through the President's Council on Sustainability and, more recently, through a range of government agencies.

In the Empire State, Andrew Cuomo, emperor of economic destruction, has funded 10 regional councils or soviets to implement Agenda 21-based plans.  The regional soviets are Emperor Andrew's first goose-step toward attacking local democracy.  Given the abject failure of the emperor's economic policies, it stands to reason that  His Majesty Il Duce now pursues fascistic environmental policies.  

One of the tactics that proponents of Agenda 21 use is to forestall intelligent conversation by claiming that Agenda 21 does not exist or that it is a "tin foil hat" conspiracy theory.  Such proponents usually have not read the document and have not thought through the implications of global redistribution of wealth and soviet government.

Agenda 21 is no more a conspiracy theory than is the World Trade Organization, NATO, or the UN itself; you can read it here.   Under town plans like the Woodstock, Saugerties, and Olive, New York comprehensive plans, people who live in rural or suburban areas with constrained cash flows or limited means will be the first to see their lifestyles curtailed.  In exchange for escalating taxes and ever-increasing environmental regulation and control, the towns will build cramped urban housing in mixed-use areas.