Nightmares Come True

Several recent news stories have appeared about Google and Facebook building housing for their employees in the high expense housing short Bay Area. We have regressed to the company housing/company town era. The freedom to live where you want is gone.  How did this nightmare come about?

Opening with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and growing with an unavoidable awareness of industrial pollution, the contemporary environmental movement was born. In some areas of my hometown of Buffalo, NY, people don’t have dogs because they die very young of cancer from contact with the soil. But as is common in many movements, the fanatics took over. They promulgated the nihilistic notion that growth is bad. This defeatist, and Un-American, idea has taken hold. We give up rather than solve. Conundrums appear. This is so clear in the situation of Marin County. They thwarted post war growth and forced people to commute from more distant locations like Santa Rosa. Then they protested the traffic through their “preserved” environment that their prior actions created. The current answer is a high subsidy passenger rail line, adding to the existing inefficacy and social costs of their “benevolent” actions.

When I left LA, it was changing from a regional metropolis into a world class city. People fruitlessly resisted an overwhelming historic change which, again, their own endeavors had helped create. "Save My Neighborhood" became the rallying cry. Some went as far as to propose freezing in time with subsidy an older art house movie theater. They seemed blind to even considering the blatant absurdity of doing that in the theater-blanketed Hollywood area. They called themselves liberals; I call them reactionaries.

This elitist attitude, coupled with the now extremist environmental movement, was hijacked by the globalist/new world order folks. It provided them with fear mongering propaganda and boots on the ground that could be used to achieve their aims. The power mad environmentalists had failed. The end of humanity by 1990 from pesticide pollution didn’t happen, nor did the global cooling/new ice age scare work. But this new alliance did work given the participation of the multinational corporations and the media they control. The global warming hysteria took off. Some convinced themselves that they had converted Goldman, Sachs et. al. to their side. Not surprisingly, fanatics are often also dense; it seems an inherent quality of their disposition.

These dramas also play out daily here in Amador County. We all know the upheaval at our local newspaper to free us of the political filth of Eric Winslow and the bias ramblings of Bret Parsons. But a new figure has arrived overtly on the scene (and probably covertly in the past) named Steven Frisch, head of Truckee’s Sierra Business Council. A recent photo of his dinner with Supervisor Lynn Morgan and environmental community leaders surfaced on Facebook. He also has voluminously participated in discussions on Facebook.  So I posted the following: “Steven Frisch’s Sierra Business Council partners with ICLEI, an organization dedicated to destroying the American way of life and repudiating the modern concepts of freedom and individual liberty we have taken for granted since the French Enlightenment, the American Revolution, etc. I would not affiliate with ICLEI anymore than I would join the KKK or the Communist Party.”

The above prompted a few days of heated verbiage. Frisch defended himself by citing his good works. These included energy efficiency, transit, access to recreation, having housing options, etc. No one is arguing against these noble, common sense ideas. But Frisch, along with some rather effusive notions about the motives of his critics, assumes you oppose these concepts. This seems keeping with his apparent character that if you question the manner of implementation, you doubt these benign goals.  Essential to his understanding is the human caused global warming fraud, so-called smart growth, disregard for Agenda 21 and his affiliation with ICLEI. Internalizing these doctrinaire assumptions allows him to decide what is good for others. This is policy and project from a non-regulated, nonprofit NGO. The democratic decision-making of local government is inhibited or abrogated. The free market where entrepreneurs produced what we decided we wanted is minimized or replaced. Decisions that forge our economic future are made by the self appointed and un-elected few for the many. How dare of us deplorables to object.

Frisch seems to ignore that housing shortages and/or too high prices were brought about by the land development policies of people of his ilk. He forgets that the “horrible sprawl” of the post-war period was the first time in all of human history that the average person was this well-housed. It must be scary for reality to intrude upon ideology.

Copyright 2016, Mark L. Bennett