Paranoid Teabaggers out to kill "UN Plots" Smart Growth and Public Transit?

[marmar]

from Mother Jones:



First, they took on the political establishment in Congress. Now, tea partiers have trained their sights on a new and insidious target: local planning and zoning commissions, which activists believe are carrying out a global conspiracy to trample American liberties and force citizens into Orwellian "human habitation zones."

At the root of this plot is the admittedly sinister-sounding Agenda 21, an 18-year-old UN plan to encourage countries to consider the environmental impacts of human development. Tea partiers see Agenda 21 behind everything from a septic tank inspection law in Florida to a plan in Maine to reduce traffic on Route 1. The issue even flared up briefly during the midterms, when Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes accused his Democratic opponent of using a bike-sharing program to convert Denver into a "United Nations Community."

Agenda 21 paranoia has swept the tea party scene, driving activists around the country to delve into the minutiae of local governance. And now that the midterm elections are over, they're descending on planning meetings and transit debates, wielding PowerPoints about Agenda 21, and generally freaking out low-level bureaucrats with accusations about their roles in a supposed international conspiracy.

Virginia activist Donna Holt is among those who believe that Agenda 21—unveiled during the UN's "Earth Summit" in 1992—is really a plot to curtail private property rights and deprive Americans of precious constitutional freedoms. In reality, the document will do nothing of the sort, but it has nevertheless been the target of conspiracy-minded UN haters for years. Holt and other tea partiers are taking their cues from people like Henry Lamb, a WorldNetDaily columnist and founder of Sovereignty International and Freedom21, groups designed to fight Agenda 21 and its ilk. He has been arguing for decades that the UN is secretly plotting to herd humans into crowded cities so that the rest of the world can be devoted to wildlife preservation. (Lamb declined to comment for this story because back Mother Jones once included him in a story called Wingnuts in Sheep's Clothing, and another article that described his role in Astroturf lobbying against the Kyoto treaty.) .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/11/tea-party-agenda-21-un-sustainable-development

[Vogon_Glory]

1. All Too Credible

I am inclined to believe that there is a substantial portion of the Tea-bagger/ultra-conservative movement that actually DOES believe this bull. There were already signs of this nonsense back in the 1990's when Houston was trying to build its first light-rail line, although opposition to light rail was more based on traditional-conservative memes like "I've got mine," "I'll never use the light rail, so why should I pay for it," and the ultra-conservative hostility to large cities and the 'different' ethnic groups that live in them.

This bs about sustainable growth being a UN plot strikes me as being an embellishment that right-wing lunatics have come up with since then. Par for the course, the Radical Righties that come up with such embellishments choose to believe them and present them to later-comers as 'fact.'

I would also add that a lot of hostility to sustainable growth and renewing inner cities also comes from suburban and exurban developers still resentful about the outlawing of red-lining and other lending practices that were turning dozens of cities across the country into clumps of sky-scrapers surrounded by decaying slums. The racist component aside, I suspect that a lot of suburban and exurban boosters resented (and probably still do) the competition presented by borrowers either trying to fix up older neighborhoods or build new.

The irony here is that I think that the US has reached a natural limit with car culture. Most suburbs are so distant from the inner cities that they have very little to do with them. In some regions, low-density sprawl has run into insurmountable physical barriers, such as South Florida and the Everglades, the Salt Lake Basin with the Great Salt Lake and the Wasatch Mountains. The middle classes are steadily shrinking (Thanks in large part to other right-wing policies). Our existing freeways are as often as not over-crowded and overtaxed. Tea-bagger hostility to raising gas taxes are going to lead to HUGE repair bills down the road as the need for maintenance comes clear. Finally, the price of gasoline WILL go up, especially as the US with a weakened dollar has to compete with other, more prosperous parts of the world for petroleum.

:argh:

[Vogon_Glory]

2. Some Of Those Center-City Slums

Over the years, I have read some very dubious right-wing claims made about inner-city neighborhoods. One such right-wing claim made by former adherents of the Young Conservatives of Texas is that Austin's Hyde Park neighborhood, a neighborhood filled with carefully-tended and often beautifully-restored 19th century architecture, is a 'slum,' which I'm sure is news to a lot of the professionals and middle-class residents who own and tend their houses.

Another claim I had on-line was with a rabid-rightie who informed me that most of inner-city Denver and ALL of the area near South Broadway was also a 'slum.' Considering the restoration work made by those houses' residents, that's more right-wing BS.

I'm sure other people can list dozens of revitalized inner-city neighborhoods that exurban tea-baggers have labeled and continue to label as 'slums.'

A point Democratic politicians need to make more often is that we're all in it together, middle-class homeowners and renters alike, against the developer-backed Tea Party myth that inner cities are all slums.

:grr: