Countdown To CAOmageddon: Flaw #43 - Plan Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the plan of the American Planning Association, and to Ecology's agenda, for which it stands, one vision, under consensus, sustainable, with Smartgrowth code enforcement for all.

We might as well have our Council say that revised pledge of allegiance at the beginning of each Council session. The CAOs have more to do with pushing a particular planning vision of America than they do with solving environmental problems here. As if we were all stamped out of the same sheet of metal, an army of forward-deployed planners, reinforced by Ecology muscle, pushes a standard formula of pre-positioned Best Available Science (BAS) onto vastly different locales to mass produce communities of life-like sameness. It doesn't matter whether their "solutions" make any sense for a particular community. It doesn't matter if there isn't really any problem to be "solved." What matters is that every community end up the same -- with the same rules, look, and feel as every other community.

Restriction, conformity, and uniformity squeeze the individuality and vitality out of us. All the levers of power; all community attitudes; all local laws fit a modular system that plugs us into a larger apparatus making us more efficiently governable. After each community has been put through the CAO play-doh extruder, we all come out with a standardized CAO look, so the pre-prepared and now time-tested legal precedents of the Growth Management Hearings Boards can be applied like blasé administrative rulings, without any need to expend effort to fend off new legal challenges to basic rights argued from first-principles. We're widgets on an assembly line, pounded into shape by forces from the outside while eco-insiders and planners have eaten away at us from the inside.

Upton Sinclair was a great, if flawed, American. The foremost muckracker of his day, he revealed the social ills of factory mass production to the general public. These days we mass produce community sameness using planning principles and eco-hysteria, which creates its own social ills. I wonder if Sinclair would herald the modern ills of social mass production? Somehow I think not because Upton Sinclair also was a prominent socialist. Nevertheless, Sinclair's words about socialism's tactics may yet offer us succor for the warning they provide us today.

Sinclair ran twice for governor of California as a socialist. In his first bid, Sinclair called himself a "socialist" and lost badly. In his second bid, he came up with a new label for the same platform. The second time around, instead of calling himself "socialist," he referred to his cause as "End Poverty in California" or EPIC.  Of his gubernatorial bid, Sinclair remarked in 1951:

The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to "End Poverty in California" I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them.

I don't agree with Sinclair about "the Big Lie," but I do agree that, as a nation, we have been successful at defeating the frontal attacks of socialism. Unfortunately, I also believe we've been out-flanked by the planners and eco-insiders of today. Theirs is an EPIC story.

The Mass Produced Community resulting from draconian Planning and Eco-Hysteria
(reproduced from Behind The Green Mask: UN Agenda 21)