Monday, June 29, 2015

Hoping For Nothing

Baltimore burns. Charleston prays. Two worldviews are at war in American communities.

Destroying to gain versus Gaining the destroyer.

Do these faraway realities touch Whatcom County? There is that takes for itself, and loses. There is that quietly gives amid pain, and gains.

What attitude rebuilds community after wars of aggression? It is “Hoping for nothing,” passing on to the next generation a legacy of selflessness in the face of ultimate sacrifice.

It is the ruler who submits himself to the rule of law.

It is the elected representative who sees community strife not as a shortselling moment to advantage his friends, but as a refinery that turns disparate metals into strong alloys.

It is the soldiering businessman who puts his life and business in the cross hairs of the bitter game of chance that is cultural war, tough love, risking the bullets of market retribution.

County Council has poured gasoline on local public policy again. Whatcom County’s Home Rule Charter has been made a burning rag in an ideological tug of war. Locals can go and watch the circle of fire Tuesday night, July 7, 2015 at the County Council Chambers.

What gives?  What is really going on? Do not the community fathers do all things well?

Frankly, after months of paying relatively close attention to the Charter Review process, and after working on two proposed charter amendments,  I have come to the conclusion that some leaders are ships passing in the night, and other leaders are privateers, ready to board and pillage.

Who have been the actors on the Charter Review stage? More importantly, who are the Geppetos, working the strings out of sight?

1. Elected leaders: the county executive and the county council.
2. Career city and county employees: managers of finance and natural resources, technical experts.
3. State and Federal bureaucrats: Department of Ecology, Conservation District, Environmental Protection Agency, Puget Sound Partnership, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Army Corps of Engineers…
4. Non profit, “third sector” ideologues, staffers, activists, lawyers: Whatcom Land Trust, ReSources, Futurewise, Sustainable Connections, Salish Community Solutions… oh, and the local Food Bank. Cathy Lehman could give you a list of twenty or more “key local players” she represents, including Tom Steyer.
5. Business owners and investors: Corporate globalists, small time entrepreneurs, farmers…
6. Media apparatchiks: Bored reporters, biased editors and owners, lucre seeking advertising agents.
7. Facilitators: legal counsels, clerks, facilities owners.
8. I almost forgot. The fifteen elected Charter Review commissioners.

Of course, if you’re reading this, you probably know that the major bones of charter contention are:

1) Should  the whole county vote for all elected council races, or should county districts have partitioned voting, each district voting for two positions plus one at large position.

2) Should the Whatcom County Council be prevented from reversing any ballot approved charter amendments detailing voter districting formulas in Whatcom County?

County wide voting appears to favor candidates that appeal to Bellingham’s clientele, and district partitioned voting appears to favor candidates that appeal to the non Bellingham clientele.

The elephant in the room that most of the above actors do not want to deal with is the growing cultural divide between Bellingham and the rest of the county. Or is it a growing cultural war? Do the grant and government funding models that pay many Whatcom County salaries bring people together? Or enlarge cultural ghettos with protective taboos and suspicions?

After the decision by the county council to place four proposed amendements on the ballot, largely mirroring and countering the likely charter amendments of the charter review committee, it is again obvious that the dialogue and mediation that brings diverse groups together is not happening.

Listening to citizen testimony during the public comment period is says it all. County “conservatives” speak of disenfranchisement and the need to restore parity. City “progressives” push back against “power plays”, against being forced to share the public square with conservatives. Horrors!

Why is there such a heightened sense of battle lines? Why has the county council intervened so precipitously? What back room deals have been brokered to sacrifice predetermined county groups on the altars of business status quo and progressive cultural fadism.

There are two books, among others, that shape today’s political plays. The Prince, by Nicholas Machiavelli, and Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

George Bush (R) and Bill Clinton (D) know The Prince well. Dedicated to Lorenzo di Medici, the rules of The Prince led to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of emerging Hugenot Protestants at the hands of Catholic queen Catherine di Medici, a generation after the book was written. In the power plays of corporations, triangulation still makes and breaks men and their fortunes.

Hilary Clinton (D) and Barack Obama (D) know Rules for Radicals well. A protégé of Frank Nitti of Al Capone fame, Saul Alinsky absorbed mob methods, then modeled them, framed with legal cover for the New Left before his death several decades ago. Behind the disarming smile of progressive non profit advocacy is a cold dagger and the tightly clenched fist that seeks power.

Is Jack Louws a The Prince man? Is Carl Wiemer a Rules for Radicals man? I can not say for sure. I could try to interview them, but to what end? Would they tell me their secrets? What about Ken Mann? Pete Kremen? Rud Browne? What about the circle of power brokers in natural resources such as Steven Jilks at the PUD? Or George Boggs at the Conservation District? Or the leaders of ReSources, Whatcom Land Trust, Futurewise, and Sustainable Connections? What about the various bureaucrats embedded in city, county, state and federal agencies, lusting for the grant streams fed by the growing national debt?

The point is this. If the sharing of spoils in The Prince type proposals coming out of the County Executive Office do not pacify the power hungry Alinsky radicals on the County Council and  local “green” non profit boards, the radicals and the triangulators will end up eating each other and us, leaving a burnt earth legacy. Just review the fractured path of the proposed Whatcom County Jail.

So, will Bellingham be Baltimore? Or will it be Charleston? Will we burn each other with anger? Or will we face down haters with determined, rebuilding openess?

Non profit agencies? Who grew the legacy of the non profit tradition? Francis of Assissi? Bernard of Clairvaux? William Carey of India? The Salvation Army in the slums of London? Lighthouse Mission? Catholic Community Services? These were and are people who largely “hope for nothing”. But, wherever there are givers, there are pretenders.

The “green” non profits of America are a different breed. Flying on the coat tails of good will of past generations, the current enviro activists talk kindly, but underneath the smiles clench fists of green, sustainable power. Their non profit vehicle is temporary, until government is fully socialist and communitarian. Their advocacy for first nations peoples destroys both the tribal youth and their own youth. Bake into their cake a fascist flavor of markets with triple bottom lines, and the world is redefined into a gray, grim Orwellian nanny state.

Churches? Redefining themselves as Lyndon Johnson 501c3 non profits, many churches act like monkeys, clutching peanuts in a gourd trap, waiting to be captured and eaten. American courts are systematically removing the hedge of honor increasingly saltless American churches have enjoyed. Persecution in the public square will unleash self persecuting churches, but until then, public policy is piously delegated to “others” by a majority of Christians. Most Christians are more concerned about paying back their loans on their single family homes, about pushing their children to get degrees from socialist educators who turn their Christian legacy of “hoping for nothing” on its head.

Educators? College appears now to be where environmentalist activists first learn to write grants, then maybe do a little work—not really hoping for nothing.

What is hoping for nothing?

It is delighting to give rather than get, trusting that the Creator of all men and means will repay sacrificial service in His time.

It is deferring immediate gratification for much larger, delayed benefits.

It is choosing to give, after working to earn, and leading others to work to earn.

It may be waiting long for the siren songs of materialism and power, progressive or capitalist, to be replaced by hoping for nothing, by giving away, yet ultimately gaining much, much more.

Baltimore or Charleston? Which will Whatcom County and Bellingham be?


JK

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Please Walk in and Vote at the Conservation District for Larry Helm, Supervisor

There is an important election for Whatcom Conservation District Supervisor, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Mar 10, 2015, at the CD Office, 6975 Hannegan Road.

Five Conservation District Supervisors  provide board level oversight of the Whatcom County Conservation District [CD] and its approximately 12 employees. Typically, Whatcom County CD provides most of its services to local farmers. Two supervisors are appointed by the Washington State governor, and three are locally elected.

Any registered voter, urban or rural, may vote in this CD election.

Whatcom County is different. Most Washington State Conservation Districts have very low profile elections for Supervisor positions, with farmers casting 100 or less ballots per district to choose their supervisors.

Three years ago, this particular Whatcom County Supervisor position election had over 3000 votes cast, with the winner’s margin being approximately 60 votes.  In that election, the Bellingham environmentalist community almost elected their candidate to the CD board, but were defeated last minute by a large number of rural and small town voters who voted in person at the CD office on election day. On election day, more than 600 people walked in to vote at the CD office, mostly for Larry Helm.

Bad Cows + Rain = Big Money. Why does Whatcom County have this unusually high turnout? Why is control of a farm service agency being sought by non farm environmental activists?

Environmentalist groups pay their leaders and staff out of federal, state and local grants that address environmental problems. More problems mean more grants, and that means more “envirocrat” jobs.

Cow (dairy and beef)  farms in Whatcom County are targeted as the alleged primary culprit for varying levels of coliform pollution in tidal shellfish beds. Bellingham’s large group of enviro activists want to use the CD to promote their agenda, giving the “public” and the Lummi nation the “benefit” of attacking farmers with cows in Whatcom County.

To compound this, in the last months, the Whatcom Conservation District has been initiating plans to become the service agency managing storm-water runoff grants and programs for the City of Bellingham. De-prioritizing farm services for city services looks like a good business money move. However, farmers may become second class citizens in their own service agency.

Storm-water runoff management is a very lucrative grant stream. Your taxes administer and salary technicians with vast government oversight of rainwater running off your property. There is lots of rain in Whatcom County. Again, this money is coveted by envirocrats and increasing numbers of university grads seeking jobs in line with their environmental degrees.

Grant streams are also the lifeblood of the Conservation District. The under the radar issue in this election is direction and prioritization of grants. Should the CD get any and all grants possible, such as EPA and Puget Sound Partnership urban and farm storm-water control grants, or focus its grant writing towards less lucrative farm service issues such as ditch cleaning, and soil and manure management services.

Local farmers do not want EPA grant strings impacting their farm plans. Period. Grants come with strings. The EPA and other state and county agencies offer large funding incentives to farmers who will let them move closer and closer into overseeing farm management plans.

As well, farmers are facing increasing fees and mitigation costs by Whatcom County Conservation District and Whatcom County Planning Department. CD technicians have a lot of power to levy fines and rulings. These technicians are currently under significant criticism for allowing environmental activist pressure to skew their farm site assessments against small farmers and small farm profitability. Farmers need a supervisor who will quickly and strongly address rules over reach when it happens.

Wildfowl. It is a fact that various technicians in state and county storm-water runoff monitoring positions are refusing to calculate how much coliform pollution comes from wild fowl such as ducks, geese and swans. Large water fowls, such as geese, produce 5 pounds of poop per day. 500 swans could deposit 2500 pounds of excrement close to a drainage ditch in one day, and then the cows get blamed.

In spite of this, Fish and Wildlife officials routinely refuse state funding grants to help them test coliform food source DNA to identify what coliform came from cows or birds. Cow farmers rightly feel unfairly targeted as the main coliform pollution source when wildfowl poop on fields by ditches is totally ruled out by activists and technicians. It’s the “bad cow” grant stream, stupid.

No one escapes. This is not just an issue for dairy or beef farmers. It is an issue for any small acreage family who has animals. It is an issue for home owners in towns and cities. Not only has the EPA put rules in place to regulate the puddles of rain on your driveway, but when farm neighbors are subject to the whims of urban regulators, the resulting uncertainty also hurts town and city businesses that supply farms.

The incumbent for this position is Larry Helm, a small beef farmer in the Squalicum Creek watershed east of Squalicum Mountain. Larry has consistently resisted the urban grant stream influences, trying to focus CD services to farmers. He runs a clean farm with minimum stream buffers, and with stream coliform levels at one quarter of the current pollution threshold level.  Even so, Larry is being misrepresented and smeared as a polluter by environmental activists supporting his opponent.

The issue is not whether Larry’s opponent sells locally grown vegetables at a roadside stand, but which former public official can be trusted to use grants to serve farmers first, not the salaries of non profits and public officials, and the multiplying rules police that stifle farm economies in Whatcom County.

Remember packing houses? How many new packing houses have come to Whatcom County in this last year after the envirocrats worked over packing house policy?

Whatcom County Farm Bureau, the GOP, and the Cattleman’s Association have endorsed Larry. His opponent is supported by the Democrat party circle. Democrat voters from Alabama Hill and the Columbia District have heavily responded to Larry’s opponent’s doorbell campaign to use mail in voting.  Do you get the picture? Where might Futurewise and ReSources and Whatcom Land Trust be in this?

Floodplains by Design is being cued up. With characteristic doublespeak, an extensive program grant application by Whatcom Land Trust targeting prime farmland for wilding in the South Fork area has been filed with the Washington State Department of Ecology. Note the promises that prime farmland is only going to be moved away from the river, not taken away. Really!! Do the farmers of Whatcom County need a friend of farmers on the CD board of supervisors, or a friend of progressive, Democrat, urban environmentalists?

Note the letters of support in the appendix from Whatcom County Public Works (Paula Cooper),  Whatcom County Parks (Mike McFarlane), and the Nooksack Tribe (Bob Kelly)

GreenLinks is here! The Squalicum Creek watershed, from downtown Bellingham out to the Rome area on SR542, is being set up for an intensively managed water runoff program called Green Links, jointly administered by the City of Bellingham and Futurewise, the recent litigant against Whatcom County’s exempt well policies. Would not the Conservation District better the public interest by electing a supervisor who would check and balance intensive environmental advocacy (salmon are the emotional hot button in the above joint venture) rather than smiling while urban eco activists collectively rezone the Squalicum Creek watershed.

Larry’s challenger in this election is an Everson area resident who worked for the City of Bellingham Public Works, and runs a summer time vegetable stand from her garden. As a past Democratic party candidate, she is most notable recently in her loss to Vincent Buys for District 42 State Representative. Larry’s opponent has benefited from considerable resources to door bell neighborhoods in Bellingham environmentalist hot zones, people who are NOT farmers, and adversarial to most current Whatcom farmers.

Monday, February 9, 2015 was the cutoff date to request a mail in ballot from the Conservation District office, which manages this election apart from the Whatcom County Auditor’s Office. As of that date, over 3600 ballots had been requested, most to Bellingham addresses. Ballots may also be cast by people who walk in and vote in the Conservation District office on March 10, 2015. Last year, 600 people voted in person at the CD office.

Walk in and vote. If you don’t want to see farmers, big or small, significantly damaged by Bellingham eco activists, please take the time to go to the CD office in person and vote for Larry Helm on Tuesday, March 10, 2015. His opponent may have a very pleasant demeanor, but her handlers and supporters are determined to turn local cows into “the” environmental scapegoat and grant stream. You can read their words here, and here, and here.

Please pass this walk in voting information on to people in your rural and small farm town circles. This election will determine who manages CD grant programs, urban shell fish guardians or farmers. Your tax money, your rural farm profitability, and your freedom to manage your own storm water runoff costs is at stake. This is a very pressing issue, even for those living in town lots.

Please walk in and vote for Larry Helm for CD commissioner at the Conservation District office at Hinotes Corner, (Pole and Hannegan),  6975 Hannegan Road, 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Tuesday, March 10, 2015.

Thank you,

John Kirk
Whatcom Works


Post Script:

Do you see the shell game?  The straw man here is having to choose between shell fish (or salmon) and cows. That is just the current version of a much larger shell game, using the Marxist dialectic to establish fascist communitarian socialism for nihilist narcissists. Chew on that for a while.

In other words—

One party (globalist dialectical power brokers) gets two other parties (cow farmers and salmon/shellfish environmentalists) to fight, and then lives well off the two weakened parties.
Collecting juicy fees to manage perpetual reparations (socialism) perpetuates the outcomes of the fights.
Rules that tax “offender's” profits (fascism) return more than taking their assets (communism).
The expectation of no ultimate consequences for making such a mess (nihilism) trains people to only talk, think, act and care about their own desires and comforts (narcissism).

Thus, a key milestone in the enviro terrorism program is ruined “trust” between urbanites and farmers. The key movers are quiet, eco activist, grant funded, power base building community organizers who do public policy by Alinsky rules—deceive, flatter, fatten, divide—then defund and enslave the middle class (BOTH farmers AND urbanites) before they know what hit them.

A second problem is well meaning, sophomoric urbanites with ruinous ideas for how farm families should run their farms, significant ignorance of how Whatcom County farmers are improving in environmental stewardship, and the gross delusion that heavy regulations on farmers will improve urban outcomes, and never come to be applied to their own free wheeling urban lifestyles.

A third problem may also be farm families, in debt to their eyeballs, whose fewer and fewer children do not want to assume the pressure cooker of large scale farming in a free falling society, parents whose retirement income can only be secured by corporate culture, selling out or hiring in. What stops the free fall? Who will feed you or me, my corporate farmer or urban environmentalist friend, in ten, twenty, forty years?

Really now, How will you get vegetable garden dirt out from under your finger nails?

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Replacing Sam Crawford

Council member Sam Crawford has resigned from county council, effective March 1, 2015. A video of his statement and some of the other council member's responses can be seen here.

There will be time to review council member Crawford's 16 year legacy of public service. There will be time to say, “Thank you!” and ask “Why?”. Sam will become a full time, Westside Building Center manager. Best wishes, Sam!

But what reality presses hard?  A position needs to be filled. The council will choose a replacement. There will be no election. An appointment will be made. If council cannot agree on a replacement in thirty days, the county executive has fifteen days to appoint a person to fill out the balance of Mr. Crawford’s term.

Six elected council persons will either cross swords intractably (remember Bob Kelly), or will collaborate to make an appointment.

What do you expect? How many candidates will apply? How will council members frame their favorites?

Here is my prediction.

There is one determined, progressively aligned council member who heavily supported a progressively aligned District 2 person who lost the race for District 42 State Representative in November, 2014. 

This council member is one of four progressively aligned council members who vote as a progressively aligned bloc on appointments for key council appointed boards. It is highly likely we will see this district 2 council position filled by this district 2 progressively aligned person who was soundly rejected by district 2 voters.

Period.

When Bob Kelly resigned, Pete Kremen wisely avoided appointing the progressive favorite who had lost elections two times just before that event. Conservative voters picked Tony Larson a few months later, and the retired Pete Kremen, as a new councilman unseated Larson a year after that.

However, the business world operates bone on bone. Free markets pick winners and losers. Canny business men buy low and sell high, and delight in extending their business reach. Patronage works. The only problem is that an unbridled drive to “control” ends up destroying both patrons and heirs. Successful public policy thrives, not on bitter force, but on trust built through servant leadership.

Tonight at county council, this same council member pressed very  hard to deny $30,000.00 for WRIA 1 planning unit quarterly operations. He said to wait for the state to fund this unfunded mandate. This is chump change. $20,000.00 for a two day, one time water seminar was freely given to WRIA 1 naysayers in the recent past.

This was nothing but a thinly disguised effort to crush dissent and irregularity. Rud Browne proposed a new “water council” that would supersede the WRIA 1 planning unit, an advisory only board totally synchronized by the executive’s office. Bone on bone. Crush “employee” dissent. Fire those who are shouting “fire”.

Tonight, two new, progressively approved persons were appointed to the planning commission, shutting out the reapplying conservative planning commission chair. David Onkels, known for challenging progressive planners and their dogma, with experience and counter balance, was tossed on the trash heap by county council.

Time will tell if the progressive Gang of Four on County Council have shown foresight in appointing only their own ideological kin to the leading Whatcom County advisory boards. Time will tell if the WRIA 1 planning unit’s contrarian instincts truly adds value or just angst to the WRIA 1 Joint Board, which has operated outside the RCW legal framework since 2009.

Time will show who truly can meld
  • fair, big government, mercy minded progressives,    (give to gov't charity)
  • free, big market, justice minded conservatives,        (give to private charity)
  • USING “humble” servant minded leadership.           (invest in adversaries).
It is the model and values of the servant leader Christ on the cross that gave us our western civilization. It is both the progressive AND conservative abandonment of that model for self actuated nihilism in the “new”, Post Modern West that is steadily leading us into a new dark age.

JK, Whatcom Works

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Sam Crawford Resigns from Whatcom County Council


Saturday, January 17, 2015

Whatcom Water Trust – The Progressive in My Mirror

Observations from the recent Water Rights Exchange Trust Forum

I started writing this early Monday morning, my chest ripped with the painful coughs of a common cold. With time, rest, nutrition and exercise, breathing will return to normal.  

I am finishing this Friday morning. This is draft #5.  This post got longer, and then shorter. Thank you for reading it. 

The cold is almost gone, and I am wondering what will be the new normal of this new day. There is work, there is family, and there are the hard-to-pin-down public policy service opportunities. I suppose community involvement never was a linear thing. The more I learn, the more holes and frayed edges and dangling threads I see.

My used-to-be-tidy life is more and more ripped with the spasms of water and land use conflict in Whatcom County. PSNERP. Meat packing on farms. Lawsuits over rural wells. Shellfish bed closures. Lynden water withdrawals. Small farm plans. Cycling paths. Wetlands. Water Improvement Districts. Senior water rights. Salmon and herring. Pacific Rim shipping.

Fresh cheeked youth spill into hearings to berate grizzled farmers. White haired seniors argue with each other over natural resources for the future. Planning technicians and planning commissioners redline out each others copy. Managers of parks and land trusts silently build empires. Volunteers snoop behind farms while distant lawyers and globalists unload on local elections. News editors and profs pull strings and spin the fresh cheeked youth, hawking this thing called “progress”. The racking spasms go on.

Progressives. Last night I viewed a lecture by the former progressive community organizer and publisher, David Horowitz. A key leader in the 1970’s leftist movement,  Horowitz turned on his progressive peers in the early ‘80’s, abandoning the “fight for justice”, arrested by the long list of civic destructions generations of progressives had wrought.

Born to card carrying American Communists, Horowitz was shocked out of the “dream” by
San Francisco’s hot anger when he confronted ‘80’s gays over sending AIDS throughout America from the SF gay bath houses. Pressed with feeding his four children, he abandoned the donors of the new left and became a capitalist, working in the traditional American free market economy.

What was Horowitz’ message? Don’t make deals with progressives when they are in the driver’s seat. They cannot be trusted.

But do not most key water players in Whatcom County call themselves progressives?

Why would Horowitz so vehemently accuse progressives? Who is a progressive? What makes a person progressive? Is this truly relevant to Whatcom County? To water rights?

Last Thursday afternoon, Jan 8, I saw my face in the public mirror. I went to a water forum in Lynden examining the idea of a trust to facilitate local water rights exchange. I use water to feed livestock. The issues of tribal senior water rights on the Nooksack River, the current urgency to prove a hydrological flow between river and ground water, and the resulting attachment of groundwater rights to tribal salmon management is a critical concern.

I went to hear what the heavy lifters would say.

After a 2.5 hour survey of laws and water rights exchange trusts in other places, things were very quiet in the room. When an informal survey of audience affiliation was taken, at least one half of those present declined to identify themselves with any group—agriculture, government, NGO or citizens. This was hardly a gregarious day.

In the last hour, six agency leaders talked for three minutes each about how they might relate to a water rights exchange trust. Lynden’s representative was very positive. The PUD was warm to the idea. Bellingham talked about things that had failed, and Whatcom County was quite guarded, notably qualifying ideas with questions.  A local water services manager shared his perspectives, and a county staffer tried to decopage the natural resources marketplace model onto water rights.

I was amazed at the meekness of normally quite self-assured local government water managers when the lawyers interviewed them, pointing out gaps in their understanding of water rights exchanges. As I watched and listened, I began making my own list of trust breakers that I have observed in Whatcom County.

1) 6+ highly polarized scientific issues that kill water policy consensus.
2) 8+ agency motivations that divide rather than build cooperation in water use policy.
3) 12+ events or interveners that have shredded trust between water users.

The lawyers gave a very concise, easy to understand, helpful presentation of water rights law. The DOE expert gave multiple, interesting examples of water rights exchange trusts.  A full video of the afternoon maybe viewed by going here.

I learned several new things.

1. WA state law treats water rights as property rights.
2. Water rights are extremely valuable.
3. Water rights are guarded intensely. Legislators are very unwilling to risk any fix of RCW problems.
4. Water rights transfers are very expensive. Water rights exchange trusts could offer scales of economy.
5. Current Washington water banking models use free market pricing principles.
6. WA state government does not currently set water rights pricing.
7. Water rights banks can ease water shortages with no grants needed.
8. Government grants have been used to buy and resell water rights to preserve existing water users who have no or faulty water rights.

Other takeaways:

9. Other property rights such as stream buffers and fish habitat, have extremely little market value compared to water rights. It seems grants and donations, not free markets is the only funding stream a Natural Resources Marketplace could swim in.

10. Selling water rights as property rights could force progressive light persons to see the historical value of property rights. Such a trust could provide some very teachable moments, reversing the Democrat / progressive choice to forecast no personal property rights in the future—IF Olympia leaves pricing alone.

After this forum, my first question was not

“Could a water rights exchange trust help here?”, BUT
“Who locally could be trusted to search out if a water rights exchange trust would work, AND
“Who could be trusted to manage it?”.

Let me illustrate. Several days earlier, a sharp observer pointed out to me a $20,000.00 line item in a recent WRIA1 joint board budget for hosting this forum. Having been involved in putting on forums, I know that amount is much, much more than what is needed to rent a room for up to 150 people, buy some cookies, and pay even high priced lawyers to speak for 3-4 hours. So, who might be getting all that dough?

I brought up this line item in a meeting a couple of days earlier, offending a colleague who really liked this forum. I decided to go straight to the organizers, and found out that the budget line item was based on a prior event that was 16 hours long, with multiple meals. It was a budget number, not a  disbursement.

(Was a two day forum planned? Then reduced to one day? Then reduced to one afternoon? Are water rights, property rights too explosive for local water use gurus to unpack?)

Now why not just trust the government bean counters?  (See item #4 below).

David Horowitz, a formernational progressive heavyweight, identifies four trust busters that define today’s progressive leaders from his 1960s group. Saul Alinsky is their prophet, and Bill Ayers, Hillary Clinton, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Barack Obama are the “born with a progressive spoon” rulers who inherited the 1930-50 communist progressive legacy.

1) Progressive leaders are dialectic contrarians.  Progressives work a cycle of institutional destruction to “set innocents free”. This is the opposite of America’s founders, who “checked and balanced sinners” against eternal, unchanging laws.

2) Progressive leaders are arrogant. They are jihadi-envangelists of a never before seen, soon to be seen utopia that common sense does not confirm.

3) Progressive leaders hate Judeo-Christian America.  America’s sins are magnified, and her excellences are discredited. Progressives create class warfare to conquer Americans and destroy their institutions.

4) Progressive leaders are liars. Spin, argument, denial is the habituated progressive yellow brick road to the future.

But, you ask, what does this have to do with our green, verdant Whatcom County home? Who dares to class the fine friends and children of conservative Lynden with Lenin, Stalin or Mao. Even Alinsky, nasty god son of the Chicago Mafia, has passed away. Are not today’s progressives gentle and benevolent and totally approachable?

Horowitz answers this linking question. His 1960s, Vietnam War busting, Che Guevarra and Castro loving generation broke a progessive rule. They refused to deceive. They openly spit on the returning soldiers.  They openly spilled blood on American streets. They openly called themselves communists.

The young left despised the double standard their Jewish New York parents had lived. The parents claimed to be “Jeffersonian Democrats”, yet collaborated secretly with Moscow’s KGB handlers. The children rebelled against their parent’s cautions, sowing open, violent, bloody revolution, and it failed. America ignored them, and they had to abandon revolution for jobs.

Hence, Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Put on suits and heels. Penetrate American institutions. Slowly, steadily create the largest army of tactic proxies possible, winning America’s next generations to socialism through the public schools and universities.

Alinsky and his core group have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Two generations of Americans have become progressive light, are proud of it, and gladly move the progressive dream “forward”.

Are you a progressive? Give yourself a test.  Evaluate the idea of a water rights exchange trust using the following grid, adapted from historical American values of freedom.

Free People:
  • Do water rights exchange trusts protect individual liberty?
  • Do water rights exchange trusts promote personal responsibility?
Free Markets:
  • Do water rights exchange trusts protect property rights?
  • Do water rights exchange trusts promote free markets?
Good Governance:
  • Do water rights exchange trusts maintain limited government?
  • Do water rights exchange trusts protect local powers from state or federal over reach?
  • Do water rights exchange trusts promote fiscal responsibility?
  • Do water rights exchange trusts provide equal protections for all under the rule of law?

If my guess is right, the above issues seem strange or irrelevant or bothersome to you, don’t they. If so, you are likely “progressive light.” If you have a multiple reasons why the above nine values are moral faults to absolutely obliterate, you are more than progressive light.

Frankly, in spite of my “conservative” education, I have had to bend my mind to think about the above issues in the last several years. Why is that?

Probably the greatest tool for transforming Americans from being a free, motivated, sharing nation into a stagflated two tier model of progressive socialism (elites and masses) has been easy money. Loans, and grants.

Why would I say that? Do we not need an active WIT, Whatcom Integration Team, pulling in the maximum in outside grants as an approved “local integrating organization”? (WIT was rebuked sharply by County Council a number of months ago for classifying rural values that did not represent a majority of Whatcom County citizens.)

Good financial management is uncommon. Financial failure, in business and government and NGO/church groups is the norm. Easy loans and grants make freefall unnoticeable and turn shattering landings into an irrelevant dream that disappears in summer mornings of ease.

What better way to use an enemy’s strengths against him. Make economic hyperwarp growth the norm, turn the debt load and grant streams into a dagger, and the traditional American Judeo Christian moralist will fall to his knees, begging to drink this pure water at the progressive fountain.

Let me relate this to the forum on water rights exchange trusts.

Why must a WRIA region with too much water talk about a trust to transfer “scarce” water rights?

When is there scarcity of water?  Answer:  July and August, as relates to certain salmon spawning cycles.

Why would a majority of people need a trust to exchange a minority portion of water rights?
Answer: because unusual favor has been granted to a minority people to sue and win the majority portion.

Who decided this? Why?

Answer One: The progressives. Innocents must be set free from debilitating institutions. And, the most innocent “environment” is the “original, natural one”, where there were no roads, no planes, no farms, no sawmills… …just wild animals roaming free, and first nations foraging and hunting.

Answer Two:  The progressives.  Rich oppressors must be forced to share, being moved from consumptive suburban lifestyles and homes to high density urban enclaves, using only public transit, not owning property, but sharing only what local cooperative soviets determine is good for one and all equally.

Answer Three:  The progressives.  Fathers and mothers saw the nice homes and cars and vacations and chose the mortgage and the second job. Public schools, being well funded, well staffed models of American decorum, could be trusted with the children.  Now, sixty years later, generation x rocks to a progressive beat, and progressive teachers wink and smile as the core American values lie bound and gagged on an altar built to salmon, cycling viewsheds, organic chocolate and boundless sex.

Who is the progressive in the mirror?

It is me. My generation. My parents generation. The public servants I have delegated my citizen responsibilities to so I need not be stressed.  Tell me, does Whatcom still work?

Should I resist the public policy of whoever I call a progressive?  Maybe. Maybe not. There are the far left progressives that want me to burn out fighting their nasty machine. Then, there are the ‘progressive lights” who are just doing the job they are being paid to do, watching to see if I can eat humble pie, make the leader of the day successful, and carry a load wherever possible.

How does one make worthy local leaders successful, regardless of conservative or progressive orientation?


America still requires its citizens to choose their leaders. Are you concerned about public policy abuse? In the next few months you may have a chance to  get involved up close in shining the lights. Stay tuned.

And, thank you, facilitators of this water rights exchange forum for putting on a very informative afternoon, and…  … for not spending the whole $20,000.00 on we who attended.

Time will tell if a water rights exchange trust is a good idea. It may very well be a next step in re-engaging true civic service and public policy awareness.

JK – Whatcom Works

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