Nerditorial: I'll see your Agenda 21...

...and raise you an ALEC. (the American Legislative Exchange Council)

[note: the "I will see your bet and raise you a bigger bet" technique is known as check-raising, and it is inappropriate to do at an actual poker table. Don't do it.]

I'll get to the Agenda 21 and ALEC comparison in a moment...

Here is a LINK to a Bellingham Herald story on the Whatcom TEA Party and Agenda 21. 

A brief glance at the comment thread attached to this story on the Herald website shows that many readers are vocally critical of Mr Schwartz.

I believe that some of this criticism is misplaced.

For another thought provoking critique of the Herald story... visit Get Whatcom Planning at this LINK 

Mr Schwartz wrote his story in a manner that organically simulates the experience of being inside this comfy bubble into which the TEA Party Patriots have crawled. And, so... Mr Schwartz has done a very good job of placing the reader inside that bubble.

The TEA Party lives in this bubble, and its narrative is such that it makes perfect sense to anyone who has not stepped outside of the bubble in years. 

They are all about the deficit...

They are all about the Constitution...

They are all about defending the nation from clear and present dangers such as Agenda 21.

And if you are like me and spend most of your time outside of that bubble... it is jarring. Like something out of a science fiction novel.

The TEA Party is all about the deficit... if you ignore the fact that they didn't say boo about the deficit for the 8 years that George W Bush was serving as President. 

No, Mr President...we still don't. Please go back to whatever the hell it is you are doing these days. Buh-BYE.

There were eight years when the GOP controlled White House and Congress put two wars and a JJ Abrams style gritty reboot of Medicare drug coverage on a running tab that were neither paid nor even put on the government ledger. None of these facts can penetrate the membrane of the TEA Party bubble.

The TEA Party is all about the Constitution... if you pretend that you can read the Constitution as if it were the rules to a board game like Monopoly and ignore the fact that there is a long string of case law like Marbury v Madison and McCullough v Maryland that fully established how the Constitution has been understood by lawmakers since shortly after the birth of the Republic itself. That third branch of government... explicitly provided for in the Constitution... that is charged with interpreting the law... yeah, the TEA Party appears to have speed read over that part in particular.

The apparent fixation on Agenda 21 is further illustrative of the nature of the TEA Party bubble.

To those in the TEA Party, the shimmering boundaries of their bubble causes the political light to refract in a manner that causes things like Agenda 21 to appear larger than they are. 

What Agenda 21 looks like to the TEA Party...

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Simultaneously, it causes those inside the bubble to miss other threats such as ALEC (a threat that I consider to be much more worthy of concern.)

Awww... isn't it cute? What could possibly go wrong?

Both Agenda 21 and ALEC exist. They are both actual things and not the feverish figment of someone's imagination. Beyond that, their differences are more telling than their similarities.

Agenda 21 is non-binding, and its language has no direct effect on statutory law in the United States.

ALEC, on the other hand, has actually changed statutory law in this country. Several times.

Agenda 21 is, for lack of a more accurate term, open source. You can read the entire text of Agenda 21 right HERE and right now. But be warned it is very long and very boring. In an earlier post I compared reading Agenda 21 to reading The English Patient to describe how very boring it is. 

ALEC's writing is not open source. ALEC has a significant library of well polished Model Legislation ready to pass through any State legislature in the United States... provided that ALEC can get enough legislators to pass it in that state. (Spoiler Alert: in many states, ALEC already does have enough legislators.) Your first chance to read the text of legislation that was drafted by ALEC is after it is passed into law... you know... after it is already binding on you.

Since Agenda 21 is from the UN, we know things like... who the hell is running the UN and who constitutes its membership. We also know that the UN can't do anything that is legal binding on the United States.

ALEC...? Not so much. Since ALEC is organized as a private corporation, its membership roll is not required to be provided to the public. And it isn't provided to the public. If you aren't a dues paying member of ALEC you are not going to get any accurate or timely information on who is a member, or what its most recently drafted Model Legislation looks like... or what are its most current pending actions.

There are a handful of watchdog organizations that are trying to get information on ALEC. LINK  They publish what they can when they can get it, but it is like trying to nail Jello to a tree.

Remember the shadowy organization that the Cigarette Smoking Man and Krychek worked for in the X-Files? 

TVtropes.org categorizes this organization, and other fictional devices like it, under Omniscient Council of Vagueness LINK 

ALEC is the closest non-fictional analogue to an Omniscient Council of Vagueness that I have found to date. It is a faceless organization that manipulates the government from the protection of the deep shadows of well enforced privacy. Using existing laws to do so, just for dramatic and evil flair. It can touch you, but you can't touch it. And unlike a James Bond villian, you don't even get to know what it is trying to do to your government until after it takes action.

Here are some examples...

The now infamous Stand Your Ground law that got everyone's attention after the shooting of Treyvon Martin in Florida? ALEC wrote that. LINK

The Right To Work law that passed recently in Michigan? ALEC wrote that. LINK 

The Education Reforms that are being attempted in Louisiana ? ALEC wrote that. LINK 

Now... imagine if the United Nations was secretly and directly indoctrinating legislators in every state in this country and providing them with well polished drafts of legislation and quietly getting those drafts passed into law in states all over this country. The TEA Party freak out would make their current response to Agenda 21 seem like a kitten's sneeze by comparison.

Well, ALEC is doing just that. Right now. ALEC's membership includes hundreds of legislators currently serving in State legislatures.

In our own back yard... Doug Ericksen. 

He is a member of ALEC. He told me so himself. He went on the record when he was running for County Executive in 2011 during a townhall meeting event at Rome Grange.

I don't hear the TEA Party or the Whatcom Excavator saying boo about him, or ALEC.

But they have plenty to say about Agenda 21, an action plan that lacks any enforcement mechanism at all, let alone any mechanism that gives it the effect of statutory law.

The biggest gripe I have with the TEA Party Patriots is they have the most impaired threat assessment skill set I have seen in any self-organized group of adults. Their inability to distinguish between a (barely) perceived threat like Agenda 21 and an imminent and active threat (like ALEC) is problematic and troubling. If an individual person demonstrated this level of assessment of physical threats, we would keep sharp objects away from that person.

The most lasting gripe I have with how Ralph Schwartz wrote his article is that he uncritically accepted the TEA Party narrative about the Reconveyance of land in the Lake Whatcom Watershed. Whether he intended it or not, his article reads in a manner that suggests that the Reconveyance is a private property rights matter. (There was reference printed referring to a taking of private land. Since the only land issue mentioned in the article was the Reconveyance, a reader of ordinary prudence could be forgiven for thinking that the Reconveyance involved private property in some way.)

That is simply untrue.

The land that is affected by the Reconveyance is all public land. Every acre of it is public. No private property is involved at all. So, it is in conflict with provable and verifiable facts that the Reconveyance is a property rights issue. Mr Schwartz did not make any mention of this fact in his story. And that is a significant (if subtle) error on his part.

I know that Mr Schwartz is new to Whatcom County and to the Politics beat, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack. But, next time... I'm Calling Bravo Sierra.