Keepin' It Green....

Well, who'da thunk that between the City Council meeting in which the councillors unanimously voted to give $2.3 Billion to a small, untried energy corporation and the next meeting of the same council, the federal goverment and Wall Street would become locked in a drowning victim's death grip as they scramble to save the economy?

Timing is everything, isn't it?

And for all their fervor at the meetings, the great orators are now, nowhere to be found. Neither Skip Cameron's "Bull Creek" group nor Paul Robbins has bothered to reply to a single email from The Austin Egalitarian, even though we'd be more than happy to continue to support their fight, in spite of the fact that we certainly are not from the same "demographic".

And having said that, The Austin Egalitarian has to say we are not going to be that supportive of any more of their loud complaints, no matter how well-founded their criticisms might be.

Why? Because this question of "Green Snobbery" is a big part of what is killing this country. Cameron and Robbins don't care about the environment. They are both prima donnas, happy to dance on the stage while the drama is high, but completely absent from the same stage as soon as it looks like they might have to cross class boundaries in order to actually achieve their supposed goal of protecting the environment and anyone's quality of life.

Approved: Hook, Line, & Sinker....

Opinion: This morning the Austin City Council unanimously approved the $2.3 Billion biomass project. Apparently, the postponement of the decision was not actually to reconsider, but rather to draw straws on which councilor would step to the front to make the motion. Councilor Cole had the dubious honor of making history with that motion today. (Video to come.)

Her decision contained some interesting language. When Councilor Cole made the motion, she prefaced it with comments requesting more input from the companies that had been shut out. The council agreed to require contracts with the other companies, or at least to require discussions. How much will the settlements be, since several of them made credible-sounding cases that they had been wrongfully shut out of a bidding process? One might think that each company could sue for what it lost: $2.3 billion dollars... but of course this is an extreme thought, not even rational.... right?

Councilor Cole provided some nice "bytes" to suggest to her constituents that she was not going along with this decision, but then she became the one who made the actual motion to approve, placing her own name ahead of the other councilors' in the public record that will re-appear each and every time this episode is revisited.

Does Councilor Cole know to what extent she is taking the fall for the rest of them, considering the well-organized opposition that is sure to impact their political careers for a long time to come? And where was Councilor Martinez? Leffingwell's attention to process? Couldn't Shade be brave enough to oppose? And Morrison.... oh, well, I'm sure she'll suggest food stamps as the answer to those concerned about something so low-class and vulgar as money...that was her answer to successful businesses complaints about losing money to batfest, after all.....

Ah, don't you just love consensus! Not one single councilor will be available to support the citizens when we all have to poney up to pay their bills.

The end result of Cole's decision to combine a request for inclusion with the motion to approve is that now the Austin Energy is actually required to give the other companies the same inflated deal they gave the New Hampshire company (BTW, the Austin Statesman keeps referring to the deal as being with "an East Texas company but, Nacogdoches is only the location. It is Jack Welch/GE/Kennedy country that is coming to Texas to burn the Piney Woods...)

City Hall Is Generating Some Heat!

We could not limit this week's "City Hall Bytes" to one short clip. There is very little for us to say, to editorialize, except that while the level of subterfuge that seems to have characterized Austin's handling of this is high, the strong, rational, and united response on the part of the outraged voters is certainly equal to the task of overcoming that subterfuge.

The City Council will be taking this up again on Thursday, August 28. So if you live in Austin and are concerned about the effect a $2.3billion "pig-in-a-poke" will have on your cost of living in this city, contact City Hall and try to attend the meeting.

We'd also like to say that this issue proves something we've always said: if enough people participate in the democratic process, it is completely unnecessary to promote a "party line" as the only acceptible expression, because the process itself will produce a balanced expression. It is also apparent from the intelligent, reasoned opposition here that the ugly personal rancor of party politics is not necessary to show strength of opposition in local government.

More people need to participate in watching and responding to City Hall, week-in and week-out. It is not hard to do. Austin City Hall provides the material to which we link in our sidebar for your convenience and we'd also like you to know that you can get the full version of the City Hall videos from the Austin History Center.

If even only a third of the population takes the time to track specific issues, a strong democracy will naturally result. Right now less than a tenth are doing this. We need to see that change: no matter what your politics are, make sure you are registered to vote and check in on what is happening in City hall at least once a month!

If you choose to use The Austin Egalitarian as your check-in point, we are gratified. Send an email to theaustinegalitarian--at--gmail--com (you know to put in the @ and dot) and we will be happy to send you a note whenever we update the clips. Let your friends know, too. And don't hesitate to add your comments. We are reaching a growing readership and we don't require log-in to comment. If we have to delete any comments, a note will show that we did (we don't control that) and we would only delete the kind of cussing foolishness that is as pointless as it is offensive, anyway.

Biggest Question: Why The Surprise?

This set of excerpts shows citizens asking the same question several times: "Why the surprise?" It ends with one citizen asking a very pointed question of the biomass company: "Who are you?" and he elicited a very full answer about this tiny, leverage-funded and nameless group of New England-based entrepreneurs with their Bahamas company (a "Delaware corporation", which is something like a tanker sailing under a Liberian flag....)

In the post below we go into our usual connect-the-dots back to New England, and so we were sadly-yet-pleasantly surprised to see the proof in this City Hall pudding. What was NOT said at the meeting: GE is heavily involved in the windpower in New England that this company in Austin refers to as some kind of associated entity (in an obvious attempt to distance itself from its own wood-burning plans), and what is also NOT said is that one of the oil heat companies up there is a community run foundation owned by "Young Joe" Kennedy, the son of Senator Ted Kennedy's eldest brother, Joe, who predeceased JFK.

Really, the citizens of Austin express it best for themselves, and so we refer you to the 8 minutes of video excerpts. No one can blame the business reps for wanting to pitch their game, of course, but we can certainly blame the City Council, especially Councillor Morrison, for not giving the public an earlier "heads up" on this profit-seeking plan to strip East Texas bare.

Oh, and where are all the environmental groups that like to suck up donations and give them to people like Councillor Morrison, hmm? Few of the citizens who spoke claimed any kind of group affiliation at all.

Going up in smoke.....

Austin is considering setting up a giant wood-stove to generate energy.

Yes, I typed this correctly. No, I am not drunk or high or watching the X-Files instead of Channel 6 City TV....

Repeat: Austin is seriously considering building a giant woodstove.

The Public Hearing on August 13th, which will be aired again on Channel 6 on Saturday at 4pm, has interesting euphemisms to prevent the syllabically-challenged from figuring this out. Since most of Texas does not have the kind of terrain that supports individual woodstoves in densely populated areas, which still does exist to a degree in heavily wooded temperate zones, most Texans are not familiar with the heavy presence of "particulate matter" that normally accompanies wood-smoke, a problem that can overcome even the most nostalgic attachment to the aroma of a wood fire on a winter evening....

You know, Austin is not a wooded glen in the Appalachians. And calling the wood "biomass" is even scarier. "Biomass" is a term that has appeared in the modern scientific and political literature referring to the entire "life mass" of all plant, animal, and human life.

It does not make any sense at all for the capital city of one of the oil & gas-producing centers of North America, if not the world, to be considering the erection of this giant BIOMASS-burning facility, unless one is considering some other fuel besides wood....

Of course, in the strange science-fiction-like dystopian world of traditional Nazis, this makes sense. It is an ingenius way for a resurging Hitlerian party to actually get the citizens of Austin to approve and build a crematorium. But of course there are no Nazis left, they were all defeated in WWII, right? And what kind of storuies did they tell the Polish people when they were just building those camps, anyway?

Sure this is extreme-thinking, beyond the fringe, but just the same, let's explore the possibilities just as if the genocidal tenedency of the Nazi party back in the 1940's somehow managed to infest the American political system like a thick-hulled seed that inserted itself into a crack in dry soil and waited years for the right conditions in order to sprout new growth.

Back in the 1940's the German Nazi Party had its supporters, not only among the Germans of Texas, but also among the Irish, Yankee Wasps, and other race-eugenics-conscious populations. While Hollywood depicted the occasional neo-Nazi group as a bizarrely comic cult int he 1960's and 1970's, the Irish Catholics were waging a terrorist bombing war against the English with most of their financing coming from Boston, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois. They were sympathizing with the Palestinians and trading skills with Islamic terrorists.

By the 1980's the Irish quieted down and all was forgiven. The US political party most heavily influenced if not controlled by the Irish Catholics was waging terrorist war against civilians in Massachusetts under the guise of Mafia hits, "random" violence, and openly indoctrinating school-children with blood-curdling images of death and genocide paid for with Federal "art" money. All the while, the Catholic civilian population was silenced by sexual blackmail and torn loyalties in the school-integration fight within its dioceses. During this period and earlier, Massachusetts Catholic bishops dismantled the old free-parochial school system that had supported ethnic diversity, upward mobility and multilingual schools. They replaced that system with a money-driven "ecumenical" parochial model that eradicated all ethnic identities while supporting the establishment of a pseudo-ethnicity called "White" by eliminating one of the most powerful supports of healthy diversity. They initiated the new Catholic/WASP/Interfaith model in which the poor are not encouraged to speak up for themselves and attempt to better their lot in life, but the upper classes instead announce from the pulpits that they now are the "voices" of the "voiceless". Hardly a month in any American Catholic or WASP church now goes by without a well-dressed college student or recent graduate in sociology stepping up to announce the need to deliver services to these pathetic souls who are no longer even allowed to have contact with families within the Catholic church. They are no longer "human". They are voiceless commodities.... BIOMASS.

Alongside this somewhat internal look at the politics of the American Catholic church in the 1980's was the rise of the Clinton faction of the Democratic party as well as the rise of anti-human extremism among the far left/anarchist fringe of youth culture. During this period the Irish Mafia in Boston controlled the FBI office through Whitey Bulger while his brother Wiliam Bulger rose on the ranks of Irish power in the South Boston and Dorchester districts to become head of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The murder of James Bernardo, a 12-year-old Catholic boy, was a backwoods Berkshire incident with curious threads leading back through the corrupt circles described here. That murder was a terrorist incident and all the families in Berkshire County knew it. During that time FBI agents included one named Townes and one named McLaughlin were switched on the Bernardo task force and evidence tampered with, including one NY State trooper being caught attempting to fake fingerprints. READ THIS and THIS and understand that the victim "Sarah Ann Wood" is a co-victim with James Bernardo. Both were killed by Lewis Lent.

Ah, we have digressed. Back to Austin Texas, today: by way of linguistic politics. "Genocide" became "Ethnic Cleansing" under the Clintons. Bear in mind, Hitlery Clinton led certain American "feminists" to a world conference on women's rights in China during its pre-capitalist, most fully totalitarian, phase. Representatives of other women's groups expressed shock at the American feminists' embrace of Chinese official politics, which include sexual genocide: only "useful" females to be kept alive. It appeared inconsistent on the part of American feminists, but by this time the Clintonites had driven all other women out of the feminist ranks.

So Hitlery Clinton's support of those practices do not appear inconsistent to anyone who knows the history of White Wasp Feminism: the Amercian women's right to vote was won on the argument it would double the "White" vote in the face of immigrants, and few "White" feminists among the suffragettes considered that Black Americans would vote, in any case. "Planned Parenthood" has often been cited as having its roots in eugenics more than in how often women choose to give birth. Alongside that, the left-wing GE Project and the left-wing terrorist fringe of the "Weathermen", the ELF and extreme "Greens" all began to move from clean air & water and sustainable resource management to human species-eradication, a truly delusional and crazy fringe cult belief that is in fact affecting young people to an alarming degree. After you read about ELF, read our post from June 18 concerning the speech at City Council about the Governor's Mansion arson. It was given by a child representing the same group that funded the art-propaganda in Massachusetts and which is now trying to control the arts in Austin.

How can this be happening, this open march to genocide? It can be because the crazy extremists do in fact have the upper hand in Washington DC. There is no one at the helm. The crazy elitists believe that they will survive the planet-wide genocides in some kind of personal bubble, and they are managing to pick and choose the target cities.

Alex Jones and his PrisonPlanet.com have been flogging this immobile if not dead horse with some really impressive documentaries, but we at the Austin Egalitarian do not share his emotionally paralyzing pessimism. Jones does not offer any kind of hope that the crazy ruling class will simply collapse. He plays into their hands by isolating himself and his supporters from the mainstream, reinforcing their delusion of strength. He seems to believe so strongly in the conspiracy that he believes we can all fight "them" somehow, but in fact there is no "them", there is no "conspiracy". There is a tragic comedy of errors on a global scale that has left the ship of state adrift while everyone looks for life-jackets.

Austin is to go the way of Sarajevo, the art-colony Sarajevo of the 1970's. Surely some readers remember those marvelous traveling art festivals that circulated through our college campusses in the early 1970's, all showing cutting-edge animated art by the Sarajevans? Austin is eerily like that city of Sarajevo.

The Clintonites and some other Democrats are at war with Texas, make no mistake about it. They hate Texas, they fear Texas. Austin is a convenient target because Austin probably has one of the largest communities of exiles from New England in Texas. It will be easy for the Democrats to maneuver a martyr-like assault on the one city that does not conform to the official culture of the rest of Texas, because so many Texans in the countryside are completely unaware of the full history of relations between Texas and Massachusetts, and they hate the part of it they see here, the carpetbagging part. And there may be enough actual modern Nazis throughout Texas to help the Clintonites carry it off, turning Austin into another Auschwitz. Over the years Democrats have helped brainwash the American population into thinking Auschwitz was about Germans hating Jews, and Jews have gone along. But the truth is far from it. Auschwitz was all about scientific population control. The "Jews" were nothing more than the current target at the moment of confrontation with the rest of the world. Had there been no confrontation, the Nazis would have moved on to the rest of the population.

"Biomass" as a fuel is not about burning wood, which in itself is crazy enough. The ultimate confrontation may be that Austin is being set up as a crazy target for the ELF extremists who will bring their violence here, and give the Clintonites the excuse to send in the same kind of troops they sent against the Branch Davidians, but on a larger scale. Don't forget: it was a fundraiser for one of the Clintonite feminist "shelters" who made the hoax call setting off the El Dorado raid. They were hoping for another Waco and they did not get it. Instead, they probably ensured that the actual pedophiles in that community will get off on technicalities while we all know that you can find pedophilic and sexual violence easily in ANY group of 400+, just look at normal crime statistics and do the math. The Clintonites itch for violence, but Texas didn't jump when they scratched that time.

We shouldn't be ready to jump this time, either. All the Austin City Council has to do to yank the rug out from under the deluded Clintonite terrorists is reject the BioMass plant. We can return to realistic sustainable energy plans with that $2.3 billion and spend it on wind and solar alongside better building designs, better mass transit, and more judicious use of oil & gas. And leave the Clintonites to their own devices to try some other way to spark their genocidal civil war.

Bat Fest Brouhaha & Police Wanting Blood?

A most interesting discussion emerged around the question of the upcoming Bat Fest. This festival has been going on since about 2005 and has involved closing down the bridge at South Congress for two days of the Labor Day weekend.

Any college professor who teaches Political Anthropology, (if there is susch a thing) should get the full tape of this segment from Channel 6. It has everything: pathos, drama, spin, money, and the question so many want to dodge: is Austin a city with a vibrant and busy population that actually needs the main traffic arteries to be open on big holidays, or a sleepy country village whose economy is made or broken on one great opportunity to sell t-shirts and helium balloons?

Stay tuned, I'll be reviewing my notes and typing more.

The possibility of the Austin Police Department wanting drivers' blood was raised by a citizen during the noon open mike session. Seems there is a rumor floating around that Austin might make blood tests mandatory for drivers who refuse breathalizers. Mayor Wynn denied any knowledge of such a policy being actively considered, but said that he is aware of a number of other Texas cities that have enacted this law. He said that the reason for it is financial, since positive blood tests result in a 100%guilty rate. He added the interesting note that this is due to drivers always pleading out rather than challenging blood tests in court. And that saves thousands of dollars, he said.

In a perfect world, one could see his point, but in a corrupt world, that is a very scary line of reasoning.(Here, let me mention that I am not a native Texan, but I am an exile from Massachusetts, therefore I naturally see corruption as the status-quo.) Whatever the full story is, we owe a debt of gratitude to that private citizen who ventured forth to use the three-minute mike for shining some light on this rumor while it is early enough to think about it.

And let me repeat my invitation to readers who have special interests to become writers on those topics in City Hall. There is too much for one person to cover in one post, and we need someone willing to spend an hour or two every week looking through the police-related topics and plans, someone who can write a column just on this issue. The email here is theaustinegalitarian---at---gmail.com, so let me know if this tugs at your heart-strings. Austin needs you. And if you are a journalism student, this blog will look good in your resume *wink, wink*....

Summer Break is Over!

City Council is back in action and so is the Egalitarian. I've added video and hope to start bringing some original tape, as well. For now I grabbed a piece off the City's own service and got permission from Dave Matustik over at Channel 6/City Hall to use this video-quote of Mayor Will Wynn making a very important point for all Texans. This clip was originally produced by City Hall Channel 6 and is being used with their permission. Other uses of City Hall tape will be under normal "journalistic use" standards, which allow use of short clips (less than a minute) to illustrate or document original material.

Shades of Art Mafia Behind City Council Meeting, July 24

Good news and bad news. Good news is the Renaissance Faire, artisans, artisans are reborn from the ashes of a near-death experience. Bad news is, they seem to be uncritically accepting control of the new "Culture Commission" structure that is being imported from Massachusetts (with a strong Seattle contingent). But one has to hope there are enough independent artists and independent arts groups, as well as a strong enough local economy, that the kind of control the Massachusetts-based activists are trying to win is not going to be handed over without a fight.

What I am talking about was not up front on this week's agenda, but it came up during the Citizen Communications at the June 18 meeting, (see link in sidebar).

I haven't got the emotional energy to footnote the following history all at once. I'll add links by & by. If you can't google up the proof of what I am about to tell you, please post your comments or questions and I'll reply with details. To really describe what is happening in Austin, it is necessary to tell you what happened with the same crew ten years ago in Massachusetts. When you read it you might not want to be identified as agreeing, particularly if you have a public job, and so I won't require log-in to post and I will delete only unnecessary obscenity.

Control, Not support, of the Arts

This incoming Culture Commission is not a "new" direction, although it may be new to Austin. It is as old as tyranny. The truth is never told about what the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) did in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, in the 1980's and 1990's, when it helped one of the first and most powerful culture commissions get set up: The Berkshire Artisans. It moved into a vibrant arts community and virtually destroyed it. It is hard to describe the setting of the Culture Commission's "death-art" project that had been set up in an abandoned department store in the center of that small city, and which the mayor finally bulldozed. The lies that covered this sequence of events are a testament to the incredible gullibility that cripples modern society.

That project was part of a massive activist effort that was responsible for a spike in teen suicides across the region, and it was also part of a genocidal hazardous waste spill, a deliberate dumping, that resulted in a 25% miscarriage (not abortion) rate because of PCB pollution of the soil and water-table all through the Housatonic valley. It was the GE Housatonic Superfund site.

It was unbeliveable. People like Steve Spielberg moved in to suck the blood from the corpse: he's just one big name among the imported Hollywood and New York artists who replaced the natural community that once thrived in those hills. (Governor Weld, by the way, had signed exactly the same agreement with the media gliterati on behalf of unaware Massachusetts that Governor Perry signed last year, on behalf of unaware Texas.)

Texans don't know the bloody history of the Culture Commission because it didn't happen down here, but now the "Artisan" project is down here, and it is about to bite Texas in its collective ass, which appears to be Austin.

Austin is to become America's Sarajevo, Texas's own death-ridden Pittsfield. I am not speaking figuratively. The same terrorists who referred to the genocide of the artists of Sarajevo as "Ethnic Cleansing" and who are moving into position around Austin have already shown up in City Hall, last month, whith their falsified "statistics" and their heavy-handed threats of dire consequences if the City Council does not hand them control of all the Arts funding in this city.

Brazen Abuse of Public Trust

Councilor Shade bragged during her campaign about her use of Americorps volunteers. She should be impeached for election funding fraud if indeed she did that, but that is a digression and, to me, not a battle worth fighting when the problem is so much bigger than that. Yet her willingness to brag so brazenly about her use of Americorps, and her part in setting it up in the first place, speaks volumes.

Americorps "volunteers" are an important part of the coming genocide that will involve the City Hall arts commission, because the first thing they are trained to do, is to lie. They are not "volunteers", they are students who are recruited to get college money for acting as temp labor in social service agencies all over the country. They are paid the same as any other unskilled laborers and they are taught not to respect either themselves or the working people in the communities they serve, because they are taught that a little money is not real money. So if their agencies steal a little, how is it different from what each and every Americorps volunteers does each time he or she uses that term? An honest person whose honesty has not been compromised has a much easier time resisting corruption than an honest person who has, through confusion and inexperience, been persuaded to lie.

The lies are an important part of Americorps training because nobody can lie to another human being without at least partially dehumanizing that other human being. It is basic training in corruption. It is also "stage one" genocidal training: dehumanizing the other people one serves. "Cleansing" the city of such people is stage two genocide. The churches are already leading the way in that regard, with their increasing efforts to build isolated "leper colonies" (to quote one protesting citizen who spoke at today's City Hall meeting) that will serve to involve the rest of the citizens in pogroms within another year or so. The pogroms may not be against Jews, and that only serves to underline a near-forgotten part of the history of modern genocide: The Jews were the last group to be systematically isolated and killed by Hitler's German followers. They began their genocide on the poor, the disabled, and the homeless, and as they ran out of victims, only then did they begin to openly home in on the middle-class Jews. The Jews were only 60% of the victims of that genocidal German nation. For some reason, the American nation does not want to remember that.

Randi Shade Exploits Homosexuals

Once the first part of that Americorps training has been accomplished, then it is easy for people like Councillor Shade to sic the hate-based gay-lesbian brigades on the rest of the community without facing much opposition. Just exactly like Nazi Germany did in their own famous exploitation and betrayal of the homosexual community in the 1930's. It is easy for Shade to pretend the lies she told about Jennifer Kim were not hate-based and racist because no one in her circle will resist or expose her. Liars are not famous for resisting other liars. The whole gay-lesbian poltical culture is a culture of lies. They have no redeeming qualities and the only redeeming quality of the Americorps volunteers is that their youth may empower at least some of them to outgrow the training and reclaim their integrity after their uncomfortable year of "service".

The Original Culture Commission: Lies, Greed, & Americorps/Vista

The original Culture Commission that is entangled with Mass MOCA ("Museum of Contemprary Art) in North Adams, Massachusetts was headed by a former Americorps/Vista volunteer Dan O'Connell. Dan O'Connell was the son of a former Pittsfield, Massachusetts mayor and also of a family that owned an oil heating company, O'Connell Oil. He took office as the Culture Commissar just as Jack Welch was pulling the plug on the GE workers. He managed all the money that was being sent to Pittsfield from Washington DC via the Kennedy conduit of the NEA money. Tiny Massachusetts, the size of a Texas county, took 20% of the national arts funding, and most of that did not stay in Boston but was shipped west to tiny Pittsfield and then given not to Massachusetts artists, but to New York artists who came in for the kill as soon as O'Connell sent word.

Picture it: a city smaller than Austin, certainly less important, and most of the working class works at one plant, GE. Highly paid, secure. Around them the old small-town industries of the papermills were turning out the finest art paper and wallpaper, even the US treasury currency paper was made there, and all scattered among idyllic dairy farms, boarding schools, and millionaires' summer camps.

The Truth About Jack Welch

Jack Welch arrived there in the late 1970's. Just about that time the PCB disposal was becoming a problem. The local hippies were doing ok, but the political Left was looking for new blood, since the Vietnam War was over and the Persian Gulf had yet to heat up. There was a commmittee in Boston called the "GE Project" that had focussed on weapons made in Pittsfield during the Vietnam War. Those of us who participated in the anitwar effort were busy embarking on our individual lives while the bored Leftists played around with way-out-firnge feminism (not the equal-rights feminism for which many of us fought so hard, but the weird man-hating stuff that no one really took seriously.)

Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University professor, wrote about the awakening of that radical fringe group in her book, "Who Stole Feminism?" She describes a lot of what happened, but while wearing academic blinders. She was too polite to point out that what she identified as unscientific and politicized false data that was used by the fringe-feminists to steal millions of dollars of art money was fraud: it was organized crime. And it was done during the years the FBI office in Massachusetts was being run by a man who later became one of the FBI's 10 most wanted: Whitey Bulger. Yet she described the scheme accurately, including some of the violence against professors and students, and that, too, was right out of a Nazi scene from 1939. She described it all clearly enough for anyone to see. They used art, and psychological terror on school-children, not just physical assault, to attack all of the families and artists in Massachusetts.

"Needs Enhancement"

While Jack Welch was sowing his seeds of destruction all through the new nonprofit arts commission groups in Pittsfield, all of it was headed by the same Dan O'Connell who has his fingers in Austin's pie right now. The new group of artists who moved into Berkshire county and helped run the native artists out of town were setting up "death art" as part of the gay-lesbian "needs enhancement" campaign. That was the campaign to increase teen suicides by challenging high school students to identify themselves as "gay" so that the funding Sommers describes would be approved. It was openly discussed in activist circles in Boston, particularly among Unitarians, some of whom spearheaded direct assaults on teenagers at Pittsfield's Taconic High School in the 1990's. Strategically, the Unitarians played into the game because it was a rule in Massachusetts that any special school funding had to serve at least 10% of the population, but the actual, scientific incidence of gay identity among teens is far lower than 10%.

Pink Floyd & Whitey & The Irish FBI Mafia

Bill Weld, aka "Pink Floyd", was governor. Whitey Bulger was not yet on the lamb. He's the notorious Irish mafia thug who got the Boston field officeof the FBI to participate in hits, even intermarry with the Southies. Whitey's brother, State Rep William Bulger, was head of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Some sons of a few Kennedy associates got involved in drowning two men by shoving their car into a lake just south of Pittsfield in 1981 and got away with it. They served 30 days, for fighting. They were let out for Christmas holidays and there were demonstrations in the town against it. One of the two victims was the son of one of the most influential union stewards GE faced: Barry Griffin, who'd gone down to the GE plant in Houston to a leader in the only unionized machine shop in all of Texas. Griffin knew about the PCB's and he knew who worked for Jack Welch. Whitey Bulger's brother William stood against the Griffin and Retzel families in the Massachusetts Supreme Court and helped set an important legal precedent against due process.

That is when O'Connell threw the Culture Commission into high gear. Soon after, William Bulger had moved from Boston to Western Massachusetts where he became president of the University of Massachusetts, keeping the money conduit flowing.

By the mid 1990's, the lesbian fringe-feminists had moved into military-style marches, complete with butch-like sergeants commanding the women, most of whom were clients of a rape-crisis center who were told to join the demonstrations in order to keep their shelter services and get their welfare checks. By then Jack Welch had closed GE down, having presided over the deliberate disposal of the PCB's into the Housatonic Valley, including distributing some of the contaminated soil to the ethnic & Black neighborhoods as "clean fill", which contributed to the 25% miscarriage rate.

On the Lamb In Texas

When Whitey Bulger went on the lamb, he came to Texas. For years he was able to "hide" all along the Route 10 corridor between New Orleans and east of Austin. He murdered at least nine people in Massachusetts. His cohorts around Dan O'Connell and the bizarre fringe cult inside the feminist movement murdered close to that many more, but only a few of their crimes got prosecuted, and those of course were supposedly "random".

We may be as doomed as those Jewish passangers of a cruise ship that nearly failed to make it out of Hitler's nightmare, but we must cling to some hope, just as they did. There is an important difference between Texas today and Massachusetts ten years ago. The Culture Commission up there was able to set itself up in an economically devastated death zone with very little opposition. The Catholic Church played a prominent role is silencing critics and whistleblowers, but that is important only in-so-far-as the Catholic Church as an organization is corrupt and its role in politics is largely unexamined. That role has nothing to do with theology, sex, & faith, and it not unique to the Catholic Church. Austin is still vibrant and alive. Texans have their own way of doing things, and the incoming carpetbaggers from New York, Boston and Seattle (there is a real history to Seattle being part of that, too, going back to 1972) are not going to find it as easy a kill as they found in Pittsfield.

Summer's Almost Over, CARITAS is up, Hearings Scheduled For New Budget....

End of summer break. The City Council is back with 101 issues on the table. The one thing that jumps out on first glance over the agenda is that there are five issues concerning the airport: Assistant City Manager Robert Goode is being appointed to the Board of Directors, the other four items concern concession lease renewals & extentions.

2008-09 Budget

A bigger item is the fiscal 2008-09 budget. The schedule of Public Hearings on the budget is to be set up, so mark your calenders and start training for the arm-wrestling matches.

Bicycle Bridge

$600,000 is up for approval for a Mopac bicycle bridge. This is a start on some real change that can benefit some healthy athletic people as well as everyone who breathes air. But is that really enough? The entire road & street system needs to be opened up to more bicycle traffic, and while they are at it, how about a "motorscooter" consideration for the rest of us? Think of the savings on gas as well as space and pollution! We should have motorscooter concessions leasing them to people at the bus transit centers. And you can park three times as many motor scooters as cars in the same space, so think about the relief of congestion downtown. Congress Ave could be limited to parked scooters! Commuters could easily arrange a lease with something like the bus-pass system and the scooters could have strong enough location detectors in them to be theft-proof. (Yeah yeah yeah, "location detector"="big brother", but just how secret is the average commuter's route? Anyway, it would just assure that the rented scooter is not lost to the leasing system. An alternative could be that the leased scooter is plugged into a prearranged destination....)

(BTW: if anyone picks up on this idea and makes a million bucks, please cut me a check for the creative idea :D, or at least buy me a scooter! )

CARITAS

CARITAS is up for another re-house the homeless grant. That should not be as automatic an approval as some people would like. CARITAS ran a very underhanded campaign to de-fund the Salvation Army last year, mainly becauce the Salvation Army's tradition is not to include political re-education and benefits "entitlement" in their appraoch to helping the homeless. CARITAS does not actually house anyone, and until they began attacking the Salvation Army last year, the Salvation Army was the only agency actually giving women a pallet on the floor if they showed up in emergency after all the bunks were fulled with women enrolled in various help programs. CARITAS staff ran a campaign along with a couple of radical Americorps volunteers to shut down those night services that were the most important to women in crisis. the city's own shelter, the ARCH, did not house women at night, only men. CARITAS knew this, and the churches that run CARITAS also knew this. The Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopaleans, & such could not tolerate the simple life-saving help the Salvation Army was giving women from all walks of life in the middle of the night.

CARITAS exploits & endangers women

CARITAS staff lied about their women's groups, claiming they were for helping the chronically unemployed learn new skills and attitudes from blue-collar and better-trained women, but in fact the groups were for gay-lesbian re-education and for indoctrination against the traditional "patriachal" attitudes of the Salvation Army. Now, I will be as quick as the next independent American woman to criticize the Salvation Army's religious beliefs about women, but they never imposed those beliefs on people outside their church staff, and in the middle of the night a woman trying to escape Austin's street-slave trade needs someplace safer and more accessible than CARITAS.

Predators and CARITAS

While I am on the subject of organizations who exploit and misrepresent statistics in order to get money that does NOT reach the supposed beneficiaries of the grants, something needs to be done about these same corrupt nonprofits placing sexual predators into the connecting points between law enforcement, the courts, and children. Everyone knows about the court advocate who was recently arrested in Austin for sexually assaulting children and videotaping the assaults. Does anyone know CARITAS role in this type of situation? CARITAS is supported by the Catholic Church. I am Catholic, so I know whereof I speak of my own kind, I am not afraid to point out that Bishop Aymond has a negative listing from his previous work in Louisiana, and he is one of the overseers of these so-called faitbh-based "advocacy" agencies. (Here is his listing in the Catholic "Bishop Accountability" website: http://www.bishop-accountability.org/resources/resource-files/databases/DallasMorningNewsBishops.htm)

You can't avoid the way these nonprofits unprofessionally and dishonestly present themselves as "saviors" of children while they harbor and coddle active predators in their midst. I live in a working-class neighborhood and mingle freely with the kind of people these agencies are supposed to be serving (and to be fair, there is still enough good in human nature that some of their staff people do the best they can, in spite of the corruption of the political activists and executives of those agencies)

So-called "Advocates" Make Children Available

Just recently, I was standing a good 20 feet away from two people talking, in a public place, and I could hear the whole gossip fest. A judge took the children away from two parents, according to the loud and totally UNconfidential "advocate" who was talking. . It would take less than fifteen minutes for any predator within earshot to track down the family in question and find those kids. Based on her job as an interpretor and based on finding out the dockets of certain courts, he could find her name in the public record and discover which children are now in that highly dangerous zone of transition from family to foster care. And most likely, the predator would be a gentle-spoken person who could count on the confidence and protection of the so-called "advocacy" system, the one providing FAKE legal aid and FAKE assistance in order to ensure that the criminal underworld thrives while the honest middle and working class people become its victims.

A Zone of Vulnerability

That time & space that follows in the few days after a judge's decision is a zone of emotional confusion and fast-paced bureaucratic case-management. It is one of the primary zones in which the professional pedophile and slave predator rings strike, and that is why there has always been a traditiona of strict confidentiality around family court cases! Look it up in any state in the union and find out what the statistics are for children "lost in the system", when and how they get "lost". And to top it off, the advocate lives in an adults-only building that just happens to be a building of choice, if not last-resort, for sex offendors who either plead out or serve out their time and then face restrictions against living near children, just like the no-child condominiums favored by a certain sector of the upper classes. I saw that advocate openly bragging about a family's case, not even just to people she knows, but out in public places where people 20 feet away can hear, and where some of Troxell's professional drug-addicted panhandlers ply their trade! (Troxell's scam is a column for another day, but just do the math: he, along with CARITAS and the Loaves & Fishes crew, claims everyone who is low-income is "homeless" in order to inflate the actual statistics as a fraud fundraising ploy. Everyone knows it, but everyone plays along, because the churches that run CARITAS also run the hospitals and have their activist members embedded in the schools and social clubs where they can and do terrify potential critics with the threat of consequences to families members.)

Who You Gonna Call?

I was angry enough to try to make a child-endangerment report on that advocate. I did not have my cell phone ready and I only carry plastic, no coins. So I went to a pay phone to use 311 to report the advocate's violation of that family's privacy and the children's safety. Guess what? Those 311 and 211 calls cannot receive calls from pay-phones! This is the very type of call that they are supposed to be handling, in order to take the burden off the 911 system. When I went to the manager to tell him his pay-phone was broken, he said that the calls are simply not allowed by the city and advised me to call 911 and have the 911 operator switch over to the 311, which finally I did. Apparently this is now the routine, because the 911 operator did not seem to mind and shifted me over to a routine APD number. The individual I spoke to there advised me to report the incident through the child-protection system.

So, right there in a nutshell: a system designed to make "soft" reports gets shoved back into the more expensive "hard crisis" system while an advocate paid for by the city via these CARITAS-type grants is openly advertising available children to anyone within earshot of a loud conversation, never mind whether the person she was telling had any right to know.

That money that the city is considering giving CARITAS would be better spent on an investigation of the entire set-up of the so-called "advocacy" system and the presence of a ring of protection that exists around the professional predators inside that system.

Vets Warned Away From CARITAS

And I do have an unconfirmed report from a Gulf veteran who recently won his disability that the VA warned him specifically against allowing CARITAS to assign a payee to his case. In our own casual conversation, in which I was telling him my opinion that he'd be better off to talk to a bank about setting up automatic bill payments than getting a payee, he said "well, the VA told me they won't allow CARITAS, anyway."

City money is wasted on CARITAS. There is too much fraud involved in how they get the money and how they spend it.

Preferential Treatment For Ex-Offenders?

Recently we happened to have the tv tuned to Channel 6 outside of the regular City Council time and we caught another group in action: the Human Rights Commission. They were listening to presentations on the question of giving ex-offenders preferential treatment similar to the "affirmative action" model, particularly in the job interview/hiring process. Whatever the Human Rights Commission decides will be presented to the City Council as a recommendation, so if this issue concerns you, it might be a good idea to contact the City Clerk and find out when meetings, hearings, and decision-points are likely to be reached.

Here is a link to this commission's page in the City hall site: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/agenda/2008/rights_062308.htm

You know, "Affirmative Action" started out as an idea that made sense. Our history and culture has allowed us to erect unconscious barriers in society to the advancement of people who have certain physical, inborn traits that we know have nothing to do with mental or intellectual competence: race and gender, and "Affrimative Action" seemed like a necessary step to take in breaking down those barriers. It has been somewhat expanded to include lifestyle choices such as homosexuality, culture and religion because there are strong arguments that these are at least partially inborn traits or are important private choices, and in any case are not normally violating another person's rights. But the notion of giving "ex-offenders", people who have been found guilty of crimes and done time, anything like an "Affirmative -Action" eligibility boggles the mind.

The main point seems to be "Ban the Box", a movement to prohibit employers from asking about criminal convictions on job applications. But affirmative action requirements that include bringing job offerings to ex-offender populations were also mentioned. These could be requirements for employers.

There are legitimate issues about job applications that ask such questions as "have you ever been arrested?" which probably should be prohibited because it is too easy for a corrupt society to subject people to arrest for no good reason. Such arrests usually are tossed out of court, if they get that far, and the person should never have to refer to it when filling out applications, but convictions? There are processes by which an unjust conviction can be overturned or expunged. We may need to expand and strengthen those processes, but we don't need to protect the people who were rightfully convicted of crimes. We may even be giving a message to young people that they can get extra points in careers if they get in trouble!

Job applications should certainly be simplified and sensitive questions should be held back to a more secure level, especially concerning the ease with with completely unauthorized an unqualified workers can read them in some companies where they are left sitting on a shift-manager's desk or a public counter, but affirmative action for ex-offenders????

Comments welcome, because this subject sure does need discussion!

Governor's Mansion Fire Cited As Warning

Today at City Hall a young child addressed the City Council on a consolidation proposal by first saying that what happened to the Governor's Mansion needs to be noticed. She then spoke about graffitti as art, referring to the famous "frog" icon on the drag and mentioning that this icon has shown up in other cities. She gave a most unchild-like speech about graffitti as art. She closed with an appeal to the Council to support article 59.

(An aside: here is a very interesting link to an article about the City Council voting last year to spend $50,000 on "graffiti education", dailytexanonline.com )

She was followed by an adult who spoke about meeting with the NEA in Colorado in preparation to bring this new division program to Austin.

Forgive this reporter for not noting all the names down for this article. This reporter was sitting in near-shock. This reporter is a survivor of the graffitti-driven and violent gang that set up a similar commission in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in the late 1980's that drove all independent artists out of that city while the political group that remained shoved death-oriented and extreme left-wing violent art projects into the high schools and into the public arena. Several people died suspiciously while fighting that group. The corruption in Massachusetts has always been notorious and need not be discussed here, except when it casts its shadow as far as Texas.

The proposed creation of this new Arts Division involves the merging of six city committees/commissions and looks like simply a move towards efficiency, but it covers a more sinister agenda. Someone coached that young child to open her remarks with reference to the burning of the Governor's Mansion and reference to the "need" to see graffitti as art, something no child of her apparent 9-12 years (at most) would have done on her own. Someone brought her around to see graffitti matching Austin marks in several cities, according to her own remarks as she described her surprise and she was told that the appearance of these marks in places like New York means Austin is very important.

The child who spoke in Austin is African-American, but the people responsible for exploiting children in New York and Massachusetts in this left-wing "art" tactic are mostly white racists. They are skilled at choosing unsuspecting or vulnerable people to deflect responsibility for their well-orchestrated violence and propaganda.

The Austin Egalitarian believes we have been given a warning, and that a very surreptitious and home-grown terrorist group is taking credit for the arson at the Governor's Mansion as their opening salvo.

Notice the new graffiti around town, the hanging bat? Look for more art-edgy projects involving school children and teachers who will be claiming this is art.

What it really is, is an opportunity for some "teachers" and other adults to bring children into contact with street violence, teaching them to see police authjority as the "enemy" and moving them into the role of violent confrontation with the "evil" authorities, because the children do not have the experience to understand that the innocent appearance of a bat or a frog is not the point: the vandalism of property is the point.

These home-grown terrorists who are snatching the minds of children right in front of us in City Hall are teaching the children the "property is theft" extremism of anarchist socialism, that is the kind that results in violence. And in order to succeed, they need not only the protection of City Hall which will fear embarrassment if they are investigated, but they also need to drive all the independent professional artists out of town, in order to silence the voices most likely to be influential in the early stages of resisting this incredible coup in Texas.

Nightmare On Second Street

It boggles the mind. One begins to wonder if one accidently signed up for some kind of Orwellian "Reality" show. One begins to wonder if some kind of Jim Jonesian kool-aid is being sipped up there on the dais.

I'm talking about Article 18:
"Approve an ordinance authorizing the acceptance of $30,000 in grant funds from the TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF STATE HEALTH SERVICES, GOVERNOR’S ADVISORY COUNCIL ON PHYSICAL FITNESS, Austin, TX; and amending the Fiscal Year 2007-2008 Health and Human Services Operating Budget Special Revenue Fund of Ordinance No. 20070910-003 to appropriate $30,000 to restructure the Mayor's Fitness Council and create a web-based Austin Fitness Index. Funding in the amount of $30,000 is available from the Texas Department of State Health Services, Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness, Austin, Texas. The grant period is May 1, 2008 through October 31, 2008. "

By itself, it looks innocuous. Maybe the City Hall is going to engage in a little promotional propaganda for getting people to use stairs instead of elevators, etc.

I was late for the meeting. As I sat down, a well-tanned middle-aged man was speaking. It was Lou Earle, publisher & CEO of Austin Fit Magazine. He was describing a plan to use the $30,000 grant in a program that will facilitate the placement of volunteers inside "faith-based organizations" and "affinity groups" as well as places of employment, in order to accomplish "real behavior change" regarding tobacco use, obesity, and other health issues.

Not one comment or question came from anyone on the dais. No one seemed to realize that if you have a government-paid set of "volunteers" embedding themselves inside existing organizations for the purpose of coercing "behavior change" in the members private lives, then you have.......

Well, you have....

Full-blown, unadulterated, pure FASCISM.

What else is it? A person joins a faith-based group for many reasons having nothing to do with "fitness" and certainly has the right to engage in faith-based activities without worrying about "fitness". What kind of misery is going to be visited upon such people when they discover they cannot engage in their chosen activities without facing invasive, intrusive questions about their diet, exercise, and health from these intrusive "fitness" experts? What about the other affinity groups? The art groups and book clubs, the garden groups and charity orgs? Are they all going to be forced to treat perceived "unfit" people as pariahs, are they all going to be trained in the art of mobbing and ostracizing the recalcitrant smoker or drinker?

And couple this with the other looming shadow of Fascism, the Parks Dept recent decision that groups of people exercising with an instructor need to pay $500 a year to assemble on public land, and you see why I call this a nightmare. It is a real one-two-punch.

Consider this hypothetical situation: an individual develops a personal network of friends with a common interest, maybe they sing in a choral group. The group gets noticed by the city-supported "fitness promoters" who will embed one of their trainers in it to start forcing the singers to gang up on any smokers or fat people. All of a sudden the rehearsals are places where snide, nasty remarks and syrupy-scary "invitations" to change are going to be repeated every week.

Now since smokers and fat people are approved hate-objects, many readers might say "so what?" Well, what about the thin person who may be using the easy camaraderie of a faith-based singing group to overcome anorexia or bulimia? And what about the fat person who is not a glutton but who is carrying weight that may have accumulated over a number of years after a heart ailment or other issue put the kabosh to exercise? Do these people now have to face being spoken to in that elitist, patronizing, dehumanizing tone that Fascists use for average citizens?

Ok, so we don't care about exascerbating normal human frailties with City-hall sponsored fascism. Let's look at the compliant, obedient members of our hypothetical "affinity" or "faith-based" group: the ones who try to overcome the psychological bullying by agreeing to meet together to exercise and support each other.

Now they are going to be approached by the Parks "thought police" who are going to publicly humiliate them with questions about what do they think they are doing, showing up to exercise together, because they are going to have to prove that none of them is an instructor.

End result: average people will stay home. Harmless little volunteer groups and hobby clubs will disband because of hurt feelings and well-founded fears of intrusion into family and private lives. The animosity that will be encouraged by City Hall's support of the fitness trainers will cause more illness, more unhealthy habits, than will be cured. People will be forced to answer personal questions asked by strangers and if they don't co-operate with those trainers, the trainers will step up to "interventions".

And what really is known about fitness? I am no expert but I do know this: at one time all alcohol was considered the demon's work, but then science showed that moderate wine and beer consumption has health benefits. I know that the explosion in obesity followed the drive to eliminate tobacco from common use, and I have wondered about the actual relative cost of lung cancer compared to type II diabetes and other complications of obesity. I also am aware that many prescription medications have weight gain as a side effect and some are known to cause type II diabetes in most people if they are used continuously for three or more years.

What people need is to be left alone. The City can best encourage fitness by telling the Parks department to forget the $500 fees and let people enjoy a safe and pleasant landscape in which to walk, jog, dance and play. The City should eliminate most car traffic from the core and also set up bike-only arteries into it so that people will just naturally become more active. Give that $30,000 to a fitness program that may include some kind of reward to businesses that install fitness equipment and showers or that give employees credit in nearby fitness centers like Gold's Gym, but don't burden us all with yet another layer of obnoxious attitude-police!

May 27: Next Meeting: June 5th. Present Concern: Open Those Mikes!

I try to keep a general list of agenda items in the bottom of this page for quick reference, but it has not been posted yet. When it is I will update that list. The link to "City Clerk: Council Meetings" in the sidebar leads to the latest agenda updates in the city's own site. The coming meeting schedule is June 5 and June 18. (The June 19th meeting has been moved to observe Juneteenth celebrations.) The next "work session" is June 4th.

A major concern is the manner in which several special interests have been blocking regular citizens from being able to speak at the open mike session that is supposed to provide contact with City Council. Normally, ten people are allowed to speak on any issue for three minutes each. But normally, Jennifer Gale and Carolannerose Kennedy show up EVERY WEEK in order to filibuster with hateful and ignorant remarks. Jennifer Gale, a transvestite, likes to make comments that vaguely resemble attempts to represent the police and the city bus drivers. Sometimes she brags of having "broken" a bus strike, which to this old union steward sounds really strange. Carolannerose Kennedy likes to recite inane poetry with an insulting, vaguely obscene tone while she throws things on the floor. It is an insult to the rest of the citizens of this fine city to see the way these two performers are allowed to embarrass us all, and it is an abuse of a system intended to support a democratic government process.

We'd like to see the City Council introduce a rotation into the system, perhaps by giving extra points to new speakers and shoving frequent flyers off the bottom of the list. We have issues like the 3.5-second crossing light on St. John's where there is a camera for catching jaywalkers and a building that includes more than a half-dozen residents who use wheelchairs, walkers and canes while trying to cross to the bus stop. People in that building have actually found it safer to jaywalk some distance from the corner in order to give turning motorists a chance to slow down instead of clipping them as they turn even when the pedestrian light is on. Motorists do not respect that white figure, they take their right-turn-on-red without looking. Now some retirees and veterans among others may have to face big fines on fixed incomes because of the short light and the watching camera.

We have issues like the growing problem of drunk cyclists on sidewalks who can do serious damage to pedestrians who can't react to their horns or bells. I, for one, have a hearing loss on one side so that I cannot tell how a cyclist is going to pass me when he speeds up behind me ringing his bell. I've been knocked aside twice, so far, this spring, just walking along the sidewalk on Congress. We need to find ways to support both cyclists and pedestrians, especially in the more active neighborhoods.

There are other issues, too. Zenobia Joseph brought up some interesting questions about children's writing programs at the last meeting, and we should hear more from parents about these issues. We should hear more from the Asian community, whose shops all over town must be seeing some effects from the shifting sands of business development.

One man I met while leafletting told me he has lots of questions about the flood-safety of the new riverside developments. He said his big complaint is that the City Council wants "to dance" while these questions, at least for him, go unanswered. "We didn't elect them so they could see a show", he said. City Council needs to hear from people like him. City Councillors need his vote as much as anyone else's.

It is always very dangerous for any government to lose connection with its own constituency. City Hall needs to keep those channels of communication open and not be fooled by the fact that one of the main obstacles to open communication, Jennifer Gale, spouts pablum about "open government" and the supposed need of an "ombudsman". City hall does not have to add another layer of bureaucracy in the form of an "ombudsman". It just needs to introduce a better rotation system into the speaking order at the open Citizen Communication sessions. There is so much valuable work that gets done at those sessions even now that it would be a shame to fail to open them up a little more.

22nd: Plastic Bottles & Green Water

Plastic Bottles: item #24 "Approve a resolution directing the City Manager to eliminate City purchase of plastic water bottles for use inside governmental facilities in City Hall and to present a plan to the City Council for reducing plastic bottle use in all City operations." (click here for full resolution)

The discussion of this resolution was a little confusing, since at first it sounded like the proposal would discourage carried water bottles. City purchase is the key here, and it means someone in City Hall is admitting that the emperor of bottled-water-land has no clothes: unless you're importing some exotic sparkling spring water, that stuff all came out of someone else's faucet!

So the big plastic water jugs that are not disposable will still be in use, but cases of individual bottles will not be draining taxpayers' money into that great plastic island in the Pacific Ocean... nice.

We just hope they don't get mad at people like us who carry plastic bottles in our packs. Even when we can afford to buy a plastic empty bottle for $5 at a sporting-goods store, we can never remember where we left it and so the old refill-the-pepsi-bottle trick works fine. No one wants to face a couple of blocks as a summer pedestrian without a full bottle of water!

Green Water: Item #40 in today's agenda brought a host of architectural firms to City Hall to put on some pretty fancy presentations showing off what they can build on the Green Water Treatment plant site. We won't try to discuss the individual companies here, except to say that it was gratifying to see a City government willing to carry this part of the process out in public. Those Austinites who have the expertise to ask the right questions can tune into Cable Channel 6 at 10:30 Saturday morning or 4:30 on Sunday and see all the dog & pony shows for themselves.

In general, though, we always wonder about high-rise residential buildings. Several of the proposals included this type of development. Part of the discussion concerned the problem that high-rise condominiums usually are not in the "affordable" range. But what never got mentioned is why anyone would want to live in such a tall building no matter what the cost. Not to rain on anyone's parade, but we do live in uncertain times. Give us walkable staircases and openable windows for those unforeseen catastrophes that may result in a power outage for a few days in August. We really do believe more wariness should be felt about this type of super-dense residential development because there are ramifications for times of natural disaster, civil unrest, or economic collapse.

Wouldn't Austin be better off to develop wide swaths of medium-density residential complexes (six stories or less) and consolidate all the other activities into the towers? Wouldn't such residential buildings be more hospitable to lower-impact energy use?

15th: Safety In Austin Homes & Streets

The Citizen Communications portion of today's City Hall meeting was opened with a statement by Anthony Walker of the Decker Lane neighborhood regarding reasonable access to bus stops. He described a situation in which those residents in Northeast Austin have to walk so far to get to the nearest CapMetro bus stop that elderly pedestrians have to stop and rest several times before arriving at the stop. He said wheelchair-bound citizens have to risk road traffic and uneven pavements, making the same journey. Mr. Walker spoke with eloquent passion and conviction about the need for the City Council to take responsibility for the risks his neighbors face when attempting to travel along the sidewalks and for the lack of more conveniently located bus stops.

He was followed by Patty Spinkle and a group of citizens from the South side of Austin, who presented a moving statement about the problems along the "Hippie Highway" residential area. They said their street has become a commuter's alternative to a more regulated roads because it has only one stop sign and no regular APD patrols or speed-deterrents. Cars have been speeding through their neigborhood during morning and evening rush hours when children are also up and about. Their neighborhood group, RespectGalindo.org, has tried to slow the traffic by putting up its own street signs, but to no avail. They showed a moving set of photographs of accidents including one SUV that plowed into a child's bedroom just minutes after the four-year-old had gotten up and left her bed. The car's tire landed on the child's pillow.

The third presentation was by Cynthia Valladez who spoke about problems in the East Cesar Chavez area. She said that a lack of coordination between two neighborhood groups has resulted in failure of City Hall to address issues of rising crime & derelict properties in that part of Austin.

The City Council called a staff member in to discuss the problems faced along the South Austin "Hippie Highway", which has been the subject of mass media coverage because of the dramatic accidents and of the Galindo Neighborhood (GENA) sign campaign. The staff member said that the Galindo Neighborhood is 19th in line for "traffic calming" attention.

What we at The Austin Egalitarian noticed was the spontaneous way the three groups, with no relationship with each other, made presentations that all went to the same point: the City Council seems to leave citizens of all types to fend for their streets themselves while attention is given over to more massive projects of urban planning such as the "McMansions" ordinance. We can see that there is a relationship between the City Council's need to control the tsunami of new building that is coming into Austin and the lack of time for attending to the existing streets and small householders.

Some of the candidates in the recent election have said that there is a need to empower the Neighborhood Associations with more authority as well as a need to restructure the City Council to make it more accessbile to the average person's concerns, perhaps by making some of the Councillors into district instead of at-large representatives.

This would not be an easy or quick solution, in our opinion. Ms. Valladez, when describing the problems along Cesar Chavez, showed that neighborhood associations can in fact become obstacles if they compete with each other. The process of re-structuring the City Council to accomodate district representatives could be slow and treacherous, even if worthwhile.

All of Austin's living, daily citizens have to become more involved in this struggle in City Hall. Too many of the building projects that Councillor McCracken is trying to address with the McMansion ordinance seem to involve absent investors and highly influential architects and developers while the risk of casualties described by the street-level citizens increases.

No solution will work if a larger percentage of the voting population doesn't wake up and pay attention. According to the figures published in The Austin Chronicle, the biggest voting district was the West at 11%. Most of the others came in well under 10%.

We at The Austin Egalitarian may express strong opinions one one side or another of any particular issue, but we really only have one goal for this publication: to see the overall voting percentage start to push 50%. We'd rather see our point of view get overwhelmed by active voters than see the city sink in an abyss of crumbling sidewalks and injured people while the City Councillors debate developers over variances and exemptions.

(This posting is what we have to say today, and we will expand it after reviewing the City Council meeting again on Sunday. Remember the runoff! Vote for Galindo!)

8th, Evening: Billboard Madness

This evening's City Council meeting was dominated by impassioned speeches about billboards, listed as Item #89. The speakers were not listed and so we are not going to attempt to identify them here, since we have no way of spelling their names correctly and a couple of them were scary people. Made us kind of reluctant to stir up a lynch-mob since that is what they sounded like.

One lady's speech reminded us of Malcolm X's famous "By any means necessary" comment. The issue, in a nutshell, is that some time ago Austin decided to go along with citizen groups who want this to be a city completely free of billboards of any kind. Tonight representatives of the Northwest and South Austin neighborhoods were at City Hall to express their outrage that the plan to rid Austin of all outdoor signage has not been accomplished.

The South Austin representative raised the issue of light-pollution of the night sky, and described the effects of these lights in the outlying area of Austin where she lives. She believes the billboards are responsible for the lack of stars that can be seen now, compared to five years ago. She said "dark sky lighting" would not be enough of a concession, but only eradication. Nobody mentioned any other possible explanations for fewer visible stars, such as more polluted air, or air traffic. (We recall an interesting surprise in the flight moratorium after 9-11: the sudden clarity of the night skies.)

She was followed by a speaker who compared the evil billboard companies to the evil tobacco companies. We waited for statistics on eye-cancer but none were presented.

But these two speakers were no match in pure visceral passion to the woman from the Northwest neighborhood association who declared those billboards WILL COME DOWN!!!

She gots lots of loud applause.

After all that, the fellas who stood up for the billboard companies surprised us. They did not have fangs or bat-like wings, neither did they have bulging biceps with tattoos of billboard-induced death counts.

They spoke softly, mentioned a few details of the agreements that had been set up to manage and compromise the issue. The gentleman for Reagan Advertising mentioned the Constitution in passing, but did not go very far in that direction. This definitely was not a crowd that wants to hear about freedom of expression. The gentleman from Anderson Advertising mentioned a question of discrimination against one form of expression. He referred to a conflict between the desired eradication of the billboards and the law, particularly a State law that we are not familiar with.

Councillor Leffingwell commented, after their remarks, that he was under the impression that one reason for having this hearing involved a question of exactly that law. The issue was tabled after that comment and after a City Hall employee spoke on the impossibility of carrying out the task of taking down the signs with the present budget and staff level.

Our impression: all of the impassioned crusaders against billboards appeared to be retirees. (We are old enough to point this out without being accused of agism). All of them seem to want Austin to look like a landscaped park. They also do not seem to be aware of the serious hazard of sleepiness on long stretches of monotonous "scenic highway". They probably have not faced what younger people often face, which is the need to fight sleep on a long drive. Billboards actually are an important safety assett on long highways.

Beyond the light-pollution issue, which could be a problem with a giant billboard, we could not see the evil they were fighting. A few rules about number, size and placement should serve to keep billboards under control. Guessing by the usual make-up of neighborhood committees, this may be the same population that supports "Art In Public Places." Which we also support, and we wonder about the comparative logic.

Billboards are an earth-friendly, small-business-friendly, economically sound medium if used judiciously. They don't pollute landfills and they don't make noise.

We like billboards, within reason. We don't think they are addictive or carcinogenic.

And we really wonder about the deeper significance of the passion expressed at tonight's City Council Entertainment Public Hearing.

Stay tuned, Dear Readers.

8th, Morning: Household Adaptations, Youth & Ethnic Issues

Let me preface this article by explaining that I am returning to journalism after a 20-year hiatus, and so I apologize for not having caught everyone's name. I will try to grab what I missed during the Sunday video on Channel 6 and I promise each week will see improvement in my coverage. I will try to choose two or three topics each week that seem interesting, and anyone who wants to push this blog in a specific direction is welcome to help with comments.

Three outstanding issues before the City Council this morning were related to "quality of life".

#48: "...a resolution directing the City Manager to initiate amendments to City Code Chapter 5-1 ... adopting Visitability standards for all new single-family homes and two-family dwellings (duplexes). (Mayor Pro Tem Betty Dunkerley Council Member Sheryl Cole )..."

#18-19: "... to increase operating expenditures in the amount of $24,482 for summer youth employment stipends. Funding in the amount of $24,482 is available from the increased expense reimbursement revenue from Travis County...." and "... to fund and administer the Summer Youth Employment Stipend program for the period October 1, 2007 through September 30, 2008 for an annual amount not to exceed $473,811 ($294,329 City; $179,482 County)...."

And another was #50: "...Approve a resolution directing the City Manager to identify areas within the upcoming fiscal year 2008-2009 budget to conduct facilitated community discussions of the Hispanic/Latino quality of life issues in Austin ..."

#48: David Witty of ADAPT described considerations of entrance size, slight-switch placements and bathroom grab-bars that are the main focus of proposed building codes. Mr. Alder, an architect, spoke for his organization and another gentleman spoke for the Homebuilders' Associations. Both were supportive of the proposals with one comment worth noting: the Homebuilders' speaker said they not given timely notice of the changes and would appreciate it if the Council would consider the amount of changes in regulation and market conditions they are coping with, and asked for a 60-day extension of study time.

#18-19 - Mr. Gus Pena addressed the Youth Employment funding, a long-standing program that serves to keep youngsters working and out of trouble for the summer. We'll be following this issue, because we'd like to see some of the young people visit this blog and tell everyone about their experience.

The center of the Council hall was filled with members of the Latino community who came to support the Hispanic study initiative, including Kathy Vasquez who spoke on behalf of the small business owners facing development and neighborhood change in the East side. Since this is an initiative to study what might be the needs and issues of that community, nothing very specific was addressed, but statistics concerning the population and future trends were noted: 34% now with a possible majority status down the road, family income between $35,000-$75,000, etc.

Mayor Wynn commented, in reply to a question that the cost of the Hispanic initiative would be in the vicinity of $700,000. The question was asked by Jennifer Gale, who opened with this rational question only to then launch into a rambling attack on the concept that somehow concluded that the Hispanic community would be destroyed by "selling out".... Nobody else spoke to balance her remarks, mainly because she was not on the roster to speak on this issue. She jumped in with her assertion that she was signed up, but that was for a different issue.

It was apparent to this reporter that Ms. Gale does not know what a "facilitated discussion" is. A "facilitated discussion" is one which is more or less moderated by people who can ensure that topics get covered and that participants don't confuse the topics with personal or irrelevant issues. A "facilitated discussion" should allow for some real solid communication because people will be able to say what is really on their mind about life in the Hispanic community in Austin and then all parties can come away with a much better understanding of each other, as well as mutual compassion.

The Austin Egalitarian will try to follow this initiative through its development and see how its best intentions turn out.