K-mart, LIAA, and Our County's Future

[XLFD]

In 1924, with an initial gift of $1.6 million, Sebastian Spering Kresge established The Kresge Foundation in Detroit. Twelve years earlier, he and his partner, John G. McCrory, opened the first five-and-10-cent store – a revolutionary merchandising idea at the time – and parlayed the concept and operations into a chain of stores that were incorporated as the S.S. Kresge Company. Many years later, the enterprise became known as Kmart.

Sebastian chaired the first foundation board meeting and then served as treasurer until his death in 1966, at age 99. By then, he had contributed $60.5 million to the foundation. All along, he maintained a steadfast commitment to charitable giving.

For more than 80 years, his mandate to promote human progress was realized through the support of fundraising campaigns to build capital projects – libraries, hospitals, schools, museums, community centers and the like – that, over the years, have contributed to the creation of the nation’s nonprofit infrastructure.

But then concepts like 'sustainable development', 'resiliency', 'smart growth' fueled by the prophesied doom and gloom scenarios of global warming (aka climate change) took root in the heads of those who ran the foundation, fostering them into transitioning the USA into a society ruled by socialistic central planning in an effort to get people centralized into 'box megacities' much like K-mart pioneered the concept of box stores. 

And even though K-mart moved out of Mason County in 2001, they plan on coming back in spades with this latest push by the Land Information Access Association (LIAA) into creating comprehensive master plans based on the concepts of resiliency and global warming.  Here is part of the agreement that Ludington signed (albeit illegally) which was similar to the ones that our county and two townships signed, that mentions the financial backing of the Kresge Foundation. 

Consider: we are being told that the $170,000 project is simply to develop master plans for the four local governments.  This task has been handled by our volunteer Planning Commissions which costs our taxpayers of Ludington around $6000 a year for everything, even when we did our prior comprehensive master plan.  With this new arrangement with LIAA, their share ($8000) is over that amount.  You will note that in this recent grant to LIAA from Kresge was directed to help communities prepare and adapt for the ravages of global warming in the planning process.

This seems rather bizarre in that communities are usually solely in charge of the planning process, as it should be, but here we have a globalized view to local planning which is quite scary when one considers how weird some of the rest of this globe is. 

Instead of extrapolating the linkages to a skewed version of what I call Proactive Socialism (where a group of chicken-littles justify dramatic, expensive, and ultimately unnecessary steps to thwart a falling sky, while at the same time creating a centrally planned society that Vladimir Lenin would be proud of), I will let the chairman of the Kresge Foundation make the case for me.  Here he will mention his fealty to the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in explaining his views, which may seem extreme to you if you are at least a little skeptical of global warming.

Kresge's CEO, Rip Rapson (pictured at left), speaking at New York in 2013 said in his conclusion:  "We at Kresge believe that climate change and society’s response to it will define the future of cities. If we care about cities and the well-being of the people who live in them, we must act today to avoid the unmanageable at the same time we make plans to manage the unavoidable. Resilience measures taken absent dramatic greenhouse gas reductions are a mirage. As one observer has noted, “The hallmarks of resilience are redundancy, adaptation and flexibility, but also the foresight and good judgment to avoid the brawl in the first place.”

Mary Robinson, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and president of Ireland before that, describes climate change as “the biggest human rights issue of the 21st century.”  This compels us to ground our work in an ethic of equity and inclusiveness. We need to elevate and celebrate urban leaders who show courage in addressing climate change and building resilience – and, given what is at stake, we also need to ensure there’s a political liability in failure to show that courage."

So those who believe in global warming and prepping for a climate doomsday scenario are to be elevated, while those Luddite unbelievers will be deemed cowards and politically dismissed by his enlightened fellowship.   Note the nod to United Nations wisdom in equating global warming with human rights issues, and the need to manage cities without any reference to rural living.  This fits in line with the Agenda 21 genesis and its land-use policies. 

Need more proof of UN mandates, Rip Rapson's naivety, and the basis of why millions of dollars in grants are given by the Kresge Foundations yearly, see it here in a post just two weeks ago: 

"Late last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assigned global society a carbon budget we must stay within if we hope to avoid a level of turmoil that would overwhelm even the most sophisticated resilience plans.

 We’ve spent more than half that budget already, and our current rate of emissions puts us on track to hit the ceiling – that is, to have released all the carbon we ever can – in 2040. The trajectory has to change. Politically, technically, emotionally, it’s an unnatural act for us to behave in the here-and-now in ways that take their bearings from a distant horizon. But climate change has set in motion forces that will forever change the nature of life in America’s cities. We must act."

It may seem like the ultimate in crazy talk when intelligent people, like Rip Rapson undoubtedly is, start talking as if a cyclical change in the weather is going to lead us into necessarily altering our way of life, especially when climate indicators are once again going against their narrative, and people in the USA are getting hit with cold, snowy extremes.  The eventual goals of these people, to herd them into megacities, feed them genetically modified foods, and take away the freedoms given to us by the Constitution of this sovereign nation, should be ridiculed and laughed away from the planning table.

After all, do we want to live, prosper, and have the rights of chickens like these:

Or do we want to live like chickens were meant to live, free to roam and with some breathing space:

The choice is yours-- if you express yourself against these charlatans trying to take over your county by infiltrating our comprehensive plan with socialistic, dystopian ideas to secure your part in their future 'paradise'.

[Willy]

What I would like to know is, would Ludington, the County and Townships be redoing their Master Plans if they had not been contacted by LIAA or whomever? If not then the whole reason for a new Master Plan is to redo our local standards to meet Agenda 21 and not to refine our needs locally. This is scary sh_t and it seems to be picking up steam. Another fine article X.

[XLFD]

There typically is minimal coordination with the master plans of all four political entities involved, and to my understanding of what has taken place in the past, they each have their own timetable which often fall on different years. 

You have reached the proper conclusion, I believe; the LIAA-written plan will incorporate the introduction of Agenda 21 concepts into the four master plans and unify their purpose.  Thanks for your support, Willy, I just wish the news could be rosier.