On 12/13/2010 3:48 PM, craigso...@aol.com wrote:
The rewriting of our zoning regs may in fact be little more than the
Developers' Zoning Streamlining and Nutter Real Estate Tax Enhancement
Act. The only thing worse than careless Republican Rule is Greedy
Democratic Rule.
Craig,
This is one of those times that you actually make sense! Of course, it
will be streamlining for developers.
Notice how Sokoloff avoids any discussion in the text about real public
notification and a transparent process? Importantly, he adds in this
new Penn design committee (the so called experts) into the middle of the
process. (Non-governmental experts don't need to consider the public
right to participate and know)
Without knowing the details to figure out, how; it's easy to see that
Praxis is trying to put "community involvement" into the hands of one of
these civic association leaders in a way they can control. (Remember
when we learned that UCD required 3 nominations from which to choose a
"community representative")
And remember, creations like "Friends of 40th" might be this "relevant
community group" used to represent the community at closed meetings.
This stuff about both sides submitting minutes is a complete
smokescreen. It's a rather absurd use of the term, "minutes". Who gets
these minutes? The design committee will throw those in the trash if
they are not useful. And those familiar with the Planning Commission
know that it creates a fictional meeting by using fake minutes.
So think about it, Friends of 40th or SHCA zoning committee submits
minutes to a bipartisan, expert, Penn committee whose recommendations
will be rubber stamped by the planning commission. That's community
involvement for you!
The only thing that involves the public is a thorough process for
community notification and open meetings at all points. Do you see how
this fake stuff avoids any mention of real community notification and
open meetings?
("And, as outlined above, neighborhood input would be an important part
of the review." Notice how Sokoloff switches from describing a process
for the "relevant community group" to this vague "neighborhood input.")
People that do this propaganda, think they are so clever.
I watched Sokoloff and Nutter's Peoples Budget. This is fake
democracy. They start with false dichotomies. The data they collect is
flawed from the beginning and depends on tricked participants. Research
collected by tricking participants into a debate about false choices
would be rejected by real experts!
Someone in the group, like me, always points out that the experts had
created false alternatives, as the only alternatives. Sokoloff's
handlers use their power as facilitators to refuse to include the real
questions that need to be decided by participants. (the experts had
identified all possibilities in advance and were always short on time)
In the people's budget, ending the tax abatement for billionaires,
taxing corporate cronies, ending the war on drugs inside the city, and
stopping the caging of poor people were not included.
They built the whole charade around a choice to raise regressive taxes
or cut libraries and fire houses. So Nutter went ahead and did some of
each.
This fake democratic process and use of astroturf groups is really a way
to close people out completely. This is exactly how Penn designed the
Clark Park Partnership and continued to bill this as community
involvement. Their pretended community involvement allows them to make
secret meetings acceptable and require group affiliation to the
invitation only meetings facilitated by a Penn group like UCD.
Craig, I hope my analysis is helpful.
Your list buddy
