“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Kris. I think I mentioned on the phone that I left counter-intelligence six months ago. Ed and I both wanted to get a fresh start away from the government. He took the job in private security, and I took a job as the President of the American Freedom Coalition.”
“The American Freedom Coalition?” repeated Kris. “That sounds interesting. What do you do?”
“AFC is a conservative think tank. Our purpose is to make Americans aware of the ways in which the federal government is taking our freedoms and to organize citizens to vote and to get involved in the legislative process before it is too late. I’ve been a member of AFC since it started about three years ago, but last year they approached me about taking a more active full-time role. Now you can see why Ed and I both had to give up our federal jobs. There was no way that I could take on the presidency of this organization with either one of us still on the federal payroll.”
Kris nodded. “I have to tell you, Lena. I am really surprised. I know that you were always active politically, and you covered a lot of conservative issues on your show, but I never thought that you would become a full-time activist.”
“It was a difficult decision, but two things made up my mind. The first was the establishment of the National Counter Terrorism Council in 2012. I worked all my life in intelligence protecting American citizens, and then suddenly I was collecting detailed information on the lives of those citizens for an agency that was allowed to keep that information for up to five years—even if there were no evidence linking the person being investigated to terrorism. I wasn’t comfortable with that.”
“No, I don’t think I would be either. But, honestly, if people are not doing something they’re not supposed to be doing, why should they care whether the government keeps tabs on them? I mean, where I work I am under constant surveillance, but it’s fine because I’m not doing anything that I shouldn’t be.” Kris was buttering the muffin that came with her salad. It looked so delicious; she had not had a blueberry muffin for months, and she was concentrating more on the muffin than on Lena.
“The problem is that the federal government, through various laws and agencies, has given itself the right to track and monitor nearly every part of citizens’ lives,” Lena answered. “The government has the power to monitor how we spend money, where we go, what political parties we support, what causes we promote, how much money we have in savings and in retirement—everything. And on the surface, that is not necessarily a problem, but that kind of knowledge can be used to make lists of people for all kinds of purposes.
“Take Smart Seniors, for example. The town hall meetings are by invitation only; all applicants are completely pre-selected. The reason that the FMPD is able to pre-select these people is that they have a wealth of information in the databases of various federal agencies which they are able to access with the click of a button. There is nothing random about an invitation to W—they are carefully pre-selected applicants. I did not want to be part of the system that was tracking people’s lives.”
Kris wanted to change the subject without appearing to be uninterested or offended, so she smiled and nodded and then said, “You said there were two reasons you left; what was the other one?”
“I lost my radio show.”
“I didn’t know that you lost your show. When did that happen?” Kris hated to admit that she had not tuned into Lena’s show in a while, but she honestly did not know that it was gone.
“After the 2012 elections, Congress passed the Fairness Doctrine. The FCC began mandating that all stations give all viewpoints equal time. My show was on a local Christian radio station, but after the fairness doctrine passed they could not continue on air. I not only lost my show; the entire station folded. It is now a country western station.
“Anyway, that really set me thinking. I had invested six years in my show. And it was not just me; a lot of people on that station lost their shows. A lot of stations closed; nearly all of the Christian radio stations broadcasting over the air have shut down in the last six months. I knew that the government was over-reaching; I worked for the government nearly my entire career. But this was personal, and it really made me re-evaluate how I was spending my life.”
“So you’re not on the radio at all now?”
“I have a show on satellite radio. The FCC does not regulate satellite radio. I was planning to go to internet radio, but there are so many new laws regulating speech and content on the internet that I could not have a show in that venue either. Satellite radio is much more difficult to regulate, even though the audience is a lot smaller.”
“What is your new show?”
“My new show is just called ‘Lena’, and I talk about the issues that we are working on through the AFC. The Fairness Doctrine is one of the issues that we have discussed, but it’s certainly not the only issue. The main focus of the AFC is to make Americans aware of the ways in which our individual freedoms and national sovereignty are being eroded in favor of international laws and international treaties imposed by international governing authorities. We want Americans to know that they are submitting themselves to laws that they have no say in passing and that as they do so they are relinquishing the freedoms guaranteed to us by our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. It is happening everywhere, all over this country, and most people have no idea that it is even going on.”
Kris ladled blue cheese dressing over her Cobb Salad. “Give me an example,” she said just before she popped a bite into her mouth.
“I could give you a lot of examples, but let’s start with the Retire America Act of 2013. The bill is over three thousand pages—it creates over fifty new agencies, including the Federal Municipal Planning Division, and hundreds of new regulations governing areas of American life that have nothing to do with retirement. Like the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in 2010, the director of the FMPD was a recess appointment by the President, and like the head of the CFPB, the director of the FMPD answers only to the President of the United States. He does not report to Congress at all. We are creating massive agencies which have been empowered to write far-reaching regulations without any input from the voters or from our elected representatives, and we are allowing our representatives to appoint powerful bureaucrats who answer to no one. We are throwing away our ability to choose our own futures—instead we are turning control of our nation and our lives over to a handful of unelected officials.”
Kris interjected. “I know that a lot of people had issues with the Retire America Act. My parents were among them. But Congress had to do something to fix the problems with Social Security and Medicare. These were huge financial issues for the United States—over forty percent of all federal spending was going to these two programs. The Act was not perfect, but it was necessary.”
Lena looked at her very directly, “But it wasn’t necessary, Kris. That is one of the messages that AFC wants people to get. In 2009 Social Security started paying out more money than it was taking in. We knew as a society for years before that date that the program was going to end up in the red. There were a number of good proposals to change Social Security including privatization of a portion of Americans’ retirement planning. As late as 2012, the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council had a plan that proposed reforms to Social Security and Medicare in order to save both programs for Americans who depended on them. By turning Medicare into an insurance plan patterned after the insurance plans that Congress has, we could have protected people who relied on Medicare and offered choices and options to American seniors. Every attempt to salvage either one of these programs through reform was shot down. For decades the strongest senior advocacy organizations in this country were really just propaganda agencies for progressive liberal agendas; they fought every reform proposal and vilified every person and organization who attempted to fix anything that was wrong with the system. For over forty years, Americans have been conditioned to beli
eve that the government is the solution to their retirement, so it was easy to rally seniors to fight to keep Social Security and Medicare intact without any changes, even though everyone knew that these programs were crashing and burning. None of that was accidental; it was very carefully planned by the progressive movement in this country.”
“But why? Why would anyone do any of this on purpose? Who benefits from destroying Social Security and Medicare? Not the organizations you just mentioned. Certainly not the seniors.”
“Really, are you sure about that, Kris? Did you know that Section 1416 of the Retire America Act includes a paragraph that automatically enrolls every senior who enters into a Smart Seniors community into membership in the nation’s largest senior advocacy organization? The deduction is taken out of each senior’s credit allotment off the top—they never even see it. By advocating on behalf of Retire America, they automatically increased their membership to ultimately include every person over sixty-five in the United States. That’s a lot better than they were doing before the Act passed.
“Who else benefits? The U.S. Treasury. Who has the money in the U.S. right now? People over sixty-five. When the Retire America Act was being debated in Congress, progressive groups kept showing pictures of seniors who were living below the poverty line, but they totally ignored the fact that in the twenty-five years from 1984-2009, the median income for seniors grew over one hundred percent. Seniors were virtually unaffected by the Great Recession—their net worth fell only six percent from 2005 to 2009 whereas the net worth of people under thirty-five fell fifty-five percent during the same period. Older Americans have equity in their homes; they have businesses, retirements. A lot of the wealth in the United States is concentrated in the hands of Americans over sixty-five. The Retire America Act is designed to confiscate that wealth—first by levying heavy taxes on retirement accounts and 401ks and then by cutting off Social Security and Medicare payments. By cutting off seniors’ access to cash, the Act forces them to sign over their assets which then become the property of the federal government. Retire America is the greatest transfer of wealth from private hands to the U.S. government that we have ever seen in our nation’s history.”
“People in the program do have to sign over their homes and cars and property,” Kris responded, “But in exchange the federal government has to care for them for the rest of their lives. That is the reason they have to sign over their assets.”
“The W initiative is brand new. We have not yet seen what the medical care will look like for the residents down the road. We have not had a chance to see what happens to patients with cancer or patients who need organ transplants. Do you think that the federally-managed health care program run by doctors who work for the federal government is going to spend extra time or care on older, sick Americans who have already signed over all their assets to the government? We don’t think so.
“But there is another significant aspect to the Retire America Act that is just as important as its impact on seniors, and that is the creation of the Federal Municipal Planning Division. This agency is mammoth and far-reaching in its powers. Ultimately, FMPD will dictate how and where every American lives and works throughout the U.S.—not just seniors. Its powers are not in any way restricted to the Smart Seniors’ program—it was created as part of this bill only because its advocates knew that by creating the agency as part of the bill they could get it started without anyone asking too many questions.”
Lena took a sip of tea and a bite of her chicken salad. She had scarcely eaten since they had sat down; she had been doing virtually all of the talking. Kris’ training had alluded to the fact that FMPD might govern more than just senior housing, but in the months that she had been working for Smart Seniors she had never heard anything more about their other potential powers. She looked at her friend seriously and asked, “What do you mean, Lena?”
“Kris, have you ever heard of a United Nations’ initiative called Agenda 21?”
Kris immediately thought back to her last conversation with Keith—his drunken middle-of-the-night rant about the government in a conspiracy to kill Americans living along the Gulf Coast as a part of Agenda 21. She stared at Lena; Kris was used to conspiracy-theory nonsense from Keith. Since he had left his job, he mainly occupied his time with crazy, paranoid theories. But she had known Lena for many years and had never known her to be paranoid or given to conspiracy theories, so she could hardly believe her ears. She suspected that the surprise she felt registered on her face, so she answered, “Only recently from my brother Keith. He’s into a lot of conspiracy theories.”
Lena laughed. “I see the look on your face. Our pastor used to say that the best trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he didn’t exist. I can say the same about the Agenda 21 proponents. For years they have convinced the educated world that people who believe in Agenda 21 are on the same level with Area 51ers—it’s just another crazy conspiracy theory. By ridiculing and vilifying their critics, the environmental lobby has been able to implement the goals of Agenda 21 right in our own backyards.
“The truth is that Agenda 21 is a lot more than a conspiracy theory. In 1992, the United Nations held an earth summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and they introduced Agenda 21. You can type ‘U.N. Agenda 21’ into any search engine, and it will take you straight to the U.N. website where you can read the document for yourself. Agenda 21 is a very long document, but, put simply, it is a blueprint for using environmental activism to redistribute the wealth from developed nations to undeveloped nations. Every U.S. president since 1992 has endorsed Agenda 21, although for the first twenty years many Americans were completely unaware of its existence.
“Agenda 21’s goals include a complete transformation of western society through a radical environmental agenda. We saw it first through initiatives to save the planet and prevent climate change. When Americans began to doubt the existence of man-made climate change, the terminology was modified to reflect a new goal—sustainability. The earth could not continue to sustain itself unless its inhabitants dramatically altered their way of life. What Americans did not understand was that sustainability was just a smokescreen for the true goal which was weakening the U.S. and transforming us from a First World to a Third World Country. Since 2008, nearly every major policy decision has reflected at least some of the goals of Agenda 21.”
“Every decision? How is that even possible? Certainly not every policy revolves around environmental initiatives.”
“More do than appear to at first glance. Take the housing industry for instance. At the beginning of the millennium, the U.S. government set a goal to put five million new Americans into their own homes. This goal led to the creation of alternative mortgage products since many of these Americans would not have qualified to own their homes using traditional mortgages. When the financial crisis occurred in 2008, millions of Americans went into foreclosure. The crisis allowed the government to get the support that it needed to pass the Dodd-Frank bill, which purported to protect Americans against having to bail out any more banks. In reality, Dodd-Frank created a huge new bureaucracy—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which was completely unaccountable to anyone in government except the President. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau authorized the government to monitor the bank accounts and spending habits of all Americans, and it gave the federal government the power to close down private businesses based on their own belief that those businesses might fail and become a future burden to the taxpayers. Dodd-Frank gave the federal government broad, unprecedented powers, but one of its most far-reaching effects was that it created regulations which guaranteed that for the first time in our history Americans could not aspire to homeownership. Homeownership has always been the American dream—for good reason. The U.S. was one of the few countries in the world where the average person could have a reasonable expectation of someday owning his own home. Dodd-Frank took that dream away from Americans.”
“The qualified reside
ntial mortgage—I remember it well—it was the end of my agency and my career. Virtually nobody qualified, and the remaining mortgages that were available to buyers through the banks were so expensive and difficult to get that almost no one qualified to get one of those either.”
“Exactly,” Lena continued, “and that was entirely by design. Homeownership is completely contrary to the goals of Agenda 21, which is anti-private property and anti-single family housing. But since Americans were so in love with their houses and their SUVs, the proponents of Agenda 21 had to cut off housing finance before they could go forward.”
“I lived through that, Lena. It was the worst couple of years of my life. I lost my own house to foreclosure because I could not find anybody who wanted to buy it who could qualify for the loan. But honestly, I can’t see any connection between what happened then and the FMPD today, except that there are a whole lot of people like me who used to own our homes and our businesses and now work for the government and are renting. Other than that, I don’t really see how they are connected.”
“Just before Chris Dodd—he was the Dodd in Dodd-Frank—retired, he tried to push through one last bill. It was a Federal Livable Communities Act which would have set federal standards for environmentally-sustainable housing. The goals of Dodd’s Act came straight out of Agenda 21, and it was certainly a forerunner of the FMPD. The bill would have created planning and capital grants to allow local regions to coordinate transportation, housing, and community development policies to reduce traffic congestion, generate economic growth, create and preserve affordable housing and meet environmental and energy goals. In promoting his bill, Dodd stated that the grants would encourage regions to think about how best to preserve rural areas and green spaces, link commuters with energy efficient, affordable public transit, and develop our main streets and urban centers into ‘accessible, vibrant’ places. The idea behind the Act was to create a ‘location efficient’ development model that would also save money by maximizing the use of the existing infrastructure—minimizing the need to construct new roads, schools and utility infrastructure.
W: The Planner, The Chosen Page 16
