The Open Space Fraud
While on national levels there remains some clear difference between the political parties, especially in regards to a clear understanding of the need for nation defense among the GOP, there is not so clear-cut a difference among the local candidates for elected office.
The Republican party generally casts itself as the part of “free markets”, as being opposed to governmental expansion and unjust increases of governmental power and taxation.
But at a local level, the “preservation of open space” mantra has been accepted as readily by the right as the left, leaving citizens with few choices for reasonable candidates.
The integration of environmentalist dogma into American culture has not been limited to the left, so that many of the local candidates from the GOP are the staunchest proponents of violating property rights and fiscal responsibility under an increasing number of “green” pretexts.
In one New Jersey town, Berkeley Heights, the local Mayor Cohen has led a decades-long crusade to seize a track of land called Stanford Drive.
The government has eagerly sought to obtain the land any way it could, from threatening condemnation to putting the question of whether to seize the land up to a public vote about 6 years ago. The local government even created the post of an additional township official, whose job ended up being to lobby for the seizure of the land and drum up support for creating a “park” on Stanford Drive.
The problem is that the land is polluted with asbestos and petroleum products, in addition to heavy metal contaminants. The government was simultaneously seeking to scare the citizenry with tales of the contamination, whilst at the same time seeking to assume responsibility for the costs of cleanup and future liability -– after a costly legal battle to abrogate the property rights of the land owner, who sought to build townhouses on the site after properly cleaning up the pollutants.
Mayor Cohen launched a personal attack on the owner of the land, stating that “if the devil had a face, it would be the developer of Stanford Drive. “
Court after court ruled against every one of the town’s strong arm tactics to force the “sale” of the land at governmental gunpoint. Nevertheless, the town continued to wage a costly and dangerous legal battle at taxpayer expense. Far from any demand of the citizens for a park, the real motivation was expressed by Mr. Chait, Mayor David Cohen’s former colleague and himself a former mayor of Berkeley Heights, who said once that “we are doing everything in our power to keep those apartments from being built.”
And this hits on the reason for the “open space” fraud being adopted by the Republican party at a local level, making the local GOP candidates little better than their democratic counterparts; snobbery. While the left and the environmentalists may be seeking to preserve “natural” open space, the locals in many of these towns simply fear development. It is not a question of wanting to keep the grass and trees, but simply of not desiring apartments or townhouses. The desire is not to preserve “open space”, but to keep out newcomers from the town.
In this respect, the open space agenda is a link between the left and the right, two sides supporting the same dangerous issue, but for different reasons. However, the impact is the same: more land given over to the gullet of the government, ostensibly for “public” use, but in reality, it is an attempt to institute a police of denial by acquisition.
When election day rolls around, Americans should decide not on personality or some special issue, but by which candidates overall view of government more closely squares with its proper functions. On the national level, that is the GOP, with Bush, for all his flaws and me-too domestic policy which embodies attempts to copy the worst Democratic proposals, understands the importance of national defense. John Kerry’s anti-war campaign clearly illustrates that he does not.
But on a local level, the GOP clearly does not understand the purpose of government any better than their leftist counterparts. As the war is to national politics, so open space is to local. The problem is that those who are on t he right side of the spectrum at the national level, are, in local matters, sitting solidly on the wrong side of the fence.
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