NH Listens? No They Don't. They Tell!

NH Listens is running around the state training "facilitators" to advance a decidedly left wing agenda.  And why not?  The 'interim' directer of the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire--which runs NH Listens--is not only a well connected left winger, he doesn't even live in the granite State.

He lives in Maine.

And have you seen who he donates to politically?

Mallory, Bruce L Kittery Point, ME 03905 University of New Hampshire/Profess	SHEA-PORTER, CAROL (D) House (NH 01) CAROL SHEA-PORTER FOR CONGRESS	$250 primary	06/12/10
MALLORY, BRUCE L KITTERY POINT, ME 03905 UNIVERSITY OF NH/PROFESSOR	HODES, PAUL W (D) Senate - NH HODES FOR SENATE	$250 primary	03/09/10
Mallory, Bruce Kittery Point, ME 03905 University of New Hampshire/Provost	OBAMA, BARACK (D) President OBAMA FOR AMERICA	$250 general	09/06/08
Mallory, Bruce L Kittery Point, ME 03905 University of New Hampshire/Provost	SHEA-PORTER, CAROL (D) House (NH 01) CAROL SHEA-PORTER FOR CONGRESS	$250 primary	06/28/08
Mallory, Bruce Kittery Point, ME 03905 University of New Hampshire/Profess	OBAMA, BARACK (D) President OBAMA FOR AMERICA	$250 primary	03/06/08
Mallory, Bruce Kittery Point, ME 03905 University of New Hampshire/Profess	OBAMA, BARACK (D) President OBAMA FOR AMERICA	$250 primary	12/27/07

So we've got a guy from Maine who is an ardent left-winger, who invites nationally renown community organizers like Bill Ayers to the state, and runs a group of professional professionals from UNH, public employees of the state,  who actively train and then insert their "facilitators" between town boards, committees, and residents.

Is it just me or does it sound like this project is more interested in telling New Hampshire what it needs by using one of the oldest tricks in the book?.  Pitting trained professionals against amateurs.

I am reminded of a seminar in which a police officer and a lawyer tell you why you should always remain silent and ask for a lawyer, whenever you are likely to be questioned by law enforcement.  Years of cop shows have taught us to distrust people who "lawyer up' but the reason is actually very simple.  The police are trained experts at interviewing.  You, more than likely, are not.  It is therefore unfair for you to enter into any conversation which could lead you to accidentally incriminate yourself simply because you do not have the same skill-set as the person across from you.   And seeing as the outcome could result in your being under suspicion or even detained--literally denied your freedom--you should never engage law enforcement in such circumstances without a trained interviewer on your side of the table.

In the typical town meeting or board and committee format, the people elected or appointed may have better skills, or may feel like thy do, but at the end of the day they are accountable to you, your money and even your votes.  While there may be factors that give the town officials a turf advantage this is easily mitigated by the fact that these are still your neighbors.

NH Listens is not accountable to you, even when some of them are your neighbors, and is the social justice equivalent of the trained interrogator facing off against those with lessor skills.  The NH Listens 'facilitators' are taught how to use human nature, group dynamics, body language, interview and word choice to not just drive the discussion toward a pre-determined goal, but when possible to get the group to believe that they came upon the decision themselves.

Whether brought in my a board or committee member or elected official or not, they are not there to help you figure out what is best for your town, or your kids--in the case of Education, for example.  They are their to manipulate the conversation, and therefore policy, towards a set of preferred priorities that fit their political and social agendas.

Now this has been going on as long as man has used language, so the Carsey Institute at UNH, which runs NH Listens, is simply using these methods to help advance a decidedly progressive agenda by offering to "help' mediate discussions or debate so that people are convinced to arrive at policy decisions more geared toward their agenda than your own.  They are also increasingly found advising your town boards and committees, using their source pedigree - NH Listens and the Carsey Institute, to legitimize them in that role.

It behooves you to become aware of them and to find out if and what affect they may be having on your local government.

Examples?

From Tim Carter at Moultonboro Speaks wrote this regrading his experience with Dr. Mallory (the Democrat donor who runs the project) after an NH Listens session in his area.

Dr. Mallory asked me to call him after the meeting. I did, and we set up a subsequent face-to-face meeting. While sitting at the outside tables at Burrito Me in downtown Laconia, NH, Dr. Mallory wanted to know what I and the Tea Party felt about NH Listens.

I pulled out a print out of the home page of the NH Listens website. Right there was a list of their Board of Advisors - a veritable Who's Who of the most liberal people in New Hampshire.

My response was pretty simple. If I recall, I said something like, "Dr. Mallory, until such time as you put an equal amount of conservatives on your Board of Advisors as you have Liberals, NH Listens is suspect of advancing a liberal agenda."

Dr. Mallory denied that NH Listens used the Delphi Technique at the meetings they facilitate. But you know the old saying, right? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and squawks like a duck, then it's a duck.

As soon as he saw the print out of his website with this damning information he told his right-hand woman attending the meeting, "We need to remove that from the site." And sure enough they did. They completely remodeled the website and scrubbed away any reference to any person whatsoever on the site. That alone should cause you great consternation.

Why would such a public group hide who they are, who runs the group and how they get their funding to advance their agenda? When you visit the NH Listens About Us page, there's nothing there but smoke and mirrors.

Emphasis mine.

And he's right.  To this day you have to chase links back to UNH and the Carsey Institute to see the rouges gallery of liberals who are perpetrating this fraud; a procession of  professional professionals who just "know better."  And look at all the psychology "experts' that work at Carsey.  Expert experts in manipulating humans with psychology and social justice, who train people to help you agree with them or the goals of whoever has brought them in, all working under the cover of good intentions and their public University associations.

But they are literally 'from the government and here to "help" (r trained by them)...and they want to help you agree to the need for more and more government," or this and that program, even if it has a history of failure, makes no sense, or is simply ill-suited to your local circumstanced.

But they want to homogenize policy and link your towns up with wider ranging government programs that inevitably tie you to Federal programs as well.  But once you accept Federal money you accept their rules, and their oversight, regardless of what the "facilitators" have to say.  They are not there to be honest, they are their to politely manipulate you into agreeing with them and their programs and they are wheedling themselves into local boards and committees as consultants and advisers.

And they are or will be showing up at your town meetings.

You would do well to learn more about their methods, and how to spot it and counteract it.  You would do well not to trust their intentions.

If New Hampshire listens carefully they will discover that NH Listens is not about New Hampshire at all.

You are reading  "NH Listens? No They Don’t. They Tell!"   by  Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012

Socialist Fallacies

Socialist Fallacies is a book written by Yves Guyot and readily available in the public domain as a pdf.  If you have not read it, I highly recommend it.  Every page (so far) is loaded with observations about socialism that are as relevant today as they were in the early 1900's.  Guyot relates the problems in simple terms that even a Democrat could understand--if they were actually open-minded enough to absorb it instead of responding with the programmed, knee-jerk, overreaction and denial.

Here's an example of just how simple Guyot makes the arguments.

In 1893, Mr. Shaw Lefevre, as Commissioner of Public Works, arranged to pull down a part of Millbank Prison by means of the unemployed. When these men worked with the knowledge that their pay would vary according to the work done, they did twice as much as when they knew that whether they worked or idled their pay would be 6½d. an hour.

The prospect of gain does not exercise its influence only upon the wage-earner, it reacts upon all men, financiers, employers of labour, and investors, because it admits of an immediate and certain sanction, that of gain or loss.

A private employer will make profits where the State suffers loss. While individuals make profits and save, governments are wasteful and run into debt. Statesmen and local officials are free from direct responsibility, and know that they will not go bankrupt and that the taxpayers will foot the bill.

It does not get much simpler than that.  Profit motivates production.  Production is what creates wealth, savings, and furthers investment growth and wealth creation.  State regulated or state run entities do the opposite.  They drain resources, restrict production, and spend what does not exist to further their ends.  You do not have to scour history for examples.  You are living an example of this now.

The state, under the  Obamacrats, have regulated, confiscated, and spent our economy into stagnation.  We are idling on a hill with over-regulation and uncertainty blocking the way forward, and the massive weight of growing debt pulling us back.   At this point, backward is the only direction for us to travel.  And the only solution they have is to spend more; to let the state control more production; to tax private investment and savings to speed our descent toward economic ruin.

The lefts response to our objections is class struggle, the socialist response to everything.

The minority rises up to intimidate everyone else into following them back down the hill, where they promise an equality that  is nothing more than a parity of shared misery beneath the regulatory jack-boot of bureaucrats and central planners of the socialist state.

Cross posted: Socialist Fallacies

GSFTC Member Organization Spotlight -NH Citizens Alliance

There are a number of groups that the Left wing Granite State 'Fare' Tax Coalition highlights on it's web site.  It's your typical collection of "non-non-partisan" interests like the State Employes Union of NH (That's the local SEIU 1984). The AFSC-which is the NH Chapter of a global leftist movement supported by all the nicest left wing foundations.  The League of Women Voters of course.  And there is even a who's-who of left wing, NH social justice churches and their political arms, all promoting socialist activism and statist policy from the pulpit down to on the ground left wing activism.

All of these groups warrant, and will receive, a proper vetting, but today I would like to focus on a special cog in the leftist machine of the so-called non-partisan GSFTC, one that happens to be very active in New Hampshire on its own; the NHCA.  The NHCA is the New Hampshire Citizens Alliance.  (You may remember their executive director, Sarah Chaisson Warner?  She received some unwanted attention after some remarks she made back in March of 2010. See also Here from the NHTPC.) The New Hampshire citizens alliance is...(drum-roll please)

...a statewide nonprofit, nonpartisan organization devoted to social, economic, and political justice.

A Non-partisan organization devoted to social, economic, and political justice?  Too bad that's just not possible.  There are no right wing groups seeking these ethereal ends.  These are buzz-words, Orwellian constructs, created by statist agenda-driven socialists to mislead people.  So the NHCA couldn't be "non-partisan" if they tried. But you don't have to take my word for it.  Just look at who they associate with and what they support.

In the 2010 election-cycle this "non-partisan" group spent over $15,000.00 in 'independent expenditures' to elect  Carol Shea-Porter to congress.  That was it.  No one else. Just one left wing democrat.  (Here is the FEC page and their latest Jan 31st 2011 filing.  Note the address and that Sarah Warner is cc;d by the lawyer presenting the filing for the NHCA.)  Note also that everyone was working to elect Carol SEIU-Porter.

For the sake of remaining a non-profit these expenditures were made to pay canvassers and on other indirect expenses but just happen to all be in support of just one left wing democrat for congress. Non-partisan my ass.

And like most left wing/democrat front groups in New Hampshire the NHCA is not the product of local activism but a state affiliate of USA Action planted in the Granite state by another group with ties to out of state money.  USA Action is referred to as the Nations Largest Progressive Activist Organization, and views itself as the place where they create the nations leading progressive coalitions. And they are connected to, and engage in community organizing (social and economic class warfare-intimidation tactics) and are heavily supported by  George Soros ' Open Society Institute.

This, at least, explains why the GSFTC likes them so much.  They have the same goals, and similar financial supporters. And it is all partisan, left wing activism in support of the democrat party agenda.

It is not non-partisan and it never was.

How About This For Morally Bankrupt?

The Christian-Socialists are at it again.  This time local religious leader Gray Fitzgerald heads up the charge,  arguing in this mornings Union leader for higher taxes on the "rich."  He opens his 'thesis' thusly;'To tax the richest at such low rates is morally bankrupt."  The rest is predictable and easily synopsized.

Some people, you see,  have the good fortune to earn too much.  Let's not discuss how they got that way or the fact that they pay most of the taxes already.  This is not about dealing with Tax-law breakers (like Obama's cabinet and Czars) it is about making laws to confiscate more.   So Fitzgerald believes we should take more by force (of law), and that faiing to do so is somehow immoral.

So here we have a local church leader who wrote a book about the Bible,  but  there is no appeal here to Christian morality.  He is not even advocating a culture of public charity by choice.  We are not morally bankrupt for failing to give freely of ourselves and our earnings for the betterment of all people, we are morally bankrupt for failing to insist on a federal regime of greater confiscatory taxation of the rich; with all the statist threats that come with it; fines, hearings, even imprisonment.   Grab your torches and pithcforks. We must embark on a French Revolution, wielding the guillotine of Tax law, screaming off with their paychecks!

Is charity by force an "interesting approach" from a guy who also advocates pacifism?  I think so.

And I suppose that commandment to not steal has no bearing here?  How about coveting the property of others?   How about advocating those feelings in others for your own purposes?  And is it not morally bankrupt to advocate for temporal laws that simply redefine property rights to make theft "legal?"

That is what this is.  And there is nothing moral about it.

Are The Democrats Any Different?

Here is what looks like a pretty run of the mill bullet list of Democrat talking points on taxes.  This is the kind of stuff you find on the lefty candidates campaign sites, in emails from Democrat Mark Fernald month after month after month, or from the mouths of other lefties who run the Granite State Fair Tax Coalition.

• End the Bush-era tax giveaways to banks, corporations and wealthy individuals.
• Close corporate tax loopholes, especially billions in tax subsidies for the oil companies.
• Raise new revenues by restoring 70% tax rate on incomes over $1 million.
• Raise $150 billion a year by imposing a financial transaction tax on Wall Street speculation.
• Cut the military budget by half. Bring troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Create jobs in a major public works program to repair our nation’s infrastructure and to make our nation number one in “green industry.” Target the jobs to hard-hit inner city communities and the rural poor.
• Fully fund a national health care program and drastically increase federal aid to education, Pell Grants, and other vital human needs programs.
• Remove the cap on the Social Security payroll tax, so that CEOs and hedge fund managers pay the same rate as the rest of us.

Of course this list comes to us from the Communist party USA website.

And if you wander around the web site a bit, you'd be hard pressed to find anything the Communist party USA wants or advocates that your State or National Democrat party does not.

So why don't they just come out and say they are communists?

Becasue you wouldn't vote for them.

But they are communists.  So why are you still voting for them?

 cross posted