In testimony before the House Committee on Fish and Game yesterday, Rep. Al Baldasaro warned that United Nations Agenda 21 is threatening “to slowly get fishermen off the lake.”
Granite State Progress executive director Zandra Rice Hawkins, who captured Baldasaro’s comments on video, responded:
Rep. Al Baldasaro is off his rocker and his rampant conspiracy theories harm public policy making. To suggest that the United Nations is trying to eliminate fishing in New Hampshire or take over our country is beyond bizarre.
After New Hampshire voters handed Republicans an electoral shellacking, former GOP party chair Fergus Cullen blamed the defeat on his party’s Tea Partiers and Agenda 21 conspiracy theorists.
As if to prove his point, the New Hampshire Tea Party Coalition today identified the greatest threat to American survival: the United Nations.
That’s right, the organization that was founded back in 1945 as the “League of Nations”, ostensibly to create a means of gathering for all countries to talk and keep the peace, has turned into an ugly totalitarian threat to every country on earth.
And right on cue, Huffington Post reports that Republican state Rep. Lenette Peterson has filed legislation to ban implementation of Agenda 21, the U.N. plan for sustainable development that encourages resource conservation and open space preservation.
“It’s an important topic,” Peterson told HuffPost. “Agenda 21 is a dangerous program to get into. It looks cushy because of the special funding. They take over and citizens lose their rights.”
Peterson’s proposed legislation is similar to this year’s House bill that passed by a 207-99 vote before dying in the Senate.
The more things change, the more they stay the same…
The New Hampshire Scenic and Cultural Byways Program was established in 1992 to provide a system of roadways that highlight the scenic and cultural qualities of the state. The program supports cultural, recreational and historic attributes along the byways and promotes unique elements of the state’s beauty, culture and history.
This week, the Dover City Council rejected an application from the Strafford Regional Planning Commission to designate a 15-mile portion of Route 108 that features historic mills as a scenic byway.
The Scenic Byways program, warned critics, “is the tip of the iceberg from the United Nation’s Agenda 21.” A resident who attended the council meeting complained, ”This is truly about individual liberty, property rights and our Constitution.”
“There goes your freedom, one little piece at a time,” agreed Councilor Catherine Cheney, who voted to reject the application. “We don’t need this type of thing, especially in this community.”
When former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Jack Kimball announced his return to the political arena, he vowed to lead the Tea Party fight to “send Obama packing!” Apparently, he now thinks sustainable development is a greater threat to democracy.
Here’s what Kimball had to say about the Sustainable Communities Initiative during a June 13 gathering hosted by the Rye Republican Town Committee:
We are now faced with, in my view, the biggest loss of liberty and freedom that this country’s ever faced since the Cold War.
Warning that the program is “targeting our fundamental Constitutional rights by propagating the same ideologies as Agenda 21,” Kimball is now taking the fight to the legislature.
On June 25, Kimball will serve as master of ceremonies for a presentation to state lawmakers on Agenda 21 and the Sustainable Communities Initiative. “I can assure you that the information you receive will open everyone’s eyes as to what is really going on,” he promises.
Agenda 21 is a United Nations plan for sustainable development that encourages resource conservation and preservation of open spaces.
Right-wing extremists from the John Birch Society to the NH Tea Party Coalition have latched onto the program as evidence of a worldwide conspiracy to destroy private property rights and implement a one-world government.
Today New Hampshire lawmakers joined them. By a 207-99 vote, the GOP-led House approved a bill that would prohibit the state, as well as any town or county, from implementing Agenda 21.
No agency or department of the state shall implement programs of, expend any sum for, be a member of, receive funding from, contract for services from, or give financial or other forms of aid to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), and its derivatives, in furtherance of the United Nations program known as Agenda 21.
Senate Bill 217, as amended by the House, now heads back to the Senate.
Projected Democratic seats: 190
