In most of North Carolina, the local police stay out of labor disputes between employers and employees. If a person is stiffed mutually agreeable compensation for work services provided (obviously something wrong to do), it’s a civil matter or a matter for the North Carolina Department of Labor. Clearly, most of North Carolina has a less refined sense of social justice.

Here in Orange County, the nonpayment of wages is becoming a police matter, at least, that is, if a dayworker is involved. A steady supply of dirt cheap labor for cleaning toilets and grounds maintenance is essential to Progressive residents. Now that's social justice.

Of course such zaniness requires the intervention of a Progressive tax-exempt organization. In this case, it’s Justice United. According to its organizers, “Justice United in Community Effort (Justice United) is a broad-based, multi-racial, multi-faith, multi-issue, strictly non-partisan citizens' power organization dedicated to making change on social justice issues (affordable housing, child care, healthcare, education, living wages) affecting the lives of low- and middle-income residents in Orange County. This is done through institution-based leadership development; the building of relationships within and between institutions; the identification of and research on issues of mutual self-interest; and disciplined, organized action. Justice United is affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the oldest and largest national organizing and leadership development network in the United States. Justice United receives support from Triangle Congregations Associations and Neighborhoods.”

Justice United doesn’t tell you that IAF is a controversial organization founded by the equally controversial Mr. Saul Alinsky.

On 9 December 2010, Mayors Mark Kleinschmidt (Chapel Hill) and Mark Chilton (Carrboro) promised the Justice United organizers that Chapelboro would do all it could to help the overwhelmingly Hispanic and illegal alien dayworkers of Chapelboro not to get stiffed on pay.

The informal meeting ground of contractor and laborer is out in the open alongside Jones Ferry Road in Carrboro, a dayworker’s version of a red-light district.

How many people are getting stiffed? No one knows. Even Mr. Mauricio Castro, a Justice United organizer, admitted the same. No problem, Progressives don't need facts to know that government intervention is necessary.

Why isn’t Justice United educating dayworkers’ about their legal recourse with the North Carolina Department of Labor (NCDOL)? An NCDOL representative states that employers pay the wages after the bureau intervenes in more than half of the cases. If employers still withhold wages, then workers have two options. They can either represent themselves in small claims court, as long as the amount in question is $5,000 or less, or they can ask labor officials to forward the case to the North Carolina Attorney General's staff to litigate. Oh, the NCDOL doesn't inquire into your immigration status in handling a case.

Uh oh, there’s the rub. You may not want to go this route if you are breaking the law by being in this country. According to Mr. Castro, ”No individual, whether they are here legally nor not, should work without pay. If someone doesn't pay you it's a work issue. It should not have anything to do with your legal status or not. You still did the work they asked you to do.” Translation, it’s all right to break some laws (federal immigration laws), but not to break other laws (state labor laws).

Such relativistic thinking fits in well with the sanctuary town mentality of Chapelboro. It’s all right to break non-Chapelboro laws, just don’t break any Chapelboro laws. Don’t even file your federal income tax return, much less pay your taxes? That’s all right. Just pay your town taxes.

Mayor Chilton offered giving dayworkers pencils and notebooks, training them to write down license plate numbers and other identifying information to help document who is withholding pay.

Mayor Chilton did not offer town training to make sure the dayworkers pay any income taxes owed on these wages.

Neither mayor promised to get the workers a safe place out of the elements to meet up with those requiring day labor services.

In most of North Carolina, a person engaged in high-rise, urban, mixed use, residential development would not be thought of as a leading light in the environmental movement. That assessment would be doubly so if the developer lived on a multi-million dollar, two hundred acre estate that had sheltered paying property taxes through the clever use of land conservancy exemptions. Efforts to lecture the community on sustainable living would be laughed at as being hopelessly hypocritical.

Orange County isn’t like the rest of North Carolina. Here hypocrisy can be forgiven if your Progressive heart is in the right place. It doesn’t matter what you do. It matters what you say. Ineffectual gibberish can pour from your lips like Niagara Falls, so long as it sounds good and makes the listener feel good.

Case in point, read the recent puff piece in the Chapel Hill News on Progressive urban high-rise residential developer Tim Toben.

Apparetly, Mr. Toben had accepted a job as the President of the New Economics Institute (NEI) and had been commuting weekly between Chapelboro and Great Barrington, Massachusetts. (The puff piece says New York, but the NEI is located in that pastoral playground of the New York City rich, Great Barrington. Only off by a hundred miles or so, that’s good enough for the local media.) Mr. Toben was motivated to take the position because the current economic model off which he augmented his inherited fortune is unsustainable. (Nice Progressive touch, first make your money, then change the system.)

Feeling troubled by his carbon commuting footprint, he gave up the position at NEI after six weeks.

What is the NEI? Good question. According to Mr. Toben, the NEI is dedicated to creating a ”new economics, one which supports people and the planet, mainstream in the United States.” Doesn’t that make you feel good? Doesn’t it sound good? But really, what is the NEI proposing that the boots on the ground should do?

That’s unclear.

According to the NEI, “The heart of the New Economics Institute’s strategy is collaboration. Presenting an academically and intellectually robust new economics will allow us to partner with mainstream businesses and financial services which are looking for ways to adapt to new economic mandates. It will allow us to bypass policy disputes between campaigning outsiders and innovative insiders by focusing on empirical solutions. ” Wow, that’s impressive sounding. But what are the Progressive boots going to do?

“The purpose of the New Economics Institute is to develop, research, and lead in a US context, the implementation of systemic solutions to a series of systemic problems that now face humanity. These include: • The sustainability, climate and dwindling resources crisis. • The equality crisis, here and around the world, in income, assets, access, and democracy. • The financial risk crisis, with a system that is neither efficient nor resilient. • The well-being crisis, in which rising income is not translating into rising happiness.
Many and various solutions to these crises are emerging, but the solutions are often not systemic, nor are the systemic problems widely understood as such, certainly not by policy-makers. Nor are the solutions being pulled together into a compelling and coherent narrative. The task of the New Economics Institute is to provide this narrative, as well as the missing intellectual support for major system change – to collect and link together the solutions that are emerging, and to research and develop solutions where they are not.
To achieve the political and economic will to implement major systematic change will require a cultural shift in public opinion. The work ahead for the New Economics Institute is to provide the feasible solutions and effective communications that the vanguard requires to make this shift possible.”

Are you still clueless as to what they want to do? Must be a new organization just getting its feet wet in the new economic order pool, right?

No, NEI has been around for over 30 years. In an earlier (you guessed it) tax exempt form it was known as the “E.F. Schumacher Society”.

Well what has this group done to bring about a new economic order over the past thirty decades? They promote the use of community land trusts (CLTs). According to NEI, “a CLT is a form of common land ownership with a charter based on the principles of sustainable and ecologically-sound stewardship and use. The land in a CLT is held in trust by a democratically-governed non-profit corporation. Through an inheritable and renewable long-term lease, the trust removes land from the speculative market and facilitates multiple uses such as affordable housing, village improvement, commercial space, agriculture, recreation, and open space preservation. Individual leaseholders own the buildings and other improvements on the land created by their labor and investment, but do not own the land itself. Resale agreements on the buildings ensure that the land value of a site is not included in future sales, but rather held in perpetuity on behalf of the regional community.”

In the more blunt words of Schumacher Society founder Robert Schwann, “Motivated by a commitment to peace and social justice, I have devoted most of my life to economic reform and the strengthening of small communities. Specifically, my work has been in land reform (trusteeship, not ownership, of land); monetary reform (interest- and inflation-free money and local currencies); and cooperative ownership (worker management and ownership of the means of production). I am encouraged to see growing interest in and application of these concepts around the world.”

In plain words, the NEI wants to see the end of private personal land ownership. You should not own the land upon which your home sits. That's the cornerstone of the new world economic order. No matter where you live, if you don’t own the land on which your home sits, then you can be coerced into behaving the way your local majority wants you to behave. Get it? Ah yes, more great transition control mongers.

Perhaps Mr. Toben’s short exposure to the Presidency of the NEI is behind his putting his country baronial retreat up for sale. For only $4,360,000 you too can own a home over 8900 square feet, with nine bedrooms, nine and a half bathrooms, and over 188 acres.

According to Mr. Toben, his family is redoubling their efforts to work for a sustainable planet in another way. He will be entirely off the grid by 2012, producing all their energy and food. Guess there’s no morning orange juice, coffee, tea, or bananas on the menu at Mr. Toben’s Pickard Mountain Eco-Institute (PME) after 31 December 2011.

Curiously, in the same puff piece Mr. Toben indicates that the also tax exempt (do any Progressive organizations pay taxes?) PME will continue to “expand its work, conducting workshops, hosting school groups and other organizations, inviting guest lecturers and so on, to help educate people about natural building, green energy and food production.” Isn't the homebase for PME for sale?

So is Mr. Toben selling his Shangri-La or not? Is his ultra-expensive mixed use Chapel Hill urban project Greenbridge ecologically sustainable or merely a greenwash way to seek personal profit?

Apparently, Carrboro Alderman Dan Coleman has fallen off the anger management wagon. In a recent letter to the editor he charged Chapel Hill News columnist Mark Zimmerman with spreading falsehoods. In simpler terms, Alderdan displayed his political sense of propriety by calling Mr. Zimmerman a “liar”. In AlderDan's words, ”It is no service to the community when Chapel Hill News columnists twist the facts to make political points (in Zimmerman's case a hackneyed screed on property rights as personal freedom).”

Pulpsters will remember that AlderDan had to undergo anger management re-grooming in 2007 during his electoral campaign debut. The infamous 911 call and the vehicular assault charge against a woman during a local high school athletic event are legendary. Like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series, this incident remains “that which must remain unspoken” for Chapelboro Progressives.

For the record, Mr. Zimmerman wrote a column detailing that the Carrboro Boa first considered limiting uses on certain flag lots and requiring Board of Adjustment or Board of Alderman approval or denial, at an 26 October 2010 Boa public hearing. (Flag lots are those in which one places a second house in the backyard of a preexisting housing lot.)

”Land owners in Carrboro with property large enough to split in two, but configured such that the second home would be behind the first may soon find that they may no longer create the 'flag lot' needed to provide access.”

AlderDan claimed this assertion to be absolutely false. In his words, “The truth is that town planning staff made a proposal that would have required the creation of ‘flag lots’ to receive public review. The Board of Aldermen sent staff back to the drawing board with no timetable set for further review of this proposal.” For AlderDan it's all about the power. Anything that extends his power as an elected official is good. After all, in his words, ”we have the important business of running the town.” These words were said right before taking the Summer off and canceling half of the Boa meetings thereafter.

The full truth is that the Boa has had multiple meetings on this flag lot issue, starting back in May when the phrase “flag lot” wasn’t even mentioned, They met again in June and September on this issue, as well as in October. Here’s how the town staff put it.

“As further explained in the staff memo, staff has further considered this matter since June 2010. As a result of further consideration, the attached draft ordinance has been expanded to further regulate the creation of flag lots along with the previously drafted language concerning minimum lot widths… If the draft ordinance is approved, then staff will bring back to the Board at a future meeting a request to create a new line item in the fee schedule related to this specific new type of subdivision. An exact fee is not yet decided, but is expected to be reduced from the existing fee for a typical Special Use Permit involving a major subdivision.”

Ah yes, when there’s not enough development going on due to the Great Recession, let’s just create some “makework” to keep the town staff fully employed. With the proposed amendment, the staff approval threshold level would be reduced from five lots to two lots.

Curiously, even Mayor Mark Chilton was at a loss at the October meeting as to how the Boa got onto “this topic”. According to Town staffer Ms. Patricia McGuire, It’s all about requiring staff review AND approval. You mustn’t have flag lots that go through staff certification, but not staff approval. A state statutory subdivision exemption provision was eliminating staff authority. The staff wants to jimmy the zoning standards to trump the statutory exemption created by the state legislature. Of course the town's outside contractor attorney also gets paid for this terribly necessary change to the town land use ordicnance. Nice to know no one's going hungry over at the Carrboro municipal corral.

The full truth is that the Boa is considering not only public review for discretionary flag lot approvals. Here’s the proposed change:

“Section 15-175.10. Flag Lots (b) The board of adjustment or board of aldermen, when approving subdivisions within their respective jurisdictions, may approve flag lots if they conclude that the access requirement set forth in Section 15-211 will be satisfied and such flag lot can be developed for purposes permissible in that district without creating any substantially adverse impact on adjoining developed properties.”

Staffer McGuire made it perfectly clear that the Board of Adjustment or the BOA could reject any new flag lot based on a number of findings either could make. Translation, Mr. Zimmerman is correct. The proposed ordinance is about more than just review, as AlderDan well knows. If you're not a friend and pal to AlderDan you may not get your flag lot. It's at his whim and discretion.

Why tell the full truth when AlderDan can extend Progressive authority over your life? In Mr. Zimmerman’s words, “It's encouraging that Alderman Coleman implies the proposal is dead, but it is not. If the Board's intent was to kill the idea, it should have asked staff not to continue working on it. They did not do so.”