By: Renee Nal
New Zeal

Image from the BBC's 'Tomorrow's Cities season'

Image from the BBC’s ‘Tomorrow’s Cities season’

“Now that more people live in cities across the planet than do not, it is imperative that this revolutionary change in attitude occurs rapidly.” – Author David Thorpe, from his article “There’s a $90 Trillion Plan to Rid the World’s Cities of Cars”

Former Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon have been roundly mocked for their vision to separate citizens from their vehicles.

As reported at the Washington Times,

Starting over is a $90 trillion expense. Minimum. But to meet that cost they would have to cram us all together in those cities like livestock, at the cost of our freedoms.

The Daily Caller observes:

Calderon and Gore made their presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where, ironically (or maybe not, at this point), some 1,700 private jets — which use petroleum — were used to shuttle in conference participants and others to discuss global warming and other pressing global issues.

We may want to laugh at the plan, but Americans are financing it.

Smart Cities

While in India this week, President Obama pledged $4 billion dollars in “investments and loans” as reported at Reuters. What Reuters neglected to mention, along with the rest of the American mainstream media, was that $2 billion will be spent for the “development of smart cities,” as reported at the Times of India.

The left’s age-old tradition of population manipulation and social engineering experimentation continues openly today in the guise of “sustainability” (code for Agenda 21), which seeks to convince local city leaders around the world to remake cities in an effort to combat “anthropogenic [human-caused] climate change.” The “smart cities” movement is a part of this effort, as discussed at Broadside News.

Smart cities will have an infrastructure that will verify that the habits of citizens are monitored to ensure they are not indulging in harmful activities like using too much water, for example. Make no mistake, you will not be using more resources than deemed to be your fair share.

Like “Smart Meters,” in time, “the Smart Grid will enable consumers to react in near real-time to lessen their impacts.” Or, it can be remotely done for you.

No more cars

At a panel discussion during a conference (hashtag #TTDC15) sponsored in part by firm called “Embarq,” the discussion to remold cities was in full swing. Embarq seeks to capitalize on the “smart cities” movement and claims to engage in “[H]elping cities make sustainable transport a reality.”

During one of the discussions, India’s “Union Urban Development Secretary” Shankar Aggarwal stated that “smart cities” currently being developed in India will be “coordinated, compact and connected” and “meant for citizens and not for cars.”

Aggarwal laments “urban sprawl,” noting that people have to travel long distances to get to work. Stating that traveling long distances to get to work somehow lessons global competitiveness, he continues:

It is very necessary that we create cities which are compact, and the transportation needs to undergo a huge change. Instead of promoting individual cars, we have to go in for public transport and that means people should be able to walk to work, bicycling, walk to work [yes, he said it twice], and then they should make use of public transport…

Here are some of the creepy tweets:

The panel discussion can be viewed here (Shankar Aggarwal’s comments can be seen at around the 8:50 minute mark):

In evolving manifestations, the radical left shares a common theme: an overarching obsession with social engineering based on a lust for power and an irrational fear of over-population, which justifies their need to manipulate populations.

The elitist mindset is anything but “progressive” if one goes by the true meaning of the word, and can be traced back to left-wing heroes Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, for example.

A bit of history

Al Gore’s car-less society is just another iteration of radical social engineering endorsed by the left. Their grand visions do not take the nature of man into account, which is why the founding fathers are the true progressives.

Consider some of the following quotes:

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population which laments,

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Progressive icon George Bernard Shaw wrote,

Just consider the situation we are up against – an overpopulation problem created by capitalism, and are trying to get rid of it by substituting emigration. Socialists say quite truly that Socialism can get rid of it, and clergymen tell us that self-control can relieve it. But it cannot wait for Socialism, and people will not practice self-control.

A eugenicist like many of his socialist peers, George Bernard Shaw was not a fan of morality. In “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, No. 1, July 1904,” he wrote:

What we must fight for is freedom to breed the race without being hampered by the mass of irrelevant conditions implied in the institution of marriage.

H.G. Wells submits,

As the standard of living and the multiplicity of interests increase, there is no sort of people anywhere who will not welcome the freedom and the relief from burdensome families that Birth Control affords.

More quotes on how the masses must be manipulated to fight “overpopulation” can be found at Liberty Unyielding.

The individual versus the collective

While the radical left brands their ideas as revolutionary and “progressive;” their visions of Utopian societies in various forms can be traced back to ancient philosophers. In fact, America’s founding fathers are the true progressives, as they put in place a Constitutional Republic that was sincerely revolutionary when compared to the vast majority of political systems throughout the entire world, throughout the entirety of recorded mankind: a focus on the individual rather than the collective, and the idea that morality was essential to freedom.

Consider this quote by John Adams (His writings compiled by his grandsons can be found online here):

If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free. – The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Volume 6, 1856

It is likely that most people would rather live in a cave and be free than be in a “smart city” and be monitored and car-less.

This article has been cross-posted at Broadside News.