Tavares, FL - April 14, 2012 - Updated Oct. 14, 2016 to add a new article about a visioning process in Utah.
The SHORT web address to reach this page is: http://tinyurl.com/HaltDelphiTechniques
By Vance Jochim, www.FiscalRangers.com
This page describes the Delphi or "consensus decision making" tactic used mostly by land use planners & environmental groups to ensure Agenda 21 (sustainable development) is implemented by local governments while ignoring public input.
Go HERE to get background on Agenda 21. This meeting manipulation method, which we will refer to as "M-Consensus" (for manipulated consensus) but also commonly referred to as the Delphi technique) is also used for many other government decisions where they do not really want any opposing alternatives or viewpoints, including selection of class curriculums, deciding on policies, deciding on smart meters, deciding on comprehensive plans, etc.
Local Governments have evolved into using a method of developing modified & mis-leading "consensus building" or "visioning meetings" on public policy decisions that really is intended to avoid opposition, beat it down, not record it, and to result in a pre-determined decision. Most critics consider M-Consensus or Visioning sessions to be manipulation of attendees to provide apparent support for a pre-determined government decision.
New Oct. 14, 2016 - Article by Utah blogger how a blatant Delphi technique meeting held by a regional (unelected) land planning group took place to fool locals into thinking they were being listened to. It seems many attendees were not local (which is a tipoff) and they controlled the tables of participants. The author, Lisa Jackson, describes an overview of Agenda 21 and how the Delphi process was being used to convert land areas to high density "walkable" areas favored by progressives without a public vote. As I have written, regionalism is a method used to appoint progressives to control a regional land use group so they can push through progressive land use plans without elected officials or public referendums.
New March 23, 2015 - Overview of Delphi technique article on website monitoring refugee programs. (written 2007)
New June 23, 2014 - Here is a good, but old 2002 article by Albert Burns of the Virginia Land Rights Coalition explaining how the Delphi "visioning" method manipulates the public to result in pre-determined results.
New Jul. 30, 2012 - Here is the current, best 13 minute YouTube video illustrating how the Delphi or M-consensus method manipulates public hearings to result in a report approving a pre-determined outcome from environmentalists and planners:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zpA1althjo
Here is a two hour longer version of the above video with excerpts from several manipulated public meetings. This includes one meeting leader saying this meeting will help make better decisions for the "greater good", aka socialism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5KYGV8314
Primary warning signals of M-Consensus Meetings
- The primary objective of M-Consensus meetings is to provide fake evidence of taking public input before issuing a report that "consensus was achieved" and pre-determined results are announced. Thus, a hearing on land planning might be held, but the pre-determined recommendations in the report are developed (usually) by regional, county or city planners to recommend numerous Agenda 21 restrictions on land, give priority ONLY to high density transit villages, etc.
- Professional, outside facilitators are used.
- Author Henry Lamb says "This new decision process is the consensus process in which
voting is not allowed. Consensus is not agreement; it is the absence of expressed disagreement. Consensus is sometimes declared despite expressed objection, if the objector can be
discredited or marginalized.
- Facilitators try to dis-credit or marginalize objections or questions. A true "brainstorming" method lists ALL ideas without judgement, but M-Consensus discredits or skips any ideas not in the pre-decided outcome.
- Allowing shills in the audience from special interest groups like environmental or developer groups. THIS video shows how the planners for "OneBayArea" had pre-made nametags for pre-invited shills who were known as radical environmentalists supporting the plan. Thus the facilitators could tell who were supporters and anyone not a supporter had a handwritten tag.
- The won't answer technical or policy questions. They keep saying they will at the end of the meeting, but then don't.
- They have a pre-determined list of issues to "prioritize" and won't accept new additions to the list. An example is a meeting to discuss prioritizing month on types of high-density housing areas, and refusing to allow "single family homes" as one of the options to prioritize in a land use plan.
- Audience ideas, questions and comments MAY be taken, written on paper or whiteboards, but then are never included in final reports.
- THERE is NO INFORMATION on costs, who will fund the programs, nor will the facilitators provide that information. Thus the audience is led to discuss items without know the pricetags or funding sources. This is being done now in Lake County, Florida, where costs to implement the Comprehensive Plan restrictions was never discussed. The same also took place regarding a process used at City and County Board meetings to encourage contributions to do a $1-million "study" on implementing commuter rail into Lake County (which means buying the trains, cars, paying staff, and subsidizing operations costs from local taxes.)
- There is no online video or audio recording of the meetings, so activists are now doing that themselves.
- Speakers are limited to 1-2 minutes, and facilitators keep moving the presentations along which eats up time for audience input.
- There are other numerous methods used to control and manipulate the audience, which are described further down in my review of one public meeting video.
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There ARE legitimate consensus building methods, but the ones described here are modified to mis-lead & manipulate discussions and particpants. They are designed to develop evidence of a public meeting but still result in implementing a pre-decided program, usually developed to implement Agenda 21 objectives (including education policy, etc). Some critics refer to the BAD method as the "Delphi" method, but it also is a legitimate methodology that is completely different, so we won't refer to Delphi methods here.
Thus, for purposes of this white paper, I have coined the term "M-Consensus" where M can stand for modified and mis-leading, or "Mal" (means BAD in Spanish) Consensus.
The M-Consensus method is designed to give the false impression that public input on government planning and other decisions is fair, when the process is really rigged to show support for a staff or politically supported position. One video considers M-Consensus to be a method to RAILROAD decisions past unsuspecting participants (& the press, who have no clue about this). The M-Consensus technique is used to provide a method to gain public input, but really not. It has been used in "visioning" sessions to show "consensus" for new comprehensive plans that implement Agenda 21 objectives that reduce property rights and property values through expensive environmental restrictions. Numerous property rights and anti-Agenda 21 activists now know how it works, and watch for it at public meetings.
HERE is a GREAT 13 minute video illustrating scenes from a "visioning" or "consensus" meeting in California, interwoven with slides pointing out where manipulation of the meeting outcome is used. They refer to the Delphi technique, which is not the proper term for the method used. WATCH this first to get a first hand idea of how M-Consensus is used and why opponents are gaining traction and rejecting any decisions reached with this method.
HERE is an 8 minute video by Heather Gass exposing the "Delphi" or M-Consensus method in a direct to you video. "We are being Delphied every day in California to shut you down...". "They treat us like a bully...".
In Lake County, FL, visioning sessions have been used by the MPO ( Lake-Sumter Metropolitan Planning Organization), the County (to get "ideas" for a comprehensive land use plan) and by cities like Leesburg. I attended one in 2006 or 2007 which was used to get "ideas" for developing the County comp plan, with urban centers, trains, limits on rural land use, etc. At the time, I was suspicious of the process which used large colorful maps, because it seemed fixed, with a pre-determined outcome, and was run by outside "facilitators". But I didn't quite know how they did it. Now I know. They used the M-Consensus decision support (and manipulation) method described below.
"Sustainable Development or Sustainable Freedom" excerpt on M-Consensus decision making
Here is an excerpt from the booklet by Henry Lamb, founder and executive vice president of Freedom21.org , on "Sustainable Development or Sustainable Freedom" describing the development and uses of "consensus building". You can get the full booklet at: http://sovereignty.net/p/sd/sdsf-1.pdf
The Consensus process - from Henry Lamb's booklet on Sustainable Development
Among the 16 “We Believe” statements issued by the President’s
Council on Sustainable Development, is Number 8: 15
“We need a new collaborative decision process that leads to
better decisions; more rapid change; and more sensible use of
human, natural, and financial resources in achieving our goals.”
The “old” process for deciding public policy involved private citizens
requesting their elected officials to adopt a policy, followed by
vigorous public debate by those in support of the policy proposal,
and by those who oppose the proposal. Eventually, after all sides
had been heard, a public vote by the elected officials would decide
the matter. Citizens who were unhappy with the policy decision
could campaign to have the elected officials defeated in the next
election. This is the process by which the governed give their
consent. This is the only way to insure government accountability
to the people. This is the only way to have a government of the
people, by the people, and for the people.
Sustainable development could not sweep the nation if it were
left to individuals requesting their locally elected officials to adopt
schemes that deny private property rights to their neighbors and
impose freedom-robbing restrictions that outlaw a back yard
tomato patch. Therefore, “…a new, collaborative decision process”
was devised.
This new decision process is the consensus process in which
voting is not allowed. Consensus is not agreement; it is the
absence of expressed disagreement. Consensus is sometimes
declared despite expressed objection, if the objector can be
discredited or marginalized.
Consensus can occur only when a facilitator declares consensus
has been reached in response to one or more questions. The
visioning process utilizes the consensus process. In the Glades
County example, the facilitator combined all 129 “visions” of the
35 participants into eight statements that he declared to be the
consensus of the group. In this case, because of the procedure, no
one was given an opportunity to object. Moreover, the statements
were framed in such a bland and general way that no reasonable
person could object. And, of course, it is purely coincidental that
goals expressed in these eight statements can be found in virtually
every other visioning statement in every other county.
The goals produced by every visioning process automatically
produce the question: How do we achieve these goals? Under the
“old” decision process, the question would be put to a governing board of elected officials who might entertain proposals from
several sources advocating different ways to achieve a particular
goal. The elected officials would discuss, debate, and eventually
decide by a public vote, recorded for all to see.
The new collaborative decision process bypasses the cumbersome
argument and debate. The new collaborative decision process
provides government funding to pay organizations such as the
American Planning Association, or the Sustainable Resource
Center, or the Institute for Sustainable Development to produce
plans and procedures that are ready-made for local governing
bodies to approve. The visioning process and the obligatory
comprehensive planning is most often accompanied by a
government grant that local elected officials rarely reject, especially
if the local community has been told that the grant is awarded to
help usher in “sustainability.”
Comprehensive plans are developed by planning professionals
committed to transforming local communities into social structures
described in Agenda 21 and the PCSD documents. The procedure
to achieve this goal is deliberately designed to bypass local elected
officials during the development process, while giving the public
impression of engaging a broad spectrum of the community’s
citizens. Only after the plan is essentially developed is the
governing body called upon to give it the force of law by a formal
vote.
This process varies slightly from community to community, but
every community has undergone, or soon will undergo a similar
process. The goals of sustainable development amount to
a complete transformation of American society. Sustainable
development embraces education, economics, and social justice, as
well as environmental issues. Once the new collaborative decision
process has been established, it can be used to develop policy
in all these issue areas.
Whenever public policy is developed
by government-funded advocacy groups, administrators, or
bureaucrats, there can be no accountability to the people. Private
property rights are eroded and individual freedom evaporates.
Advocates of government control of land use have exerted their
influence since long before the term ‘sustainable development’ was
first uttered. The 1976 U.N. Conference on Human Settlements
uses the raw language: “Government control of land use is
therefore indispensable.” By 1992, the advocates of government
control had learned that words matter, and rather than use words
such as “government control of land use…” they coined terms
such as sustainable development, smart growth, and sustainable
communities.
It matters not what euphemism is used to shield the reality of
government control. Sustainable development, smart growth, and
sustainable communities all describe a government-controlled
society. Every time a public policy requires a private citizen to ask
permission from government, another expression of freedom is
destroyed.
Read again the consensus “vision for 2020” goals from Glades
County Florida. These are reasonable goals. They can be
improved, however, with a strong statement expressing the goal of
advancing the principles of freedom and respect and appreciation
for private property rights. There is no reference to inspiring
personal achievement or promoting entrepreneurial opportunities.
These values are rarely mentioned in visioning plans. These values
must not be allowed to fade from American communities.
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Additional examples and background on M-Consensus & Visioning Techniques
Here is a short document on how to deal with M-Consensus "Manipulation" techniques (they refer to the Delphi technique) which was written in 2002 by Alfred V. Burns. (Added May 4, 2012)
http://www.etherzone.com/2002/burn092302.shtml
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HERE is a GREAT two hour video of a "visioning" or M-Consensus meeting in Marin County, CA, and below are my notes of quotes from the video, AND a list of the specific consensus meeting manipulation methods used by the Marin County staff and facilitators in the meeting:
This is a great Video of citizen action on "Tea Party TV" to halt Agenda 21 regional housing & transportation plan implementation in Marin County, CA (2 hours - scroll down to see the link, plus tactics used by facilitators to control the outcome of the meeting)
- Boy, am I glad I moved out of California in 2006. San Francisco area Green advocates organized a "One Bay Area" program to make 9 counties follow high density housing plans to adhere to a new California law SB-375 that was NOT voted on by the voters. The plan apparently included housing quotas for each city and county that LIMIT the construction of single family homes. This is a good video of how the greenies try to push Agenda 21 high density villages in a 9 county area affecting 7.2-million people, but they have opposition from educated, knowledgeable opponents of Agenda 21. This video is also a very good illustration how the Agenda 21 implementers use Delphi decision making techniques to control the outcome. The OneBay Area proponents have a website, OneBayArea.org . The OneBayArea opponents even discuss on the video the stealth Delphi technique using a trained facilitator that will be used to avoid questions and be used to show "consensus" on a pre-defined program. The greenies want everyone to move to "transit villages".
Here are quotes from the people on the video: "This is UN Agenda 21".
"There are no single family homes in the plan - only high density homes".
"There are a lot of angry people here - why aren't elected officials pushing back at the State level - the regional group said they don't have a method for doing that - thus it appears you assume this should go forward...".
"I felt very insulted this evening - not enough time to read materials, presenters rushing us through, spoke over questioners, not answering questions, no explanation of what "complete communities" meant, many comments did not address issues".
"I don't want to live in a social engineered home where someone tells me where I can park..."
"I know tyranny when I see it - this is tyranny".
"In listening to this, I feel I am living in a foreign country - we worked long and hard to have a choice to have a car, etc and not to be run by a government entity."
"This meeting includes maybe 60 shills designed to lead to a pre-ordained public consensus".
"This is no conversation - the meeting is rigged".
"Parking is essential, and it has been cut out of most affordable housing."
"How can you take a vote on plans with so few people here?" (Answer was "that's a good question").
"Public-Private partners are favored developers." "We are getting bedtime stories and an infomercial for OneBayArea plans". Denouncing of home allocations between cities. "We don't want high density in our town." One website for activists is www.FreedomAdvocates.org .
"How many of you want to be forced to share bikes? I want to drive to the store."
"We don't like it - we want you to go away and bother some other country".
One person asked what "social justice" is, and staff panel deferred, saying they would answer it later.
"State parks money is going to the group running this".
"What I see here is incomplete information where people don't even understand what choices mean - this needs a do over - what is actually being proposed here - this is just a collection of questions".
"Can you give an example of a city that has these rules and they are happy - best example is Portland, OR, and people are being forced into transit and they are moving away by the thousands. They even started a Sitcom called Portlandia, and it is something we do not want. This is the US with personal freedoms, and your plan is coming directly from the UN Agenda 21."
"Marin County has been asked to take only 1.5% of growth, and 3% of jobs."
"Your plan wants to restrict development in many areas, with quotas for most cities. What will happen is that properties not in priority areas may not receive permits to build housing. You are using Federal transportation funds to dole out to cities to comply. Property values of properties not in priority areas will damage property values. Don't be dangling the carrot of Federal funds to get them to agree."
"This is reckless government spending".
"Federal money is being wasted on this project - needs to go to education".
Facilitators quoted region wide statistics only, not ones affecting Marin County and changes from County General Plan were not answered or provided.
Lots of women showing concern about social issues with vague, emotional statements (shills?).
"Roads are land uses - we need to make them zero emissions land use".
- Rosa Koire, author of Behind the Green Mask was there, pointed out that "no action" was not listed as a choice. That is a key consensus method, which is not to allow opposing alternatives or choices for the public to choose.
At the conclusion of the 2 hour event, one lady said "The main problem was lack of time. There was a ton of information provided, and a ton of questions, but NO TIME allowed to provide answers to questions. People were totally ignored or spoken to patronizingly. Or, they were basically told to shut up, that it was the presenter's turn to talk. I felt that to be extremely insulting. Some people were speaking out and we were treated like children. I didn't learn much except there is very definitely an agenda. I wouldn't be surprised if the issues we wrote down are tossed into the trash can."
"No, my questions were not factually answered. It would have been better to allow a question, then provide an immediate response, but that was not the way it was setup. "
"If your property is outside the priority urban growth area defined in the plan for allowable construction, your property value will be so DIMINISHED you might not be allowed to sell your property or develop on it. This is a HUGE Constitutional conundrum resulting in unjust takings, unjust compensation. This is the stuff that Soviet nightmares are made of. The first meeting like this had 2/3 of the people vocally against the plan and many refused to vote for the limited choices in protest. Then tonight, they showed a film saying that people at the earlier meeting supported the plan, thus lying about the true "consensus. There is a trust deficit with government and a trust deficit with elected officials. I did not hear any questions that were actually answered. Not one single question had been answered in three group break out sessions. There was a person writing issues on a whiteboard, but who knows what they did with that. This is a VERY, VERY dangerous game they are playing. This is something that left a really bad taste in the mouths of most people here tonight. ". (Sally Zelivkosky, founder of Bay Area Patriots).
"What you are seeing is called the Delphi technique. You can google it to learn how to navigate in it when it is used against you. The Delphi technique can be used both consciously and more insidiously subconsciously. It's mostly used by terrible human beings who can't convince people of their ideas so they instead try to dominate others and discourage dissent via social manipulation. (Author Note: Some activists refer to the Delphi method, but it is a legitimate decision making method unlike the modified consensus method used by government to manipulate decisions. I prefer the term "M-consensus" or "visioning"- vj"
"I think the big mistake here is that people keep bringing up Agenda 21. These criminals do not in any way believe they are implementing A21. If you just attack the policies you will get further. Attack the fact that they want to remove people from the rural land, stack and pack housing, get us out of our cars etc. These things are provable. They are trying to break people up into separate rooms to once again stop public input. I still think we should stay away from A21."
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Below is my list of classic M-Consensus meeting and decision manipulation techniques which I saw used in the above video used to "develop consensus" for a "pre-ordained outcome" on the Marin County transportation planning issue:
- Breaking the group up into smaller groups so speakers, comments & questions are not heard by all. Hardly any questions were ever ANSWERED.
- Using stickers to separate friends into different tables and sessions so they don't have support. and can be controlled by facilitators.
- Choices for discussion were from a staff prepared list. No additions were allowed.
- Rather than allowing the audience to add choice alternatives, only the staff provided solutions were discussed. Thus no master list of choices, including those from the audience, was created during the meeting. That is a sure sign of a rigged meeting.
- Voting was on PRIORITIZATION of staff selected actions, not on which actions should be used for prioritization. This is another sure sign of a rigged meeting. If results reports only show prioritization of actions, it is not really a vote to approve the actions, but only on the order of the choices.
- Limiting speakers to two minutes.
- Facilitators refuse to provide any cost estimates for the offered options. They want attendees to rank the staff provided alternative choices without concern or knowledge about costs.
- Only taking comments and questions, but not providing any ANSWERS on an issue.
- Votes are blind, so you can't see who is voting for what. They use tokens to place votes.
- Staff repeats untrue or favored assumptions or hyped info such as "we need to plan for population growth of 2-million people" when there is no support for population growing by 2-million since California population is actually declining.
- Using "ushers" or facilitators at each table to control the outcome.
- Using ushers to split up groups and friends between different tables.
- Promising to post comments on a website, but no track record of doing it for prior meetings. (Note: We did find comments and "prioritization votes" on the OneBayArea.org website, but no ANSWERS to QUESTIONS. Basically the whole process is rigged to generate "consensus" to support the spending plan wanted by staff.)
- Excluding opposition questions from any published report. (i.e. how much will this cost, or how will this affect personal property rights.) See above comment - we did find posted comments for THESE hearings, but it is not always done for Consensus sessions.
- Use of pre-formed "Initiatives for consideration" that exclude opposition points or any alternative choices that do not support the staff pre-determined outcome.
- Exclusions of a "no action" or "do nothing" or do something different alternative. (They were tracked as "wild cards" in reports on the website, without any specific text disclosing what the alternatives were.)
- Refusal to discuss costs, where funding will come from, or setting spending caps.
- Meeting site not accessible to public transportation to allow input from low income people.
- "We may not have time to provide answers to all questions" - thus limiting input time.
- "If question is technical, we may not have time to answer it..."
- More voting tokens existed than people who attended (rigging of vote, no method to ensure one vote per person)
- Not recording any vote (if allowed) and announcing results during the meeting.
- Shifting discussion from all new ideas and alternatives to only prioritizing staff selected objectives.
- Facilitator sets aside speaker request cards of those who already spoke once, thus if they hear something new, can't ask a new question or provide comment. Also a way to limit opposition questions.
- Refusal to allow elected, well informed local official more than two minutes.
- Facilitators did not define vague buzz words like "complete communities" or "transit villages" or "social justice".
- Use of skillful facilitators trained in reaching pre-ordained decisions.
- Facilitator says "lots of these are rhetorical questions" and didn't want to handle answers.
- Facilitator slips into being advocate for pre-determined objectives.
- Facilitators are trained to "marginalize" objections, and use specific terms to downplay any objection to their pre-determined objectives by saying the objections are "rhetoric", unfounded, uncommon, never encountered before, etc. They might even have a shill in the audience to make denigrating comments like "stop wasting our time on impractical (or non-relevant) questions, let's move on".
- Use of paid facilitators who cannot answer questions or explain technical issues, thus reducing the quality of the dialog.
- Facilitator refuses to answer question in public, telling questioner to talk to them offline, thus audience doesn't hear answer, especially if it is not supportive of the plan.
- Control discussion by showing video asking questions only aimed at desired outcomes described in video.
- Frustrate attendees by making it a SHORT meeting so many cannot comment or get good answers.
- "How to "invest" revenues ( $68-billion over 25 years) expected for transportation". By that, they mean spending. One questioner said why distort the issue and say "cost" and not "investment" and they were ignored.
- Facilitator refused to allow answer to important question, and instead allows two more speakers, making audience mad.
- Use facilitators not from local area, so cannot answer local issues questions. (on purpose?)
- Facilitators speaking over questioners and not answering questions.
- OneBay area will consider several choices. Ask for help. Thus controlling choices.
- Requiring each attendee to vote using a token, with audience having many shills.
- Ignoring other spending alternatives, ie. schools, etc. Basically, they assume the funds will be budgeted and spent on transportation and planning, and not other areas.
- Deferring requests with "we will consider that", ie. say "investment" vs "cost"
- Only taking questions, but not providing answers, when groups are in different rooms.
- Split people up into different rooms, sessions and tables so they don't all hear issues asked by others.
- Summaries of session or table discussions summarized by shill facilitators who only include items supporting the staff pre-determined outcomes.
- Show films or make presentations saying the public agreed with the plan at prior meetings when witnesses were there and said 2/3 of the attendees at the earlier meeting clearly were against it, and since voting choices were limited many did not vote in a protest. Thus the staff and facilitators were lying about what really transpired at the earlier meeting. That is why it is important to make recordings and videos of every meeting like this.
- Promising answers on website, when none posted after past meetings.
- Not explaining where funds will come from during terrible budget period.
- Not dropping or deferring staff selected options or factual assumptions when the audience rejects their justification.
- Why no wide, public vote on the plan - decisions only made by small groups controlled by facilitators & staff.
- No answer regarding question about whether eminent domain will be used.
- People were given chips to vote on staff pre-ordained alternatives, but no added alternatives from the public and no choice for "no action".
- Facilitators take notes on whiteboards, but probably throw them out after the meeting, since their preferred outcome is already decided. Thee is no formal method to verify that any of the ideas on the whiteboard ever make it into any staff written report.
- Staff says "If you don't agree, you have an opportunity to make that known", but it was not a voting choice and staff didn't even take notes.
- If a voter entered an idea different from staff supplied "solutions" it was only listed as a "wild card" without specifically listing the ideas. Thus in one ranking, "wild card" ideas ranked THIRD for Marin County HERE (page 16), but they didn't list the ideas, so they were not considered, apparently. Almost every "priority" was to expand or increase spending in an area, with no choice to cap or halt any increases.
- Saving input from plan supporters (shills) to the end, then letting them talk last. One woman arrived very late, and talked in support of the plan at the very end, but she wasn't there to hear any of the prior dialog.
- Smart Growth or comp plan advocates lie by "omission". READ this article, where the author describes how a Smart Growth advocate report talked about how the public wanted transit villages, but they completely avoided talking about how high the density of the village would be, which respondents do not want.
- Facilitators avoid known hot button words, and use alternate, vague, generic terms to describe the same factor so as to confuse readers. For instance, the above linked article talks about how planners know people do not want to live in high density villages (i.e. transit villages with 8-16,000 people per square mile), so they now say "compact development" instead of "high density", but still use "low density" when denigrating development of single family homes on individual lots. They are practicing marketing goggledegook, and should be selling encyclopedias door to door. Planners & advocates using these tricks are no better than con men.
- Facilitator is not neutral. Keeps moving discussion back to pre-determined results and rejecting (softly or assertively) new ideas that do not match expected results.
- Facilitator does not allow audience to discuss merits of new ideas that did not come from staff.
- Facilitator does not offer hand votes on the importance of an issue before letting speakers use up time on it. Thus a proposed action might not be important to 70% of the attendees, but proponents waste a lot of time on it.
- Facilitator does not allow audience to reject some staff ideas from consideration or discuss reasons for doing so.
- No method for attendees to validate, postpone for further information, or request that some or all staff proposed options be dropped from further discussion.
- No method for attendees to see or get roster of all attendees to see who they are, employer, location (i.e outside shills could have come from outside the affected area - I once attended a "town hall" led by US Rep. (D) Alan Grayson in Lake County, CA and it was loaded by "invited" people from outside the county, and they followed a rigged agenda.)
- No method for attendees to BLOCK or HALT further action on the issue (i.e. a vote of confidence). Why continue if a majority disagree with the assumptions and reject provided options? Why bother to prioritize rejected options.
- Promised public website with results never published, or very few details. No email of results. HERE is the website of the OneBayArea group: http://www.onebayarea.org/ Note: We looked at the website and found a list of many frustrated comments & questions HERE from the public meetings sorted by County name. But, if you look, there were NO ANSWERs AND NO EVIDENCE THEY DID ANYTHING WITH THE QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS. There also were NO summary reports showing the actual votes at the meetings either by County or in total.
- Website says "All workshops are currently overbooked, but we encourage you to sign up for the waiting list. We have established attendance guidelines to ensure access to the workshops by the maximum number of people". However, the video for the Marin County workshop clearly shows lots of space. Thus they limited attendance to limit opposition.
- Stacking the meetings. Besides the announced public meetings with limited attendance, the staff also met with 28 low income groups to "survey" them. I would assume those people were less educated and unable to determine how the resultes were manipulated. The website said they visited with over 1100 low income people, which was probably more than at the public meetings. Thus people who want FREE STUFF were used to generate support for trains, transit villages, etc. There was no info on the workshop lists showing attendance figures, votes, etc. For Cinco de Mayo, they setup a table and "encouraged" many people at the event to fill out surveys. Page 6 & 7 of the above linked report provided a summary matrix and it was clear that the survey only asked questions about spending more money in different transporation areas (like transit villages) and the results were for priorities of the canned choices. There was no cost discussed, or yes or no. Respondents only selected 3 of 7 options in one report for priorities, not whether any should be done or dropped. THIS IS BLATANT MANIPULATION OF RESULTS TO SUPPORT PRE-DETERMINED OUTCOMES.
End of Marin County video review section on Consensus meeting manipulation methods
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Excellent Sovereignty.net Book & Videos on "Confronting Agenda 21" & Combating Consensus Building Techniques
This book and videos include sections on how to deal with consensus decision making.
You can order the book from Sovereignty.net at this page:
http://sovereignty.net/store/confront-A21-buy.html
And, you can VIEW (or order the DVD) of all three "Confronting Agenda 21" videos HERE (move the Video Menu slider up or down to find them AND many other videos:
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Here is more on consensus decision making before I found the above resources:
Consensus or Visioning Methods to Sway local Public Support towards Agenda 21: Local planning departments use "Visioning" public meetings to gain local "consensus" on pre-determined land use plans. They are usually based on a modified version of legitimate consensus public hearing methods but modified to generally ask for public input on a specific list of pre-determined objectives derived from Agenda 21. No new ideas are accepted. If a member of the public says that one of the priorities of a local land use plan should be to ensure personal property rights were NOT reduced, or to reduce government restrictions, the trained facilitators might write it down, but that idea never gets into written reports.
In my opinion, planning department "visioning" meetings run by trained facilitators are a scam to provide evidence that the public had a hearing, but the results are almost always the pre-determined objectives supporting Agenda 21 goals. The same method is used by "social change" experts to get school systems to adopt radical policies on religion, sex education, etc.
Numerous firms with trained "facilitators" exist to implement "consensus" meetings, like this "Integrated Decision Making" service from the UK firm BAE Systems. There are several videos showing actual examples and I will post them here when if find them in my "stack of stuff". Here is an article about the problems with a local visioning process in California.
More on "Consensus" method: A 1998 REPORT from sovereignty.net summarizes information from a UN 5-year Agenda 21 report. It clearly explains the purpose of the "consensus" method in the US is to "by-pass Congress" to implement Agenda 21 objectives at the local level:
"In America, the Constitution requires that consensus on public policy be hammered out in public by elected officials, not by 28 appointed individuals, carefully selected because of their known support of the principles expressed in Agenda 21. This UN description of the PCSD (Clinton's 1993 Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development) is found in a section of the report entitled "Integrated Decision-making," also known as the "consensus" process. All federal agencies have now adopted this "consensus" process to by-pass Congress and other elected bodies, to build consensus on Agenda 21 activities at the local, state, and national levels. The UN report describes America's progress in each of the activity areas in glowing terms. The report boasts that:"
"The government has included representatives of NGOs in the National delegation to every session of the Commission on Sustainable Development as well as at other major international meetings.
How to EXPOSE "Consensus" decision making processes used by Agenda 21 supporters: Get the book "How to Counter Group Manipulation Tactics: The Techniques of Unethical Consensus-Building Unmasked [Paperback] B. K. Eakman (Author)"
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Here is an amazing 20 minute video (first of 6) of a California "visioning" session rigged to prevent questions, but the M-Consensus aware visitors decided to use a "non-polite" or "in your face" way to object, and plenty of yelling ensued. Their prior meeting ideas had been ignored, so here is a new tactic (taken from the occupier movement?) But, notice the facilitators still tried to force following their specific agenda, and had an audience full of shills to support their viewpoint. The property rights (anti Agenda21) proponents noticed there was no pledge of allegiance planned, but "forced" the leaders to do it. "They were none too happy". At one point they played a movie, and it sounded eeringly like the Apple Ad for 1984. This was the first of six videos on this meeting by Rosa Koire. "We object to social engineering..." A plan speaker talks about the need to respond to the threat of seawater rising and covering bridges. Staff would not allow a VOTE whether there was support for the "OneBayArea" plan at all. The facilitator talked about deciding how to "invest" transportation dollars in road vs transit, bike trails. Video 4 is of one of the breakout sessions led by a "sustainable growth" believer. Apparently the Planners created very small "priority development" areas that exclude being able to develop property outside the boundaries. Lots of yelling and the cops were called and one appeared. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA4GKUUxkhA&feature=related
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About the Delphi Decision Making Process
It actually is a legitimate process developed in the late 1960's for complex decision making, and facilitated by the Rand Corp., a Think Tank in Santa Monica, CA. However, now, in most references related to local use of the "Delphi" technique, it is a MODIFIED version that skews results and manipulates attendees into thinking their input was used. I consider the proper term to be consensus building and not Delphi.
You can do google searches on "Delphi decisions" and find many references on the legitimate version. However, it seems somewhere that the Agenda 21 crowd modified that process and adopted it under the name of Consensus Building, or Visioning, and I have not found the source for that (yet). There are also legitimate consensus building methods used by business, for example, but when we talk about Consensus or Visioning here, we are talking about a method modified to manipulate the outcome. Our list of the manipulation examples used in the two hour video referenced above gives a good idea of what was removed from the legitimate methods to result in manipulation of public decisions.
According to the authors of the book below, "Delphi may be characterized as a method for structuring a group communication process so that the process is effective in allowing a group of individuals, as a whole, to deal with a complex problem." The true Delphi method is much different and more structured than the one used in consensus building.
Here is a source to download the original book on the legitimate Delphi technique:
http://is.njit.edu/pubs/delphibook/index.html
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