If you needed any reminder about how the political left works in the shadows and surreptitiously to achieve goals it knows if exposed cannot win judicially or in the court of public opinion, look no further over the controversy surrounding a proposed grain terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish.
Last week, Greenfield Louisiana cancelled that project after years of struggling with activists both locally and nationally, and a sly federal government propagating an anti-growth and neo-racist disguised as anti-racist agenda. It would have brought around 100 jobs to an economically-depressed area that many in the surrounding community, the unincorporated area of Wallace, wanted.
That area presently has little going for it economically except nearby tourist attractions of former plantations. It also has mostly black residents, many of whom trace their lineage there back decades, if not centuries, whose presence of long-standing families meant the company had to plan carefully building around historically-significant areas and mitigating any after-effects from the economic boost that would ensue.
It tried, but kept facing hurdle after hurdle. At the local level, activists questioned the propriety of the land’s zoning and rallied anti-growth and monied tourism interests to oppose, ironically over supposed quality-of-life issues. At the national level, nonprofit and federal government agencies worked interdependently, as best described by the company, to keep moving the goalposts for permits from the Army Corps of Engineers.
It was a decision by the ACE to push back any approval, building off data received from the federal government’s National Park Service and the congressionally-chartered nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation that was the final straw. And it represented the triumph of the concept of environmental racism through the backdoor when it had failed to breach the front door.
When the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden Administration came into power – and with it control over the ACE and NPS – at first through the Environmental Protection Agency it tried to proclaim enforcement against “environmental racism,” or that free market decisions contained an implicit bias against non-whites that exploited them through inadequate environmental actions, despite the utter lack of proof validating the concept. Fortunately, with Louisiana at the tip of the spear, when the legality of the EPA bringing in the discredited concept as a feature of its policy-making was questioned, it folded up.
But behind the scenes the leftists in charge of the bureaucracy have continued the march, with the Greenfield incident bearing that fruit. The legalism involved over zoning, permitting, and the like obscured that these merely served as tactics to achieve the hidden goal (at least to the wider world; the leftist media freely admitted the larger question was over) – propagation of environmental racism policy preferences allegedly to combat that. These forces see the less government control over the market, the more evil it perpetrates on non-whites, summed up in a statement endorsed by the NTHP: “Preservation has been complicit in extending and valorizing white dominance. The federal, state, and local regulations that govern many of the most important preservation mechanisms reflect bias against communities of color.”
In effect, this outcome was a victory by leftist ideologues from the area and inside government and by limousine liberals outside it: advancing collectivism through the environmental racism trope. Losing were the parish as a whole and many black are residents who wanted good-paying jobs for a valued service and tired of seeing their children have to move away for real opportunities, However, in the end politics won out, the same tired story of why Louisiana with all its abundant resources remains a relative economic backwater and suffering in quality of life.
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