Tag: rural community

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Whose Plan Is This Anyway?”

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Whose Plan Is This Anyway?” page 1
“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Whose Plan Is This Anyway?” page 2

These are a couple of excerpts from one of the County Comp Plan articles. This Plan is a scary document that outlines how each aspect of our lives will be directed and controlled. It may be even scarier to learn how few people want to read it.

“To make a contented slave it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.” — Frederick Douglass

In a kind of natural selection; Cornithaca attracts those who are only concerned that their place in this new society is secure and defined.

It’s strange to think that it’s a University Town where the residents refuse to look at the corruption and oppression that goes on all around them. Maybe it’s what they’re being taught.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Writer’s Choice”

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Writer’s Choice”

“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are just words to those who live under the boot of industrial farming. Corporate Agribusinesses fund and bully the politicians, control the agricultural colleges and the regulators, and through a combination of advertising dollars, threats, and litigation control the media as well.

As the upcoming Part 2 will show: even the law is no protection against these powerful interests. They have the power to make the law go away.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Anonymous Victim Survey”

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Anonymous Victim Survey”

“You know you live in Cornithaca County, when the only rights left are the right to be a victim and the right to be poor.” This statement sums up what it’s like to be a rural resident in Cornithaca County. Rural people are considered so unimportant that they don’t even get a minimal share out of the wealth that its autocratic leaders gather from each new policy decision. Unfortunately; this survey can’t even be classed as satirical.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Handy Land” Game Board

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Handy Land” Game Board

Rural America is the “handy” dumping ground for the unwanted and dangerous by-products of our society. Unreported and unrepresented; rural communities have become a dispossessed and marginal population that is ridiculed by a city-centric urban media.

In this scarier version of the children’s confection favorite: Your children are dropped off at the Ag Ghetto border, and must make their long way home safely.

The copyable book pages will include a 15” square game board in four parts, and all the color and special game cards needed for the game.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Form Based Code Living”

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Form Based Code Living”

Form Based Code planning is the most authoritarian and self-serving method of zoning this side of an imperial palace — everything is ordered for the benefit of those with power and influence.

Cornithaca County’s only city and seat of power is using Form Based Codes to make their “vibrant” community a place of “historic districts,” “parks,” “walkability,” and “single-family homes and row houses” while the same Codes allow building tracts of multi-family housing and a large urban sprawl bedroom-community in rural greenspaces by calling it a “Node.”

They are building a new marina; while we are getting a drug rehab center. Their city is one of the country’s 20 most expensive to live in; so we get the affordable housing mandates.

There are so many buses at their University that it’s difficult to drive a car around; while I would have to walk two-and-a-half miles and stand at the side of a ditch to wait for one of the few that travel the periphery.

Form Based Codes don’t help the needy; they just build walls to keep them out

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” – Lines of Defense – Part 5

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” - Lines of Defense – Part 5

I live in an Ag Ghetto. I call it an Ag Ghetto because the local policy is one of containment: contain the poverty, contain the crime, contain the drugs. The deputies patrol the borders of the Ag Zone and only enter when called, write a report, and leave. A kid was tossed onto the road outside my house while playing a game where they stand on the truck of a car as it drives around. It’s the sort of games they allow kids to play in the Ag Ghetto. He landed on his head. He died.

The Ag Zone is no Old MacDonald’s Farm; it more like “Fire Down Below”: people use the land as a dumping ground, buy off the residents futures with next to nothing, while telling them they’re lucky to get anything at all — and the residents know who calls the shots at the sheriff’s dept. and the regulatory offices.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “The Rural Families Landfill”

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “The Rural Families Landfill”

When you control all the Institutions, all the Bureaucracies, all the Lawmakers, all the Experts in the county, and are connected through the highest reaches of State and Federal power; you do whatever you want.

The College Town was looking for a community to take over and remake for their own benefit, and they did.

Oh, and they write the history as well.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “College Town CPR” Poster

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “College Town CPR” Poster

When Cornithaca County’s cleverest get into trouble — they look for patsies. The College Town always looked down their noses at their rural neighbors and had nothing to do with them, until their arrogance got them into serious troubles; then using their money, power and Ivy League influence, they reimagined the county as a way to dump all those troubles on their neighbors instead.

Just on example: Their planners created the myth of “rural sprawl” and pushed through the development of ugly urban-sprawl bedroom communities in the green spaces of neighboring towns to “combat” this horror. It’s enough to make a cat laugh, and rural residents weep.

In the “county’s” most recent comprehensive plan, the College Town is said to “define” the county’s future, and the rural community no longer exists.

Parts 8a & 8b — Integrity and Transparency in Government – Deadly Drift & Non-Disclosure Agreement? — Summary and Conclusions

The cases explored in Deadly Drift and Non-Disclosure Agreement? share many striking similarities:

  • Both involve powerful Agricultural interests who are catered to politically and bureaucratically.
  • Action on the complaints could result in a loss of profit and a restriction of those Agricultural interests.
  • Action on the complaints would damage the public image and undermine the favored political position of those Agricultural interests.
  • Health risks were limited to rural residents.
  • The facts of the complaints were never argued or admitted.
  • The officials entrusted with the welfare of the public at large refused responsibility to act.
  • The decision to take any action was left to the same people who had the most to lose if any action on the complaint was taken. No “conflict of interest” concerns were ever expressed.

I tried to explore all avenues of remediation, and follow all the proper protocols, so that nothing could “fall through the cracks.”

In answer to those critics who point out that there are “only two examples”:

There will be more.

The proving of a circumstantial case depends having a number of pieces of evidence that all point in the same direction. It will be left to the reader to decide for themselves how far a coincidence can be stretched.

While the county’s rural community has always been the focus of this blog, there are larger and more far reaching social issues to be examined.

What secrets lie at the heart of this template for a Progressive society?

Welcome to Cornithaca County.