When the County Highway Director proclaimed a blatant untruth to block a through-truck regulation – and it was proven to be untrue – he never changed or retracted his statement — and not one member of the County Ethics Committee, the County Transportation Committee, or any Town or County official at any level would even mention it. There was just a wall of silence.
And not one of them would speak on the reason for their silence.
Like the “Landfill Park” in The Mask – the public is always the recipient of that which is unsuitable for “people of influence and obligation” – a bureaucratic wrapping up of garbage for those “gift giving” publicity photos. So what does local government do with a dark and polluted bit of rural woods at the bottom of a steep valley? Make a gesture.
It’s a gesture that rural people are familiar with.
A picture may be worth a thousand words – but there are some pictures that the public doesn’t see.
Farmers are sometimes just referred to as the “rich people” in the poor rural communities. One dental technician told me that she knew the farmer crying for subsidies on television: he has a 40-ft yacht.
“Farm Friendly” doesn’t begin to describe the deliberately biased and un-equitable treatment that exists in the rich farmer – poor unrepresented and disposable “non-farmer” rural communities.
Agricultural Law protects farming; like beheadings protect a tyrant.
Ithaca is the place where everybody wants to live: because it’s the only place in the county where people have individual worth.
While Ithaca rules the county – it never leads by example. Their plan to blanket rural Lansing with CAFOs is balanced by their own petition to the New York State Supreme Court: enumerating serious concerns about lack of CAFO and Agricultural regulation and oversight, lack of disclosure, and the possible effects of modern farming practices on their own residents and the their own town’s environment. Lansing’s puppet government has expressed no concerns at all.
Ithaca is Camelot: A castle community where people dump their slop on the unprotected commoners outside the walls – without a second thought.
Policy making in Tompkins County is a purely mechanical process: every outcome is decided before the issue is revealed.
The round of comments, and meetings and surveys is only a meaningless backfill for an edifice whose foundations have already been laid.
The “meeting” for a radical zoning change for the rural Lansing community is called an “Open House” – a PR phrase for an exclusionary paradigm shift that denied that same rural community any participation in its planning.
When you connect all the dots — it’s a picture of money.
Politics is all about convenience – and there’s nothing more convenient than a vague and nebulous classification:
Especially one with emotional leverage.
How many communities have allowed housing complexes that will serve elderly residents – that turned out to be high-crime, felon and sex offender dumping grounds — with a scattering of elderly as perennial victims.
The “Homeless” designation is the perfect heart-tugging catch-all to disguise the problems of drug addiction, violent crime, and under-the-radar serial killers passing through.
Dumping your problems on someone else is more convenient than trying to solve them yourself – and more practical. It changes: “I’m no good for not solving them” to “you’re selfish if you don’t accept them.”
The Cornell-Ithaca machine “allocates burdens” to the other towns in the county – while keeping all the benefits to themselves.
It’s not that residents don’t understand what’s going on – it’s just that Tompkins County is not a representative government – and these days: it doesn’t even bother to hide it.
When corruption reaches a level of blatant display and whispered stories — it’s past remediation.
“Proles” in George Orwell’s “1984”: are a social class that forms the lowest level of society. That’s us – conforming, categorized, and caught in the flow of an authoritarian restructuring of government. Long before we get there — comments like this will no longer be allowed. Nor the people that make them.
Putting the finger on the scales means that you’re buying things on their terms. And when you’re paying with everything you own: how can that be ethical?
Competing on an unlevel field is a common situation for rural people – but being excluded from our government’s “Equitable” policies; is like locking the gates.
“The real tragedy of these small enclaves of marginality and poverty is that people are playing a game of life that has been structured in such a way that they are required to play but prevented from winning” – Janet Fitchen, Poverty in Rural America
It’s not surprising that most Americans don’t know what’s going on in the Agricultural Sector – they’re not supposed to.
You may know that methane emissions have the greatest short term effect on Climate Change: greater than the CO2 gasses produced by cars, trucks, and industry. What you may not know; is that Agriculture is the greatest contributor to methane emissions – and that the Agricultural Sector is the only sector where methane emissions are continuing to increase. And that the farming methods being promoted by the USDA and Agricultural Colleges are the biggest producers of methane of all farming methods. Or that our government is only using voluntary programs and incentives [paying them our tax money] to fight this pollution.
To cut straight to the punch line: When all their activities that contribute to Climate Change affect their crops —government subsidies and funding pay out our tax money to ensure that our country’s corporate agribusinesses get every penny of profit they’re destroying our climate for.
Are they fools for what they’re doing? Or are we fools for letting them do it?
This hits home – because I was sprayed with a cloud of Roundup from an agricultural boom sprayer while mowing my lawn – and ended up dazed and vomiting all over myself and the bathroom in the early morning hours.
The investigation of my complaint by the NYSDEC [documented in “Tompkins County and Tammany Hall”] did nothing to help their reputation for corruption in the rural community.
Most rural families are too poor to move and powerless to use politicians; and when the mega-million dollar factory farms took over rural Lansing, NY – they owned us and everything in it.
The only thing worse than the environmental racism of the rural blacks – is the environmental erasism of the rural whites — we have no help, no hope — and no worth.
