With the short life-spans of their antibiotic and hormone-filled cows; industrial dairies have a problem with unsalable carcasses. Disposal of dead cows and hogs in compost piles is now recommended over dragging them out in a field to rot.
It’s just a step to using the same method of disposal for their workers. Who’s to know — it may already be happening.
Do you know what you’re breathing? It’s good to know. People often learn by doing; but sometimes the learning process is painful or even fatal.
I once had a professor begin a lecture with: “Sewage is purer than Ivory Snow.” This statement juxtaposed the advertised purity of the soap with the fact that sewage is 99.99% water. The purity of the air, the effects quantified by surveys and studied in laboratories, and the duration of exposure; all need to be judged in terms of human health.
Factory farms take a lot of the bad things from human industrialization; and put it all in one place — the rural community. If it was anywhere else they would be shut down.
An activity page with Factory Farm attitude. In a way, it’s too late to satire their destruction of the natural world; because they’ve already shed the “Stewards of the Land” skin and put on the mantle of “The Important People Who Feed the World.”
I had a feeling that this was coming last year when I met an Ag Professor returning from India: He responded to the issue of rural health and reduced life expectancy by stating it was “a sacrifice that was necessary to fight world hunger.”
This fits in with the Cornithaca concept of disposable people: Other people. Different people. Lesser people.
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.
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.
If there is any bi-partisan agreement in this country, it’s the importance of “Big Ag” [a conglomerate of corporate Agribusinesses, Industrial Farms, the “Food industry,” and Politicians].
It’s not surprising that a group with that much money and power [coupled with a “City-centric” media and a government policy that claims to eschew race, gender, and national origin in their forward looking society, and yet uses them as the basis of every decision and piece of legislation] is able to suppress what is being done to rural families in our country.
It’s also not surprising that in Cornithaca County, a place so Liberal that their feet scarcely touch the land they hold dominion over; their mouths overflow with a dismissive contempt — reviling the rural community as “hillbillies,” “good old boys,” “trailer trash,” “ignorant,” “bigoted,” and “Lily Whites,” without ever having met or spoken with one.
This bigotry will be exposed, and well documented, in Part 2 of Cornithaca County.
Does changing the target, change the act? If so, where does that thinking come from?
The cases explored in Deadly Drift and Non-Disclosure Agreement? share many striking similarities:
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.
This follow-up blog to Part 8a lists the recipients and posts their responses to the issues detailed in Deadly Drift.
The letter and its enclosures were sent via USPS Express Mail envelopes by Certified Mail to ensure their tracking and receipt:
NYS Attorney General Letitia James
NYS Dept. of Health Howard A. Zucker, M.D., J.D.
NYS Senator Pamela Helming
Tompkins County Health Dept. Elizabeth Cameron
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
Sen. Gillibrand and both state and county health departments claimed they had “no jurisdiction” and “no oversight” and told me to go elsewhere, while Sen. Helming and the Attorney General’s Office merely passed my complaint of the NYSDEC’s misconduct back to the NYSDEC for their review. The NYSDEC, in turn, dismissed my complaint without ever addressing the evidence. Their investigation could be summarized in seven words: “It was done right and that’s that!”
Continue reading Part 8a Follow-up — Integrity and Transparency in Government – Deadly Drift
