Tompkins County – Page 69 – Rural Tompkins County

“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 – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” – Lines of Defense – Part 4

Getting “public servants” to see eye-to-eye with the public on policy decisions goes beyond logic, and into the world of politics. Even with a groundswell of public support; committees, experts, and agenda filled studies can be used to load the deck and leave the public on the sidelines. No one can divert a flood of voter concern into a thousand rivulets of fast-drying intentions better than an experienced politician.

With Cornithaca County’s large college population and their 4-year memory; the sands of time are turned into a veritable sponge for false promises and self-serving policies. The legacy of this year’s biggest event is, a few months later, merely the mention that it was last year’s biggest event, and within another year almost forgotten.

Politicians know that the students are ephemeral, but the powerful interests are always there.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” – Lines of Defense – Part 3

It’s never a good idea to use government and municipal handouts as the sole source of fact gathering; they always put themselves in the best light possible — even if they have to smash a few light bulbs to keep us in the dark.

In Cornithaca County, it’s laid on thick: our town’s new Comprehensive Plan states that the factory farm agriculture in the north of town prevents development and keeps taxes lower, and that extensively developing the south of the town with condos and apartments is good because that will lower taxes as well. They refuse to explain or correct this conundrum.

This new Comp Plan document is over 300 pages long, and is stored at the County level as images only; it can no longer be searched by the public for words and phrases.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” – Lines of Defense – Part 2

I had publicly spoken out, written letters and argued for responsive, participatory government and rural justice for years before this incident [that some of my neighbors thought was no accident] and still do; but somehow I was changed — there was a glowing ember inside me that never goes out.

This book is not a monument to be viewed from the outside, it’s meant to invite people inside, to involve and challenge them; any pieces in the book are pieces to be built on and to move ahead.

Cornithaca County. I just put that in because.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” – Lines of Defense – Part 1

The fight to retain human dignity and worth is being lost every time someone sighs because corruption, greed, and deceit will always be with us, and checks their phone for tonight’s party. It’s a battle where it seems that every time you type in a letter, they hit the “backspace” button, and it’s a burden you can’t push off on somebody else.

If you end up in a fast moving river; you can stand against the current, struggle to move against the current, or just relax and end up wherever the current takes you — but if the same person who brought you there won’t show you the map . . .

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Chipping Away at Bureaucracy” Introduction

Cornithaca County’s elite and their corporate and institutional partners never worry where their next perk or profit is coming from: they just announce, “The County needs . . .” and create the program or pass the legislation to make it happen.

The lesser functionaries and businesses run along behind this well-connected combine of perpetual profit; fighting over whatever scraps are tossed to them.

While Cornithaca County’s functional dictatorship continuously mocks the concept of any meaningful participation in government; residents in other areas may still have a chance to regain a government of “public servants,” rather than a government that sees the public as the servants.

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “The Hog Farm and the Hurricane”

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?

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – “Doctrine Quality Advisory” Poster

“It hasn’t happened yet” is probably the best description of this poster. If you have spoken at any length with, or read the ideas of these Doctrine holders; you have probably realized that they will not admit to any doubt or allow others to live in a manner that conflicts with that Doctrine. Differing beliefs are wrong and must be immediately corrected: by persuasion, accusations, intimidation, or even physical force.

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — Harry S. Truman

“Cornithaca County” Book Preview – Family Fables – “The Rice Grain Moral”

What’s so scary about fables? The same thing that’s scary about wisdom; it shows up the pretentions of the self-serving and the fool.

Cornithaca County seeks to suppress the lessons of history and the rationality of wisdom, and substitute their new paradigm: “Doctrine = Wisdom.”

“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.