The Wealthy People's Caucus Strikes! The Poor and Working People's Caucus Schedules Its First Open Zoom Meeting!
Time for there to be a real conversation!
Yesterday I found myself talking for two hours with a customer from Flemington NJ. Flemington has similar developer and leadership-related problems as Boothbay. Like the Boothbay Peninsula, Flemington, New Jersey is a historic town as its domain name, https://www.historicflemington.com, tells, but when you click on the link it is hard to find images that depict its historic qualities, other than the picture floating behind and obscured by many widgets. links, and icons.
The economic development leadership of Flemington decided that there needed to be attention brought to the historic location and that the solution is to construct a monument to the town.
Where else should a monument be placed but on the traffic circle on the highway, that traffic configuration that every modern town, that counts for anything has, according to the conventional formulaic developer mentality? But how to pay for the monument advertising a historic town? With digital video signs, of course!
And so signs advertising commercial products were installed around the monument promoting the historic town intended to grab the attention of drivers negotiating a historically dangerous traffic circle while bored to death with being banned from using their digital phones while driving. and “bored to death”, should be taken literally as the Flemington traffic circle has an extensive crash history. This ran counter to the work done by the civil engineering firm to make the traffic circle less dangerous. The text on the McKormicj and Taylor website describing solutions to the high incidences of crashes states “To help alleviate these issues, McCormick Taylor developed safety and operational improvement aimed at reducing vehicular conflicts and driver confusion in and approaching the circle……..Roundabout signing and pavement markings were also implemented within the circle and on the circle approaches. “
Perhaps we should be grateful that Boothbay economic development leaders haven’t heard of the Flemington solution, but maybe they will and declare that digital road signs are the new badge of hip and so the hotel at the triangle where traffic on Route One veers off to 27 must be torn down and replaced with income-producing digital signs advertising the wealth culture of the Boothbay Peninsula. Perhaps Mr. Coulomnb can run videos of his Country Club and the Botanical Gardens can advertise the Christmas lights display on huge digital billboards to entertain drivers on the highway and when the new industrial training center replaces the traditional high school, it too can run digital ads on the roadside.
A new article reports the wealthy people’s caucus has reached their funding goal of two and a half million dollars for the planning stage of an industrial training center, aka public school system. Boothbay developers share with Flemington developers a willful disregard for safety and sustainability. Flemington Developers disregard the high incidents of crashes around a traffic circle and all of the efforts by engineers to fix it while Boothbay Developers dismiss warnings of the state and the local water department about Boothbay’s fragile water supplies. The MO of developers is to simply act like the public safety and sustenance issues are not their problem and so there is no need for the developers to address such issues as they promote solutions that exacerbate them.
It is fair to say that developers and community leaders comprise much of the political wealthy people’s caucus that runs the show in both Flemington and Boothbay, and many other places.
But now we have The Maine Green Independent Party’s Poor and Working People’s Caucus.
FILL OUT FORM TO JOIN THE POOR AND WORKING PEOPLE”S CAUCUS ON MONDAY JUNE 2 at 7PM
The Maine Green Independent Party is providing a new way for the rest of the population to organize in the newly formed Poor and Working People’s caucuses. Since central management of the economy took over the federal, state, and municipal government in the 1970’s the economy has bifurcated, Most people are either firmly in the camp of the wealthy people’s caucus or in the Poor and Working People’s Caucus which suffers from lack of organization and funding so that there is little opposition to the wealthy people’s caucus running ramrod over everybody else as we see happening with the fifty million dollar school project on the Boothbay Peninsula, being promoted as of it were a fair accompli when there is no acknowledged plan for funding it, and the public has never had a chance to say if they want it.
The fifty million dollar school, while never voted upon by the public as a direction the community chooses, receives continual writeups in the Boothbay Register with the planning stage is being funded by the wealthy people’s caucus while no other perspectives or ideas about education and associated issues is given air time, including my own.
Following is a quote from an email sent by Justin Beth to those who signed up for the caucus:
I wanted to share with you all a preliminary version Statement of Purpose and Mission Statement for our caucus. Part of the reason for this upcoming meeting will be to get the group's approval of these items and we want you to be a part of that. Additional emails that will be sent out this weekend will share other preliminary language for you to take a look at and will give you the agenda for the meeting. For now, here are the Draft Statement of Purpose and the Draft Mission Statement...
DRAFT STATEMENT OF PURPOSE:
"We, of the Poor & Working People's Caucus, seek a world where all basic human needs are met and working people are not exploited in the role they play in society."
DRAFT MISSION STATEMENT
"The mission of the Poor & Working People's Caucus (further referred to as "The Caucus") is to give a safe place for its members and participants to discuss and address issues relating to poverty and working conditions such as unionization, health care, food insecurity, housing and homelessness, and other issues that affect those who are of low income. The caucus recognizes that oligarchic capitalism is a root cause of poverty and forms of economic oppression that create gross inequity in our society. Part of the work of this caucus would be to develop ideas and plans that would diminish the effects of poverty on it's members, such as developing legislation or tools to help the poor advance out of poverty. It is also to develop a roster of members who can advocate for or against legislation that will alleviate or increase the burden of poverty, respectively."
Sorry for the long email, but I wanted to give you an idea of what ahead for this movement. On top of talking about the things to form this group, we'll also be talking about what we can do to shake things up against the Ruling Class that's been having their way with us for far too long.
Sign up here to join THE POOR AND WORKING PEOPLE”S CAUCUS ON MONDAY JUNE 2 at 7PM
Thankfully, there is now Newsbreak, to counter the hegemony of local mainstream media, a media where alternate views can have a voice. My latest article, as I mentioned in the last post, does not display the public stats, although I see the story streaming publicly in the Boothbay stream, under Local Creators, which is mostly me, apparently because no one else has applied, which anyone can do by clicking on the Creator link.
The one-to-one stats for my lastest story are now at 26 impressions and 26 views, climbing another notch as we speak, the most those stats have ever reached. It looks like my story is hot on the mysterious one-one circuit, but my followers have decreased from 16 to14, which does not matter all that much in the context of needing 200 mobile phone followers. You can’t please everyone and it is easy to displease many.
Medium has announced a personal essay contest with large dollar prizes which are a long shot with so much talented competition but it has inspired me to write something for Medium again, which is likely the purpose of the contest. Four essays around four prompts but I am thinking they will all be of one piece organized as four stand-alone essays with one month to complete. So that will keep me busy in August.