A CHRISTMAS TAKE-UP
BY DAN VALENTI
PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY
(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY DEC. 16, 2024) — THE PLANET has gratefully reached the point in 2024 where the winter solstice is upcoming. That’s our cue to begin a well-earned Christmas vacation.
To vacate, to withdraw into silence and solace. To ascend the stairway to matters of PERSONAL importance, the fulfillment of which need not be explained or analyzed, just enjoyed. One merely has to “let it happen,” like the flow from the bottle of Chateau St. Esteph Medoc 1960, gifted by a dear friend from “over there,” with orders to savor and enjoy during our time off.
MERRY CHRISTMAS from MR. & MRS. PLANET
We leave Official Bitchfield to rot in its self-created filth, to its corruption, to its drugs and thugs, to its prolific pedophilic propensities. With a strong push from the feds, who knows if Vesuvius will finally erupt? It’s been roiling for decades.
Meanwhile, our thoughts and prayers, good wishes and blessings, extend to Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski, the Little Guys, electoral orphans who have no honest representation and who deserve so much more than what they’re being asked to endure.
THE PLANET will keep The Comment Line open.
Merry Christmas to all.
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“What you are looking for is where you are looking from” — St. Francis of Assisi.
“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”
LOVE TO ALL.
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Letter: “American voters chose poorly”
The Berkshire Eagle, December 21, 2024
To the editor: American voters installed a treasonous insurrectionist, racist, molester, habitual liar and convicted criminal assaulting the timeless principles of truth, morality and the common good.
Their blind choice will deny specific programs meant to help people: a woman’s freedom, voting rights, increasing Social Security, universal health care with paid family/medical leave and elderly home care, assault weapons elimination, ending the genocide in Gaza, strengthening unions, making home-buying affordable and free higher education in return for national service. Instead of an astute leader in this time of global crisis, we now have a buffoon running a sandbox of transactional bribery.
The decision removes any pretense of humane values in this floating garage sale called a country. Our hemisphere has been inhabited by first peoples since at least 23,000 BCE. Europeans came in 1492, initiating a genocide lasting to the present, occupying lands and people for free labor in the profit-driven plantations and industries developed over centuries. When natives could not serve as fodder, enslaved African peoples filled the role in a holocaust begun in 1532 in Brazil and 1619 in what is now the U.S. Succeeding waves of immigrants — Chinese, Mexicans, Vietnamese — were cast as the “other,” tortured and killed yet used as integral parts of the labor pool to benefit successive actors in the 1 percent snake-oil medicine show. That has included agricultural and factory operations, with its current offspring, the prison-industrial complex; overseers of immigrant labor; robber barons old and new; and now a new means of production/control via information and virtual reality — all serving the updated radical individual, stealing fortunes for ego and power, diametrically opposed to the idea of communal responsibility.
The American circus is retreating to further extremes in lockstep against the world’s peoples with violence, puppet leaders, oppression and media suppression — a metastasis of domestic and planetary inhumanity. Our moral vacuum is historically and currently drenched in atrocity, denial of justice justice, rejection of laws and the Constitution, all part of the global scene’s last refuge for extractive monopoly capitalism.
Headline news states Kamala Harris lost the election. Yet the people of the U.S. Inc. and the world have lost things that cannot be regained on our path to extinction: democracy, truth, honesty, responsibility and community as one human family. As George Orwell stated at the end of his novel “Animal Farm”: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Royal Hartigan, Pittsfield
December 21, 2024
Re: The horrible legacy of Mayor Peter Marchetti’s first-year in City Hall
Hello blogger Dan Valenti,
The letter, below, describes the city’s sidewalk fines that will punish elderly and disabled tax-paying citizens during and after winter storms.
Here is a list of the horrible legacy of Mayor Peter Marchetti’s first-year in City Hall.
1. Asked for a 90-day grace period free from “FREE SPEECH” criticisms.
2. Said he is not a fan of social media and blogs “FREE SPEECH” commentary of government.
3. He is named in a federal civil lawsuit as one of three Pittsfield Co-operative Bank male managers who allegedly sexually harassed and sex-discriminated against the terminated bank employee named Victoria May, who then bank manager Peter Marchetti allegedly called “a BITCH”.
4. Gave the disgraced politician and millionaire Andrea Francesco Nuciforo Junior $341,000.00 from the city’s FREE CASH account(s) to settle “Luciforo: Pittsfield’s Pot King (of lawsuits)” pot permit case that he filed against the City of Pittsfield in Berkshire Superior Court.
5. Passed a record-setting all-time-high municipal budget that increased property taxes by an average of 7.17-percent, and city fees by 8-percent each.
6. Is collecting his mayoral 6-figure city public pay plus perks, which he will someday turn into a 6-figure city public pension plus perks for himself, while the fictional Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski hard-working-class family pounds sand.
7. Said he was unaware of the controversial events and legal actions in the troubled Pittsfield Public School system, which is rated “Level 5” – the worst rating – by the state government in Boston.
8. Hitting good people with controversial new city fees with his new toter garbage collection scheme, as well as the aforementioned sidewalk fines that will cause pain and suffering to the elderly and disabled citizens of Pittsfield.
9. Wants to demolish two city school buildings to build a new one in their place, while Allendale Elementary School abuts Hill 78, which is full of GE’s brain-damaging and cancer-causing industrial chemicals called PCBs.
10. Wants to renovate Wahconah Park, which had no baseball in 2024, and which will have no baseball in 2025, but it is said to be a flawed project that would turn into a “Big Dig”-like boondoggle.
I cannot believe that Governor Maura Healey, State Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, Former Pittsfield Mayor Sara Hathaway, and others in state and local politics support my family relative Peter Marchetti, who is yet another failed leader of Pittsfield politics.
What else would one expect, of course?
Best wishes,
Jonathan A. Melle
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Letter: “My perspective on Pittsfield’s sidewalk-clearing paradigm”
The Berkshire Eagle, December 20, 2024
To the editor: I would like to put a personal observation into the sidewalk dilemma story covered in Mitchell Chapman’s Dec. 16 column.
Upfront, I have maintained my sidewalk for more than 35 years. This year, my circumstances have temporarily changed dramatically. I am a 77-year-old who has had recent eye and heart surgeries. I have a section of sidewalk along a high traffic section of West Street. This street is a major thoroughfare for schools, a nursing home and a hospital. My section of sidewalk is situated no more than two feet away from the road, and the walk starts at an intersection. On a snowy day, West Street is plowed multiple times day and night. A shoveled sidewalk is very often buried under repeated street plowing. The safety of drivers requires no less attention.
Simultaneously, city plows pile snow against the intersection curb as the pass down the adjoining street. A few inches of road snow becomes a few feet of hard-packed snow at the corner. Clearing and maintaining this stretch of sidewalk is difficult for an able-bodied person.
I have contacted my councilor, the mayor’s office and the Public Works Department about this dilemma for several years. I believe the promising “snow angel” initiative by the city has been sparked by stories like mine. I have requested a paid volunteer who can provide the shoveling service. To date, none have been available in my area.
Issuing fines for citizens in my situation is a most unproductive exercise. I would clear the way if I were physically able. The city will collect a little money, but the funds don’t go to sidewalk services and the sidewalks remain snow bound. I am willing to pay for assistance, and such funds would both employ someone and get the sidewalk cleared.
I appreciate how large a problem the city faces when you consider the miles of major roadways to be cleared. I want to be a citizen working on a solution and not a scofflaw with fines that fail to clear the sidewalks.
William Travis, Pittsfield
Call Curtis and tell him you want every hire and departed by resignation for the last 15 years.Allowing them to walk away might be about sex accusations.They could also be legitimate resignations….Now find out how many settlements were settled out of court to walk away.The business person has been there for many years and will know those settled lawsuits.The public needs to know how many and why they were settled.Behnke has handled the cash for many years.As long as we are digging we should dig deep on the finances.Get to the bottom of everything.
This is what happens when you leave democrats unsupervised
I’m saying Dave Guidi is no pedophile. That’s a fucking lie.