BY DAN VALENTI Pittsfield is Poisoned FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE (MARCH 14, 2011) — Alone among local media, The Planet has driven the recent and urgent discussion on industrial poisons in Pittsfield. Ironically, this came about as the result of a development that, at first, appeared to have nothing to do with PCBs, mercury, and the […]
BY DAN VALENTI Toxins, Hill 78, and Unfunded Liabilities: Planet Puts Councilors on the Spot First things first, as my sequential numeraries insist: Today, The Planet sent the following e-mail to 11 city councilors: MY RIGHT HONORABLE GOOD FRIENDS For www.planetvalenti.com, I am looking for on-the-record positions on the following issues. I invite your written […]
BY DAN VALENTI Quake a Reminder for All of Us First, The Planet has to say a word about the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and resultant tsunami that has devastated northern Japan. The scope of this tragedy cannot be comprehended, except by metaphor. In the early moments after such an event, it is impossible to get […]
BY DAN VALENTI ‘People Will Continue to Get Sick and Die’ Today, The Planet presents this remarkable story on PCBs. We call it “remarkable” for the way it explains what’s at stake for Pittsfield and Berkshire County in as concise, coherent, and complete a treatment as we have to date seen. Guest writer Dave Martindale […]
BY DAN VALENTI Ruberto PEDA Bound? The Planet has yet to master bi- and tri-location, but we have something even better: our network of spies. They were at the City Council meeting last night, the CEDS meeting earlier in the day, in various offices at city hall, in the municipal departments, in many places downtown, […]
BY DAN VALENTI In its draft document assessing Berkshire County’s strengths and weaknesses, the CEDS (community economic development strategy) committee produced a work that reveals the following: From 1970 to 2009, the population of the United States grew 51.01%. In Massachusetts, the population grew 15.90%. Berkshire County, however, experienced a 13.46% drop. The county’s two […]
BY DAN VALENTI On Jan. 21, 2011, the Berkshire Chamber of Commerce sent a “Key Legislative Alert” e-mail to its members. The “red-phone bulletin” tried to drum up support for a “low-impact solution that still meets EPA health standards” regarding the polluted Housatonic River. This seemingly innocuous letter hides much and reveals more. HIDDEN This […]
BY DAN VALENTI What is a question? Ah, The Planet just played with your mind. We just wrote a linguistic tautology, putting a query in the form of a question? In much of Eastern philosophy and thought, answers ride questions only when the questions stop. Questions serve as horses that gallop unsaddled. Only when question […]
BY DAN VALENTI The poisoning of Pittsfield by General Electric ranks among the great socially sanctioned “crimes” in U.S. history. Of course, little if any of the process was against the law, and “crime” is nothing but a legal concept varying among cultures. In Pittsfield, GE manufactured transformers, electrical equipment, plastics, and other products in […]
BY DAN VALENTI Behind the Times You would think that the good folks at the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission would change the outdated information on its CEDS page (listing the “next meeting” taking place on Jan. 25) given the fact that The Planet notified them of the embarrassing error. Moreover, based on the amount of […]
BY DAN VALENTI If you go to the website of the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, as The Planet did today for information, you will see this posting: The next regularly scheduled CEDS Committee meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, January 25, 2011 from 12:30 pm to 2:30pm at the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission conference room. Hmmm […]
BY DAN VALENTI We won’t be done with the topic of unfunded liabilities until every dime is paid up or the debts are reorganized out of existence. That’s going to be a spell. Hope you don’t mind, but again The Planet confuses you with facts that the Boring Broadsheets’city hall masters have told them not […]
BY DAN VALENTI We begin with a rock. Granite. Marble. That kind of rock. We as a species have long employed stone for its memorial qualities. Rock endures. The most ordinary stone is probably millions of years old (what has it not experienced?). As physicists have demonstrated (and Eastern religions have “known” for much longer), […]
BY DAN VALENTI Every now and then (and more than you would suspect) The Planet retreats from words and enters wordlessness. Today we give you images, not words (except as commentary). Read on, my dear friends. In January 2010, we bought a set of oil paints and acrylics, jumped in the deep end of the […]
BY DAN VALENTI The city of Pittsfield presently faces a pension liability $186,547,000, of which $105,976,000 or 57% is unfunded. An unfunded liability is simply a promise to fund something without a cent being paid. The Planet has been addressing this issue going back to the mid-1990s. On the air and in print, we have […]
BY DAN VALENTI Peter Marchetti, where were you? Your friends on the council’s Gang of Seven could have used your vote. You could have helped them hit the taxpayer in the wallet again and at the same time grow local government into a more unwieldy bureaucracy. Be honest, my Right Honorable Good Friend. There’s no […]
