Guest Blog: Fred Carrol:City Government Is A Whore

Local activist

Guest Blogger Fred Carrol writes his thoughts about proposed zoning changes to the MX and ID zones and his thoughts on the development at the corner of Washington & Pearl Streets being proposed by Centerplan Development. All opinions of guest bloggers are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Insider staff. 
To learn more about Carrol read previously guest essays. Available here:http://www.middletowninsider.com/2012/12/guest-blog-fred-carroll-on-washington.html   and
http://www.middletowninsider.com/2012/09/guest-blog-loitering-wars-update-by.html 
 In his own words:
"It occurs to me that certain elements in Middletown Government ARE A WHORE FOR CENTERPLAN.....[and at least one community action group....who are more of a "community act stunned" group, but of course it's easy to criticize]." Thus reads a recent Face Book post by me which prompted the Middletown Insider to solicit for an essay on the subject, and so here it is. Now, as a minimalist I would think it quite sufficient to simply describe the pertinent parties as whores, call Centerplan out on being slippery, slimy liars and, after apologizing for "stating the obvious" and "telling everyone what they already know" call the deal done. But there's a catch, you see, as is so often the case, no one is crazy enough to say what "everybody knows".

Which is to say there's no shortage of well informed, intelligent, principled citizens in Middletown, but for the most part everybody just has too much to lose by telling the truth as they know it. And of course there's certainly no shortage of folks who are "crazy enough" to say or do absolutely anything, but for the most part those people don't particularly know or care about Centerplan or who's who and what's what in Middletown Government, at least not until their Drug Dealer gets a Loitering Ticket, and then suddenly half the North End decide to get involved in "community activism"....so it falls to me, Dr. Freddy H. Carroll, and I'm not even a real "Doctor"! Yeah, sober, "invested" people who care have to much to lose, and the Less To Lose Crowd basically don't care about anything except where their next loose cigarette and lukewarm meal is coming from.....and of course they know both of those things and so don't care about much else, certainly not the fact that their government is selling their city CHEAP.....And that's it, "the City" just can't be generous enough with some "entities" at the expense of others, others meaning basically "the little people". "Well Fred", I can almost hear someone say, "That's some tough talk, of course you have the facts to back all that up, right?"

No, I have no facts, you couldn't "prove" or "disprove" anything by me, but there are plenty of people who could substantiate my statements short of using such explicit language as "whore" and "liar"; and when I see these people sit at a "community action group" meeting with their hand in the air for half an hour and then get three minutes in which to make their every point or not get even three minutes to take Centerplan and their peanut gallery of Bill and Peter to task, I say to myself; "Somebody has to speak truth to power here, hear?"

So in closing, if you want to convince me that I'm wrong about whores and liars let me see you convince Ed McKeon or Catherine Johnson in a fair debate and then I'll reconsider my choice of words, but until then I'll call Middletown Government a whore and Centerplan a smarmy liar all day every day.....

Fred Carrol