Northampton Voters! Don't Run Blindly Into Rush Hour Traffic! Don't Vote For Gina-Louise Sciarra and Her Marionettes On November, 4!
I apologize to my non-local readers who might see the foibles and petty scandals of Northampton, Mass. as some quaint and overblown mischief that pales before the fascist monstrosity that strangles the entire planet. But I take issue with the idea that Northampton’s often privileged residents stand apart from the larger conflagration. Northampton is a miniature example of the human condition - all the suffering, misery, cruelty and arbitrary power held by bullies can be seen here, whittled down to scale. Our politics stinks to so called high heaven. We have greedy lawyers and bad actors with dollar signs spinning in the vortex of their eyeballs playing monopoly on a little square with streets named Strong Avenue, Hawley Street, Gothic and Masonic. The mayor has a get-out-of-jail card and Smith College owns all the houses and hotels.
Our Daily Hampshire Gazette reading/WHMP listening voters go forth in a state of zombification to the local polls to vote for cycle after cycle of generic, small town Democrats. So we get high rents, pot holes that plunge down to the “brittle-ductile transition zone” and lousy schools. Hey, lets all do it again on November, four. Or not!
Don’t forget that the bombs dropped on Gaza come (significantly) from L3Harris on Prince Street, and a former Northampton mayor paid for the L3 CEO to have a limousine ride, taxpayer champagne and a key to the city. Our local evil isn’t theoretical.
Maybe Northampton is a place where the establishment can meet the butterfly effect. We have a week in which to play Zombie Apocalypse with Northampton voters. Can we role model political grit for a quivering nation almost ready to wave the white flag?
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Why should we care about Northampton’s upcoming election when the entire country is unravelling at the seams? Believe it or not, all of the themes playing out nationally are acted out in “Paradise City.” Nationally, education is under assault, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and massive corruption is everywhere. Dependably, the press fails to call out the criminal behavior of Donald Trump, and here in Northampton, our local press is grossly remiss in covering the scandals of our unethical mayor, Gina-Louise Sciarra.
Trump has his unreleased Epstein files, and Sciarra has her uninvestigated scam purchase of a downtown church for over three million dollars. The purchase was manipulated using a contrived appraisal that more than doubled the estimated value of the church and allowed Gina-Louise Sciarra to use your tax money to pay off notorious landlord, Eric Suher, for an as yet unknown reason. Now the city is stuck with a useless eyesore that will continue to burden tax payers.
Sciarra has gutted the school system causing a number of law suits from understandably pissed off parents whose children are deprived of legally mandated services.
She has lost the support of the Northampton Association of School Employees (NASE) and the Western Mass Labor Federation.
Sciarra has tried to silence teachers who speak out by having her appointed superintendent threaten disciplinary action.
She has pushed gentrification in the form of the “Picture Main Street” project that would mutilate downtown and place a huge burden on local businesses.
Her housing authority appointee just resigned after engaging in the corrupt practice of “favoring” people who were “jumped ahead” on waiting lists.
Don’t vote for Sciarra or her sycophants - Gwen Nabad (ward 1), Deborah Klemer (ward 2), Laurie Loisel (ward 3), Aline Davis (ward 5), Marianne LaBarge (ward 6), Garrick Perry and Benjamin Spencer (at large). These are the people under the iron fisted control of Mayor Sciarra. Vote for the other candidates.
For school committee the mayor’s puppets are Megan Wolf, Angela Wack and Robbie Saner Sullivan. Vote for the others.