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Chronogram Corporate Lackey?

To the Editor:
Regarding “Hard Choices in Hudson,” St. Lawrence Cement’s plan to convert the region around Hudson, NY into a heavy industrial zone.
It would take several thousand words to address the superabundance of propaganda tricks the author Joseph Brill slipped into this thing—unfortunately with your editorial blessing—but here’s a condensed version.

First, the insulting caricature you chose to use to illustrate the residents of Hudson perpetuates the St. Lawrence PR department-manufactured myth that debate on the issue is “dividing” the community.
In fact, opposition to St. Lawrence’s scheme has been a major community builder. Over 2,400 area residents have become dues paying members of Friends of Hudson to fight this thing. The recent annual picnic for FOH supporters drew approximately 1,000 and was hosted by a local “blue collar” fraternal organization.

In contrast, the best the St. Lawrence forces have been able to muster is the busing in of out-of-town bodies to a major state hearing to pose as plant “supporters”. A free lunch and a free blue t-shirt does not a supporter make. Note: Friends of Hudson members pay for their t-shirts.

Second, your choice of a Register-Star “reporter” to present the facts was most unfortunate. An objective analysis would reveal that this paper has been exceedingly biased in its reporting on the St. Lawrence plan.

This fits with the attitude of the paper’s owners, extremist pro-corporate, anti-environment ideologues who in recent years have: 1) supported the building of a dry cleaning chemical plant on the banks of the Hudson River,2) slandered award-winning environmental author Gray Brechin on its front page, and 3) managed to find a way to disparage the biodynamic agriculture efforts of Hawthorne Valley Farm.
After a bland, chamber of commerce-style intro, Mr. Brill starts his article by drilling in the “fact”—over and over in case you missed it the first three times—that Hudson used to have cement plants. It’s a childishly obvious ploy to create the impression that any cement plant, no matter how large and out of scale, is “traditional” for the city.

This, like the graphic you chose for the article, is straight from St. Lawrence’s PR playbook.

In fact, what is traditional in Columbia county is agriculture which predates cement making in the region by hundreds of years (or a few thousand if you include the economic activity of the native people.) Farming is the “big business” in Columbia County and local farmers, quite logically, are against anything that’s going to dump 29,350,000 pounds of solid pollutants, in their air every year.

But, of course, farmers, the backbone of the local economy, and the 97 percent of Columbia Memorial Hospital physicians who have come out strongly against the plant are just “special interests” trying to take bread from the mouths of the needy and deserving Swiss-owned cement “community.”

To people who want to get information on this story from a source other than warmed-over St. Lawrence press releases, try here: www.friendsofhudson.com

—Ken McCarthy, Tivoli