How much diligence is due to constitute due diligence?

Early in their deliberations about allowing Verizon to install hundreds of 5G “small cell” EMF towers throughout Jamestown, the city’s planning commission’s chairman observed that there is “no statewide [New York] legislation to guide local municipalities” on the question. Very true. Local planning and zoning boards are on their own, up against Big Tech.

Historically, planning and zoning boards, composed of competent and well-meaning citizens, were able to assess the issues that came before them. With the advent of heavily subsidized wind, solar and the telecom giants (Verizon is the biggest), it became much more difficult for planning boards to do their due diligence. Just last month, Verizon promised a $45 billion payment to the US to control wireless airwaves for their 5G rollout, considerably more than other 5G giants. They expect to rake in trillions from internet users after paying off a pittance to the towns and cities for their 5G cell towers.

As a state’s attorney investigator for 10 years (Cook County Illinois, 1980-1990), I became viscerally aware that prosecutors, like defense attorneys, never ask a question in trial that they don’t know the answer to. The ‘Brady Rule’ of 1968 requires prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys, allowing them to ask questions that don’t jeopardize their clients. Over the years, Justice Department prosecutors in high profile cases tend to violate the Brady Rule, as Sidney Powell rigorously documents in her book, Licensed To Lie (Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice), 2014.

Even so, in the lower courts prosecutors tend to follow the Brady Rule; violators, if caught, can have their cases overturned in appellate courts, and run the risk of being disbarred.

In making their cases for industrial wind, solar and especially Big Tech, the telecom giants face no such thing as a Brady Rule: they can misrepresent, lie and cheat with total impunity. They don’t have to reveal anything about the dangers of their product.

It’s all safe, ipse dixit: it’s so because we say it’s so, and the FCC says so too, irrespective of the fact they admit they’ve done no environmental or health studies. It should be incumbent on Verizon to prove 5G is safe.

This is the situation faced by local planning boards. At their last meeting, a commission member stated, “…it would be nice if we heard from some practicing scientists or manufacturers if any of them [claims about safety or danger] really hold water …These kinds of things they’re doing with the 4G and 5G … if there are some things that are dangerous, it would be nice if somebody would step forward, and I don’t really expect that to come from manufacturers, because a lot of times money issues keeps it more or less buttoned up. But I just tend to feel a little — I’m not going to vote against this but I feel a certain apprehension because I’m just not hearing things coming out of other quarters that I would like to…”

Subsequently, the planning board unanimously approved Verizon’s rollout for hundreds of ‘small cell’ towers – every 300 to 600 feet – for the city, kicking the can down the road to the City Council for them to do their own, ‘due diligence’ at their next meeting in late March

There is a plethora of evidence that the intensive pulsed radiation from 5G cell towers is dangerous. Chautauqua Updates, the Mayville-based film group (available on Youtube) has supplied each of City Council members with documents and DVDs outlining scientists’ 5G concerns. For the residents of Jamestown, it’s hoped that the Council will look at the material carefully. Wishful thinking is not due diligence.

Roy Harvey is a Mayville resident.