STALINISM AND RUMOR MONGERING AT NIAGARA TIMES BLOG

The anonymous person or group that calls itself Hobbes at the Niagara Times blogspot—clearly a Roveian if not Orwellian inspired Republican front group—is a threat to democracy and the public sphere in Niagara County. A few days ago the blog administrator deleted my posts and barred me from participation when I challenged the truth of his “story” regarding the activities of County Manager Greg Lewis and pointed out his hypocrisy in criticizing the moves of Gov. Paterson. In the manner of any good Orwellian bureaucrat, Hobbes, the supposed Administrator, deleted most of the remaining of my recent posts. This is a Stalinist practice right out of the pages of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Hobbes, like Stalin and Mao Tse Tung, chooses to re-write history rather than deal with the truth of historical events. So Hobbes deletes my posts and writes me out of the pages of discursive history as if my critical disagreements with him never happened.

This is seriously dangerous stuff. Memory and history are essential dimensions of truth and freedom. But Hobbes arrogantly and self-righteously chooses to help us forget and re-write history by deleting crucial events and ideas. It is understandable why these people stay anonymous. The Republicans obviously don’t want to be associated with these tactics—at least if they have any common sense or integrity—and yet this proto-fascistic action goes unchallenged by the Republicans.

Today Hobbes continues his witch hunt against Mr. Greg Lewis, Niagara County Manager, much of which is based on sources that he never discloses, undoubtedly Republican insiders who wish to control Niagara County politics no matter what the cost to democracy, truth and freedom of speech. Hobbes arrogantly and self-righteously claims knowledge he could not possibly have. Using tactics right out of the play book of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney he tries to instill fear and hysteria in the citizenry in order to force actions that are irrational and impulsive.

Hobbes bends over backwards to find contradictions and supposed incompetence in Lewis’ actions. If in fact Lewis was being particularly cautious in playing according to the letter of the law in reporting possible swine flu at the Niagara County Courthouse, it could only be because he knows there are Republican Party “hit men” out there jumping at every opportunity to discredit and oust Lewis from his position.

Hobbes tactics are character assassination pure and simple. At the very least, these tactics are mean spirited, ill willed and at worst seriously destructive to the spirit of community cooperation and trust. The likes of Hobbes perpetuates the Party domination of county politics and the inability of the people to move forward in a spirit of honesty and trust and create the conditions of a true polity. He/she/it is destructive to openness, transparency and accountability. He creates paranoia in the community and pollutes what it means to be a member of community and democracy.

His tactics, in short, are in effect violent and interested not in the force of truth but the force of fear, domination and exploitation. Anyone of good will, who is honest and interested in reason and the spirit of community should attack this character with all their energy and will within the court of reason and limits of law.

The integrity and creativity of the Niagara polity depends upon eliminating such toxic and vicious voices from our politics.

ASSESSING ALBANY: The Futility of Moralism

Certain kinds of analysis of recent events in Albany-- political coup, weeks of insider ‘politiking’ while shutting out democratic transparency, shuffling the deck chairs of the Albany version of the Titanic, and finally, seemingly, things returning to where they were at the beginning of the Republican coup-- are as politically useless and unproductive as the events themselves. They are moralistic and one-sided, leaving little room for possible change and hope of transformative renewal.

For example, LC Scotty over at Buffalo Pundit says in response to the Pundit’s call for abolishing the State Senate,

“The folks in the assembly are culled from the same political cesspool as the senators.”

Scotty doesn't really tell us what he understands by the 'cesspool' source he talks about. We should consider that those “political cesspools,” by the way, are our communities. What else would they be except possibly a new class of professionals serving the interests of the state and servicing the needs of mega-capital to influence government to write laws favorable to privilege and profit.

Another contrasting example of useless moralistic political ‘analysis is Robert Harding of the Albany Project who points to Pedro Espada as the fly in the ointment who

"represents everything that is wrong with our legislative process and everything that is wrong with politics and governance in New York."

Harding doesn't really explicate what exactly Espada represents politically and governmentally. Is it moral decrepitude and lack of political integrity that he points to? Possibly. But this kind of political analysis amounts to holier than thou moralism that leaves things at the status quo.

So, whereas LC Scotty doesn't really tell us what he thinks constitutes the "cesspool" from which we "cull" our elected officials, and Harding doesn't clarify how such an individual as Espada embodies our political decadence, we are left with business as usual in local/state political analysis. These two types-- let's say macro-political and micro-political -- of political analysis of the problem as originating socially from a "pool" of people or as arising in individuals themselves is a blame game that doesn't describe let alone explain what might be going on let alone how to extract ourselves from the dilemma.

LC Scotty and Harding are both right and both wrong. Their kinds of analysis are equally one-sided and equally abstract. Communities are in a cesspool-like state of decay and most individual politicians have little concern for a moral consistency that properly informs their political activity. Transparency and accountability to real community interests are just something they try to make people believe actually exists. But it doesn't. It's smoke and mirrors, illusion and sleight of hand. Practicing an ethical politics is impossible for professional legislators because their morality is no longer rooted in their identity with and loyalty to an authentic community. Nor is there any transcendent universal ethics that exists that could obligate and inform their behavior. Moreover, on the other hand, ethics committees in legislative bodies are more useless than the fox guarding the hen house.

Throwing out all of the state senators is a wasted suggestion, should we try to start all over again. The community as it is would simply recreate the same type of candidates in the Assembly.

Endlessly moralizing in condemnation of this and that individual senator is equally useless. Possibly once a politician has played the game long enough to qualify for state office, they have been sufficiently conditioned to know how to promise the people of the community everything and deliver very little besides a little pork-payoff trickling down to the Party faithful in the 'community.'

Also, the politician/candidates have more or less sold their souls and minds to the bureaucratized party duopoly, the Republicrats, who operate and think more and more like a self-interested autonomous social class. For all practical purposes they are a social class effectively no longer accountable to, for the most part, an effete, indifferent and powerless community. The party leviathan vitiates community and eviscerates the little left of the individual politician’s moral integrity.

The solution is turning back to community to reconstitute the foundational autonomy of polity as a self-sustaining entity. The community must reconstitute those things such as education whose substance has been eviscerated by state bureaucracies, both at the pseudo-federal and state levels. Education must be education for citizenship and therefore for an individuality which enables critical thought and self-understanding of what the community is and what is in its interest. Such reconstitution is also a matter of extracting from communities corporate incursion into the socialization of individuals who they turn into mindless consumers of the culture industry. Corporations have colonized community and commodified consciousness.

In short, our essentially depoliticized, disempowered and uneducated communities ARE political cesspools sending their scum to Albany. But the solution still lay in the community not in playing mental checkers and chess with the media events in Albany as another form of the culture industry’s colonization of consciousness and character. We can play imaginatively at politician all we want in trying to shuffle the chairs on the deck of the Albany Titanic, but short of re-appropriation of individual political consciousness and community sovereignty, the centralist bureaucratic regime of Albany will wax on, continuing to sell their soul/minds to the state-party mechanism, while a few aspire to even higher office in Washington, requiring of course that they compromise their loyalty and belonging to community even more egregiously than they already do.

Mega-businessmen like Golisano will continue to weasel their way into power through people like Pigeon as people like Espada will work their way up through the corruption of community and muscle their way toward careers of personal self-aggrandizement.

The Community must reconstitute a social individual who actually belongs to community. Without out that pre-condition representation is meaningless. Without a community of citizens who believe in and belong to their community how can they be represented at all? Without community we will remain aggregated macroeconomic statistics on the spreadsheets of corporate-owned state and national politicians.

An aggregated constituency artificially engineered through media manipulation and party domination of local political discourse does not make a community nor a polity of citizens who can claim democratic power. The faithful, true-believers, who consume the platitudes and procrastinating propaganda of the machine wait on and on for the professionals to change their lives. And they do not.

THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE OUT: Censorship of Critical Thinking at Niagara Times Blog

I’ve been kicked off the Niagara Times blog spot for the third and final time. Hobbes, the Administrator, says I don’t follow his ‘rules.’ He e-mailed me with this:

“Anything you post will be deleted due to the fact that you have repeatedly been told to abide by my rules, and you have chosen to blatantly disregard my requests. No need to respond, just choose another site. Have a nice day.”

What this really means is that any critical discussion of any of the implications of his feature post or any essentially related materials is out of bounds. Well, that’s one way to have a discourse but it’s not rational and it’s not reasonable and it's not really discourse, especially critical political thought. It ends up being propaganda, agitprop, character assassination, witch hunting the supposed enemies of the Republican Party, partisan obstructionism, etc. So Hobbes, whose identity we don’t really know, censors any commentary that distracts from his mission. What is his mission? It is to disseminate the talking points and projects of the Niagara County Republican Party.

Hobbes diatribes are usually against those darn corrupt and incompetent Democrats who are ruining the State of New York and the county of Niagara. His latest attempt is to stir something up about the County Manager, Mr. Lewis. Hobbes accuses Lewis of endangering the health of Niagara Countians by not shutting down the County Court House when apparently a couple people came down with the flu. (Reportedly, a swine or two was seen leaving the building.) Hobbes didn't like my take on this, which suggested that his hysterical rant was mostly hyperbole and gossip in an attempt to whip up some social and political hysteria to start a witch hunt aimed at Lewis.

Hobbes is good at witch hunting. He was instrumental in stirring up an apparent public outcry on his blog (i.e., really only about 3 or 4 people) against Tom Christy of LCTV Legislative Journal fame, which was then used by the Republican Administration at the station to oust Christy. A few Niagara County Legislators also referred to this fabricated outcry in their self-justification in not defending Christy and saving his show. There was some soft evidence that Senator Maziarz was involved in ousting Christy also. It all makes sense given the capabilities and essentially authoritarian ideology of the Republican machine consisting of a network of politicans, lawyers by the dozen, IDA connections, LCTV supporters, etc.

More recently Hobbes, who sometimes calls himself David Stein of Lockport (who I don't think exists) has been disparaging Mayor Dyster, a Democrat of course. And he has attacked most of the rest of the Democrats in the area at one time or another. That's his job. He probably gets paid for it and he doesn't work/write on weekends. So bourgeois, no?

The last straw for me was when I commented on how the Republicans might actually like Gov. Paterson's recent, apparently Constitutionally illegal, appointment of a new Lieutenant Governor. I suggested, sarcastically of course, in the following post, that the local Republicans might actually like the Governors move:

"...But, Hobbes, the Niagara County Republicans should love Paterson’s maneuver! Don’t they all think government is about “efficiency” as we discovered in the last Niagara County Legislature meeting where they were all ranting about the need for "efficiency" in government and thus the need to downsize government? Well, now they have such efficiency in Albany: a dictator who flouts the Constitution and operates like a good business man is as “efficient” as you can get. The chickens have come home to roost. And when do Republicans around Niagara County ever express any concern over “democracy” or even the Law for that matter. Your blustering, as if you care, about democracy and law is a great example of using principle to manipulate the faithful blind followers. As we all know, most Republicans hate ‘dictatorial authority’ only when they don’t have it. [They are for the most part] proto-fascistic hypocrites!..."

That was strike three for me. Hobbes had his excuse to censor me for good. I broke the RULES. Well, the truth is that I got his goat with the truth. Even the most callous of hitmen have feelings sometimes. And they don't like pesky gadflies around who remind them about the truth they conveniently overlook, the lies they tell, the distortions of facts and events that they manufacture and the essentially viciously violent vulgarization of politics and democracy that such as he propagate. Such as Hobbes also don't like to be made conscious of their own self-contradictions and inconsistencies. They don't really like to think. It's not a good demagogic method when you're trying to control people as opposed to trying to play a part in a process of self-reflection and socio-political self-criticism.

So, if I were Hobbes I would want to stay anonymous also. Who would want to be publicly known for systematically functioning to undermine openness, transparency, truth and the integrity of the public sphere. All in the name of retaining and further expanding the power and the oligarchical aspirations of the Republican Party in Niagara County.

Some useful information comes from Hobbes site. I will and have always given him that. But his skewed perspective, judgmentalness and moralistic crusading is self-serving of partisan power alone. As Hobbes himself once said in one of his rare appearances in the discussion thread as Hobbes himself that 'it's all about his money' and only about his money. It's all about securing the lowest possible taxes for the rich and assuring conditions for a "free," that is, anarchistic, market, that the elite of mega-wealth and their minions can continue to exploit for their own financial aggrandizement. Hobbes does not serve Niagara County well.

Nevertheless, I'll keep an eye out for and keep exposing the agitprop from over here at Niagara Journal.

Toward a Federal Populism: From the Writings of Paul Piccone (Part 2)

"The main implication of all theories of the New Class is the displacement of economic conflicts between labor and capital as the deus ex machine of social dynamics, in favor of political conflicts between those possessing a “cultural capital” redeemable as social and political power and those with mere “cultural liabilities.” In a context where all economic relations are mediated by political arrangements, this means that the struggle for power—including economic power as a special case—no longer defines politics in terms of a Left that favors egalitarian redistributive policies and a Right committed to defending existing privileges and social inequalities, but in terms of control of institutions allocating a substantial segment of the collective social product appropriated through fiscal means. Thus the main new political division now obtains between centralizers committed to an extension of the state redistributive apparatus allegedly meant to solve all social problems (hence “victimology” as the New Class’s favorite mode of ideological self-legitimation) and populists committed to local autonomy, fiscal austerity and participatory forms of democracy.” (From "Confronting the Crisis," pp. 273-74)

TOWARD A FEDERAL POPULISM: From the Writings of Paul Piccone

“What led the Soviet system, first, into Chapter 11 and, subsequently, into Chapter 7 was neither Reagan’s military Keynesianism nor Stalin’s crimes, but its wasteful central planning, social engineering, and abstract rationalism—characteristics which, in more moderate guises, also define all liberal-democratic regimes. Thus, far from being irreconcilable opposites, the bureaucratic centralism of the former Soviet Union and liberal technocracy in the West turn out to be variations of the same basic [Age of] Enlightenment [political] model—a model that, by defining all conflicts in economic terms, has successfully occluded a more pervasive logic of domination beyond labor/capital conflicts: [a logic of domination] predicated on the political power obtaining between the rulers and the ruled, the experts and the masses, the administrators and the administered. During the last couple of centuries, blaming capitalism for every imaginable problem has been a convenient way to conceal the equally questionable role of the New Class of politicians, intellectuals, and bureaucrats in institutionalizing and administering new structures of domination. [Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, pp. 271-72]

PARALLEL UNIVERSE (part. 2)

After the hypocritical and embarrassing display of Gov. Mark Sanford's obligatory apology with tears yesterday on every news channel in America except Fox, it should be clear to all that the Republican elite have surely reached the limits of hypocrisy, arrogance and power mongering. As we know from all the naysayers who buy into the mass-marketed sophistry and demagoguery of the Republican party and their army of talking-head hitmen, there are just as many immoral Democrats, not unlike Mark Sanford, cheating on their wives, forcibly coming out of the closet and commiting other smarmy and despicable acts of moral indecency and indiscretion. Yes, we all know that, thank you. [If I hear that “you do it too” argument one more time, I’m going to hurt someone.]

But the fact of the matter is that it is only the Republican ‘holier than thou’ crowd-- who are really the crowd of ‘false prophets’ that Jesus warned us about-- who exploit moralization to the point of inciting violence. Moreover it is the Republicans who want to tell women what they should do with their bodies; want to tell everyone what proper sexuality is; want to tell everyone what constitutes proper marriage; want to tell everyone what a real family is; want to tell everyone who doesn’t practice their morality (that they all too frequently can’t and probably don’t even try to live up to), that they are not real Americans. And Sanford is one of the biggest offenders, biggest of all their many christianist hypocrites.

While they attempt to reduce politics at the national level to mediatized struggles over issues that should be and can only be dealt with at the community level, they exploit the sincere concern of local peoples to preserve their traditions or transform them according to the needs of their times and the demands of historical ruptures or deadends. Moreover this deviously misplaced propaganda allows the Republican demagogues such as Karl Rove and the usual suspects on Fox News to exploit the fear and ignorance of many of conservative and Christian persuasion in order to mobilize a foundation voting block to return the rich and powerful, that is, the war mongerers and globalists to office.

The sad and pathetic if not frightening aspect of such Orwellian style social and civil evil is that they may well achieve their goals even though they have nothing to offer the mass of true believers that they terrorize into swallowing the Limbaughian distortions of fact, interpretation, context, history and perspective.

Karl Rove on Fox News this evening was actually defending Mark Sanford with the “everybody makes mistakes argument” as if that was all that was involved. As if there were no difference between the right Republican, neo-conservative militant christianism and other adulterers not of their persuasion. This same crowd of political deviants who were quite willing to vilify Spitzer or Clinton, suddenly find forgiveness in their hearts for Sanford, one possible prospect for the presidency 2012.

But that isn’t the most despicable part of all of this. All of the manipulation, sophistry, character assassination and exploitation of people’s concerns to reconstitute culture—i.e., a community-based popular culture beyond the reaches of the “culture industry” and the incursions of a parasitic corporate culture and an interventionist bureaucratic centralist state—all of their arrogance and bullying is only and simply to restore the base for the retaking of power in 2012. Nothing else really matters to them because only that level of power will assure fulfilling upon their insatiable drive for profit, empire, and the military reconstitution of all other cultures in the image of Liberal Democracy, a failed one at that. They exploit populism, christianity and American patriotism in the name of their social class's profits, power and elitist resentment.

This is the Republican/Neo-conservative's parallel universe. They have no real concern, understanding of, nor compassion for America as intended let alone the America that many are still struggling to achieve. This is possibly why they were so outraged by Obama’s use of “empathy” when describing what may well serve a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Hopefully, the base of true believers who support the neo-conservatives and the likes of Rush Limbaugh will soon see through the hypocrisy and virtual Hitlerian big lie, and transform themselves in the name of a true conservatism and a neo-populist federalist reconstitution of an authentic confederation of true American communities.

And lastly, let's note that Sanford didn't make a "mistake" as Karl Rove insipidly and unabashedly proclaimed. Sanford knew quite well what he was doing. He consciously and intentionally did wrong. That's not a mistake. A mistake is a consequent error made in an honest attempt to do right or tell the truth but which fails to understand what is right or what is true. Sanford understood what he was doing and knew it was wrong and he did it anyway. Sanford is slime. Did he consider it a mistake before he got caught? No.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Did you ever get the feeling you were missing something? How is it possible that the financial “experts” who drove the banking system into crisis are now in greater demand than ever?

How is it possible that public money will continue to be poured into a parasitic financial culture that has questionably anything to do with a sustainable real productive economy? How is it that millions upon millions of people are living virtually and actually hand to mouth while others get rich beyond imagination by buying and selling money which it is questionable really exists?

So a parallel universe does exist. But it’s not the physicists' possible world mathematically inferred. It is a world of symbolic manipulation of the value of the real world by the financial wizards pulling the levers that keep us fearful and who dare us to pull back the curtain. Many thought Obama would do that. How wrong they were.

PRIVATE SECTOR PROMISES

Former President George W. Bush came out of retirement to join the Republican attempt to consolidate the fragmented grand old party. Bush admonished us that only the private sector could produce wealth and presumably pull us out of the now nearly normalized economic crisis.

We will, however, never really know, this time around, whether Bush’s claim regarding the power of the private sector is true. We’ll never really know during this crisis, whether “we can spend our money better than the government can” as Bush chided. Why will we never know? Because the government is spending our money for us in the private sector to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars. They’ll even be spending much money we don’t have, just like the Bush Administration. We lost our chance to see if the private sector can really pull itself up by its bootstraps.

The Congress had its chance to let the private sector put up or shut up when the banks crashed. But they backed out in the end when the last 15 or so representatives in the house preferred the proffered pork over republican conservative principle which would have required opposing that first Bailout package.

It seems there are many in the private sector who don’t have the faith that Bush seems to have. He himself would have been a failed businessman if Daddy hadn’t bailed him out. All too many corporations and big farms would also be bust if it weren’t for corporate and agricultural welfare. Just ask GM and the tobacco farmers in the Carolinas.

When are we going to allow the private sector to test its power of wealth production? If the government is to blame for disrupting the private sector, why can’t the capitalist faithful just say no. After all just saying “No!” is a tactic the conservatives seem to like to use in various venues of political concern. But there always seems to be an excuse why they just have to take the public money and run. Why can’t they stay in integrity with their beliefs and commitments and just say “No!”

Seemingly, as the private sector needs more and more taxpayer money to survive possibly the crisis and the capitalists lack of faith in their ideology means that the private sector, the capitalist economy, has reached its logical conclusion. Greed doesn’t work. Competition is not sustainable. The segregation of private and public sectors is an illusion.

The new populism would be much truer to capitalism and to the conservative insight that “the accumulated wisdom of the past can only thrive [in the context of] traditions and customs, i.e., as ‘lived realities’ internalized” in communities, not as the dictates of governmental bureaucracies and exploitative corporations.

THE SWORD'S OTHER EDGE: On Populist Possibilities in Local Politics

Historically populism has been a “grassroots resistance to encroachment by state and capitalist agencies on the basis of local traditions, customs and ethical norms” …. “ populism becomes a useful concept for configuring current as well as incipient developments both in the communist east as well as in the West. … populism has not emerged spontaneously during relatively “normal” times, but has always developed as a response to concrete threats to existing communities, lifestyles or other established relations.” (The Crisis, P. Piccone, pp. 202-04)

Populist thought and action has always been an attempt to restore the existence of the whole individual to life in the public sphere “rather than only a splintered economic or public persona. This is precisely what populism promises by vindicating concrete individuality rooted in communities, traditions, customs, etc.” (The Crisis, P. Piccone, p. 204)

Usually in American political discourse populism's image is reduced to the cliché of “pitchfork wielding farmers” or far right fanatics often of either the religious/millennial or militia types. However the historically sedimented motives and current momentum of such spontaneous movements have been lost on the American populace due to media manipulation and a universally degraded and distorted educational system.

At least since the presidential campaign of Ross Perot the populist slogan has been bandied about almost always opportunistically to secure various voting blocks which might not otherwise be harnessed for partisan purposes. Few have taken a serious look at the potential and possibilities of populist political self-understanding in America. When Perot’s “populist” communities and constituencies insisted on connecting with one another without his mediation or interference, Perot objected. So it was not difficult to see that Perot’s “use” of ‘populist’ slogans was for purely instrumental purposes, having no intention to promote the unfolding of concrete individuality and self-determining and self-sustaining communities. Perot had no intention to allow the spontaneous support that came his way to practically prefigure radical changes in democratic America. He wished to use it and then return it to the easily manipulable condition of alienated, massified individuals living in a homogenized and standardized culture and economy.

Bob McCarthy detected something of the populist rumblings in America locally here in Western NY in his Buffalo News Opinion piece entitled “Locals with pitchfork and torch.” He was referring, of course, to the ‘conspiratorial’ part played in the recent ‘Albany procedural coup,’ that reconfigured power in the State, by George Maziarz, HenryWojtaszek, Steve Pigeon and Anthony Baynes. McCarthy refers to these players as “upstate revolutionaries.”

Wow! I’ll have to re-check the definition of ‘revolution’ real soon. Because if that was a revolution I’ll eat my hat.

“We changed the way New York does business,” Baynes said. “And there were no tanks in the street.”

What unmitigated arrogant elitist Orwellian bullshit. Firstly, let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that Maziarz and Co.’s actions led by the money of Tom Golisano has anything to do with Populism let alone revolution. It obviously doesn’t despite the ubiquitous pitchfork and torch metaphor. What happened in Albany was the proceduralist treachery of a corrupt bureaucratized party politics of entrenched politicos defending the interests of big business, not business in general let alone sustainable business and not for any other meaningful and transformative “reform” in NY. Of course they were also shoring up alliances to guarantee their own future power positions amongst the political class in Albany.

Maziarz has had numerous opportunities to take populist discontent in the county of Niagara and turn it into meaningful political power and the leverage for real change for local sustainability, improved quality of life and integrating the communities of Niagara County. However rather than spending time playing a part in organizing the organic potential of populist discontent in Niagara County in fighting the toxic waste business polluting our environment, helping to consolidate public services and mediating the political forces that perennially manages to keep Niagara County working against itself, Maziarz chooses to play bureau-boss in Albany. Maziarz too cuts with the other edge of the populist sword. Rather than grasping the power of populist discontent and its potential for real change in the quality of local life he chooses to play the part of shot-calling, cash dispensing local party boss. While he is objectively positioned in a region materially poised for real populist political power, his cynicism, careerism and Republican self-misunderstanding leave him wallowing in the shallow waters of state politics as usual, but waters in which real political leadership and creativity can easily founder and drown.

I believe it’s pretty well established that the merry-go-round of musical political chairs in our state capitol isn’t going to do anything for real political and economic change in Western NY. But the disconnect and vast divide between the people who, in a sense, are a “part of no-part” and the New Political Class is so starkly great that even the likes of Sarah Palin conceptualizes this divide between local interests and what she recently coined as the “party of government.” In her own down-home style Palin names the preponderance of political, economic and bureaucratic forces that have crystallized in the formation of a New Political Class that serves to systematically facilitate the centralist regime that looks out for the interests of mega-capital and the mega-corporations that keep the profits flowing to the top 1% or so of the “people.” But this class analysis applies as much to the politicos of Albany as it does the political professionals of Washington, D.C.

It is the people who are a “part of no-part”-- especially not a part of that sector of the population represented by Palin’s concept of the “party of government” -- who manifest the populist discontent of the country. However just as Perot was not to be trusted in ’92 and ’96, so also Palin is not to be trusted since her interests are also not genuinely populist. She is a New Class wannabee manipulating every imaginable constituency in her bid to be the first woman President of the United States. So her sword also clearly cuts in more than one direction.

While the local state party politicos, especially DelMonte/Thompson, Stachowski and Maziarz fight against or ignore one another, the common issues of restoring our environment, regaining control of our local parks, creating a sustainable economy and expropriating our rights to water power go essentially unaddressed. Although efforts such as Dennis Gabryszak’s to return profits from unused power sold on the open market back to the region’s Economic Development Fund is a move in the right direction I wouldn’t hold my breath that we see that money any time soon, nor that this effort sparks any further consciousness of the political will and self-identity which such demands could ignite.

Until the people and the politicos can think beyond party politics, corporate configurations of the markets and centralist control of local economy and culture, the sword of politics, which seems to be slashing against those interests which continue to rape local economies and civic autonomy, will surely, as history proves, cut hardest against us on the backswing.

Lastly, it should be clear that populism privileges politics over economism and the bureaucratization and corporatization of culture as the source of our redemption and vindication as American communities, that is, as a confederation of communities and regions that still believe in self-maintaining and self-determining localities as the source and sustenance of the autonomous, responsible, not to mention, happy democratic individual. The values and preference that make a people free and strong are not determinable for us by de-localized professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, financiers, social engineering experts, business specialists, technocrats and Ivy League professors. Populism is first and foremost about taking back the political sphere and the public realm of democracy as the lifestream of the civic and spiritual autonomy that embodies and assures any possibility of the good life.

LET THEM EAT WORDS

From “Confronting the Crisis: The Writings of Paul Piccone” [Telos Press, 2008]::

“…..the loss of a traditional grounding [of society] has brought about a veritable Orwellian predicament. Within the context of today’s conformist political theory, modern representative “democracy” can hardly be regarded as democratic anymore; contemporary “federalism’ has nothing to do with federations or the preservation of cultural and political autonomy: the concept of “law” has lost all normative import; degraded to the level of arbitrary and expedient “regulations,” it no longer warrants unquestioned compliance.

Even more recent concepts, such as “the nation” or “the people,” have lost all substantive meaning and have become crude instrumentalizations meant to legitimate the status quo. In the hands of Panglossian ideologists bent on pleasing the powers that be by demonstrating the “universal validity” and therefore the “unquestionable truth” of whatever happens to be the case, these affirmative concepts neutralize and deactivate the normative content they originally embodied.

Thus, “the nation” no longer exhibits any axiological dimensions which designate a particular, self-determining, and geographically circumscribed citizenry sharing a common history and common goals. Similarly, “the people” has ceased to have any specificity or qualifications; it designates only an amorphous mass of physical bodies whose only redeemable attribute is that it can be counted and instrumentalized to legitimate “democratically” whatever mediatized agenda it can be manipulated into supporting.

No wonder, then, that the very notion of “community,” degraded to a positivistic description of “really existing communities,” no longer connotes anything held “in common” other than the fact that some people happen to be in physical contiguity at some particular time.

The reduction of the "people" to an abstract quantifiable mass "democratically" approving or disapproving whatever pre-constituted agenda is placed before them or voting for candidates and parties that operate within a political sphere with no organic roots in active public life is not democracy, but manipulation. ... [T]his kind of [Orwellian] mass democracy often contradicts another fundamental democratic principal: self-determination.

The solution to this [contradiction] rests with a 'federalism' allowing maximum possible autonomy to the constituent elements [communities; regions] whose fundamental units will have to be sufficiently small to permit direct democratic participation. Only within such a context can organic participation in public life define the participants as "a people" determining their own destiny and, in the process, establishing a common identity."