Creating a New State Out of Western New York

What Western New York needs to do is secede from New York State. Any political leader that deserves the name of politician in this region is the one who will begin to mobilize the forces and marshall the energy and respect to carrying out such a project. What we have now are mere functionaries lacking the necessary combination of political leadership, vision, authority and creativity.

Given that Albany continues to expropriate the wealth of resources and revenues from Western New York without anything of essentially significant value for our recovery returned, any obligation we continue to have to Albany has apparently long since ended. Albany has legal authority but no real political legitimacy.

Also, given that the Federal Government and the nation benefited from the contribution of this region to the WWII war effort but fails to clean up the mess that was left over, our obligation and loyalty to any claim to control over us that they may believe they have is also ended. They also have no legitimacy caught essentially between meeting the coercive demands of the extra-national corporations while struggling to placate the masses and rationalize the validity of Washington’s pseudo-policies and absolute lack of any sense of American identity or purpose let alone vision.

Western New York has been written off as a lost cause for the much too foreseeable future. We receive lip service and serve well only in prostituting ourselves to Albany, New York City and the Federal Government.

Given that this region is rich in water as such, natural beauty of the Falls, river, gorge, lakes, historical value, cultural riches, universities, winter attractions unlimited and endless artistic and architectural merit, it is time that we recognize the grounds of our uniqueness, potential autonomy and capacity for local self-determination. By comparison, we may with some little thought wonder why it is that Saudi Arabi and Venezula, rich in oil have the lowest oil prices in the world for their people but Western New York, rich in water-generated electrical power, has some of the highest electrical costs in the nation for its own people. Why are we getting ripped off? Because we are letting ourselves be ripped off.

The state of New Niagara has every capability of not just being one of the world’s greatest tourist destinations but THE world tourist destination. Why continue to let ourselves be exploited as has been the local tradition and why let ourselves be at the mercy of real estate speculators buying up property while they wait around for prices to go up. If state authorities such as the liquor authority cannot pass rulings that facilitate the success of our wine industry, then the new state of New Niagara could create such policies.

The Niagara corridor between Buffalo and Niagara Falls is the heart of a new state which could however be joined by all of the state minus New York City and whomever may choose to go with them. But with the western corridor recreated as a new state, northern New Niagara could be a summer paradise and southern New Niagara could be a winter paradise, not that it isn’t equally attractive in the summer. Possibly only the western corridor and the Finger Lakes would be the limit of such a State. I don’t know. But this is what needs to be discussed and considered.

The Indian “nations” also have to realize that they must now be part of a regional strategy and give up the illusion that they are actually a nation. It is probably only a matter of time that they will lose such autonomy as it is to New York State when financial push finally comes to fiscal shove. They need to join in a neo-populist con-federation of communities that must realize that they either will re-create their identity and image or they will continue to be an afterthought of the NY state and the Federal governments.

These governments do not represent what we should be and they can not claim to have had the authority to sell out Niagara Falls to the so-called Indian “nation” to appease the ethnic Indians in their untenable jurisdictional relation. Such past arrangements cannot change the past and only serve to shackle real regional development in the future. Casinos are a good gig but merely serve the purpose of extracting capital from the region without considering the well-being of the region as a unifed whole upon which their very survival in the long-run depends. If in fact the Indian nation believes it can extract wealth without helping to secure the sovereignty upon which the regions survival depends, then they must be judged as exploitative as the other two aforementioned governments.

The leaders of Western New York need to stop playing petty pretend parliamentary politics, passing out what crumbs they can manage to weasel out of Albany and Washington. They need to call upon the legal, financial, managerial and scientific talent of Western New York and propose talks for the creation of a new regional community as a new state of New Niagara or whatever its name may be.

All real politics really is local politics in the sense sketched above. It’s principal is that of subsidiarity, that is, whatever can be done at home must and should be done at home. This neo-populist and authentically federalist secession could be the beginning of a true federalist reconfiguration of the relations of all local American regions and communities with the central government in Washington. Given that Washington has reached the limits of governmental sanity and has gone far beyond the limits of rational fiscal responsibility, selling out the middle class, conducting irrational neo-imperialist wars, striving for an empire in which all lands would be subdued and transformed in the name of a Liberalist Democracy which we ourselves fail to practice let alone believe in.

Washington has failed to represent, value, reflect or desire in any reasonably expressed way a national unity that imbues local regions with as much consideration as it gives corporations, trading partners and other nations which serve the interests of the networks of corporations and banks that no longer value the history, geography and integrity of local peoples, their traditions, cultures and continuing needs and aspirations. When the communities and localities are no longer treated as ends in themselves but utilities of a “greater good” from which the communities do not benefit, then the center does not hold and new decentralized centers must be created. Only in this way can a new political center be non-violently forced to be recreated as a regulative administrative center as opposed to the constitutive bureaucracy and autocracy that now exists. Washington and Albany are our “capitals,” all right, in the sense that they will “capitalize” on every opportunity to continue to use us to sustain their solvency as a bureaucratic social class, a class-based power as purveyor of the interests of trans-national corporations and as an advanced guard of the military-industrial complex’s interest in empire.

So someone or more true politicians that the region will listen to must step forward and call for a “constitutional” convention of sorts to begin the process of re-constituting, planning and declaring our independence. Otherwise given our situation and status, we are probably doomed to a slow cancer-like loss of vitality and vision, a diamond in the rough treated as a stepping stone for the benefit and advantage of others. If we don’t constitute ourselves as a self-responsible, self-regulating and autonomous State, then we will be constituted and again reconstituted at the whim and in the interest of “foreign” powers perpetrating a vision of us as mere raw material and a kind of “disposable income” for the well-being of “states” in whose essence and abundance we do not seem to share.

Why not?