PRETEND POPULISM AT NIAGARA TIMES

I had been arguing for months with Hobbes and the gang over at Niagara Times about the virtues of going beyond party politics. But Hobbes couldn't stand the truth unless he could take credit for it; so he barred me from his blog permanently. Now it seems the light has dawned and we hear him pleading for regional unity to fight downstate exploitation of upstate. Some people are just slow learners. But of course he hasn't really learned and is not to be trusted.

Hobbes whines, "We're said it before, and we'll it again - if you vote for a Dem at the state level, you are voting to send all of the power and money to New York City. Get your collective heads out of your asses people, this is not about parties, it's about Upstate getting our fair share and ending the tyranny bestowed upon us by New York City Dems." (October 15, 2009, "States Senate Dems Continue to Spend Recklessly") [Typos are Hobbes' mistakes.]

Well, the truth is that it is and is not about parties. It's about party destruction of the public sphere and civic life. Now that the Democratic party seems to the Republicans to be becoming a political juggernaut in NYS, Hobbes appeals to regionalism if not the populism which, in unusually degraded form, is manifesting across the county. However, his regionalism/populism will last only as long as the Democrats are in power and will stop as soon as the Republicans take control.

Hobbes is an oligarch at heart. Like most Republicans all he can think of politically is reduction of taxes, de-regulation and powermongering for his party. It takes more than random and opportunistic appeals to the people to be taken seriously with respect to transcending party politics. Such meaningful action would require real political thought and diplomacy. Instead he chooses for the most part to moralize and rant about the inanities of local politicos who continue to fail to pull our county and region out of the polluted backwater gutter that it is.

When the Niagara County Communities Comprehensive Plan initiative was getting under way over a year or so ago, Hobbes was stumbling over himself to oppose the project. Even though the lead consulting firm itself said that it would be a major achievement for Niagara County if nothing more than a county wide dialogue was started as a result. The likes of Hobbes, however, does not want dialogue any more than he wants regional empowerment or a sustainable economy. The New Class business bureaucracy that the Niagara County Republicans imagine themselves to be are elitist, chauvinistic technocrats who will not give up their superiority complex any time soon.

Although there are signs that the Republican dominated Legislature might get the value of regionalism particularly in their lawsuit against NYPA, the downside is that they can't see past the limits of such legalistic reductions of political issues to the courtroom. The Republicans see the enemy but then choose to fight the battle on their turf and their terms. What this means is that they have no intention of politicizing NYPA's rape of WNY power profits.

They want to re-appropriate the monies swept to the Albany coffers but they don't want to expropriate the power that enables such bald exploitation of our regional community to continue.

So at present regional Republicanism is the mouse that roared. The lion they could be is not likely to show up because they can't draw the necessary but painful political conclusions. Like their Hobbes-ian mouthpiece the Niagara politicos remain blinded by the impotent but toxic institution of party dominated parliamentarism in NYS. Like their Washingtonian counterparts the local politicos are part of the tail that wags the dog. It's just that at present they don't get to do the wagging. And they don't like it. So they choose to, believe it or not, appeal to the populist sentiments of the people.

Nice try Hobbes. But it's all too easy to smell the hypocrisy and the anti-democratic demagoguery waiting in the wings.

The populist protest in America today, grotesque as it is, is a symptom trying to understand the disease. As the country moves slowly but surely toward Plutocracy, the people fail to understand the disease. Until the primacy and sanctity of the communal roots of democratic self-determination is re-awakened, the dismantling of America and Niagara County will continue.

We live in pre-revolutionary times but someone is yet to pull the curtain back on the Wizard.