 Where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to…
In the past few months, Buffalo and the Erie County government that it resides in have been going through a fiscal crisis. In simple terms its collapsing statist style while trying to find as many "revenue streams" as it can to stay alive.
This has prompted much anger from the taxpayers of this area, more than I have ever seen in the entire time that I have lived here in Buffalo. So much so that it is causing a political upheaval that has resulted in the formation of a number of small community based political groups.
www.FreeBuffalo.org
This organization founded by James Ostrowski a libertarian of Rothbardish leanings. Its goals have become to set up an independent think take to handle local buffalo issues in a libertarian fashion. Their goals at this point seem based entirely in their nine point philosophy the simplistic version of which calls for the complete break down of county government back to basics, police and roads. With a call for funding everything without use of taxes.
They have 300 members in their forum and have so far had the most successful in person meetings with roughly 300 people in attendance with complete press coverage. Their next scheduled meeting for this coming Saturday is expected to have more because the first meeting had a waiting list of people unable to get into the meeting.
www.primarychallenge.org
This organization founded by Leonard Roberto who I have not spoken with yet. His political leaning can best be described as pragmatic. His organizations concern is for finding people to run against current political leaders in the primary races and with reforming our local board of elections which he blames for enabling the two large parties to hold power in the elections.
They have 420 or so members some of which are in duplicate of the above organization and to my knowledge they have had slightly less success with their meetings with practically no press coverage.
http://rusthompson.com/
Rus Thompson whose website is above there seems to be the only person offering to actually run against the current political leaders at this time.
http://www.wnyprogress.org/
This organization founded and run by Mark Poloncarz and backed closely by Alan Bedenko. This organization has consistent meetings about various topics and recently had a fund raising meeting to boost their coffers. I am not aware of how many members they have nor do I really want to know. This organization is best described as the Statists currently looking for a hand hold to get into local government so they can dictate how to spend the money. On Bedenko’s site they have already begun to attack FreeBuffalo.org and make side comments about me. In his posts I am ‘others’ and he also calls WNY for Progress the non-Objectivist alternative to FreeBuffalo.org .
I am currently the only Objectivist and when left with these choices I have chosen to get into the boat with FreeBuffalo.org despite their poor web skills, they seem to be a good place to start to find people interested in change. A number of people have recently been e-mailing me interested in discussing Objectivism and so between all this, school and work. I have been unable to visit SOLO with the frequency that I would have liked.
I hope everything is going well with everyone.
From the front lines of the war to win men’s minds,
~E.
The Capitalist Radical
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