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Health & Fitness

Rockland's New 2014 Politics

Minor political parties in Rockland were placed on a fast track to extinction in 2013 by the rise of the grass roots movement, Preserve Rockland. Democrats and Republicans combined to replace 'government by payoff' with 'government by principle'.


As in political revolutions, so in paradigm choice—there is no standard higher than the assent of the relevant community - Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book by Thomas S. Kuhn on the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of knowledge particularly as pertaining to the sciences.

Kuhn challenged the view that progress in ideas proceeded gradually and that new concepts evolved slowly and incrementally. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such continuity were interrupted by periods of sharp and revolutionary change during which old beliefs about how the world behaved were radically and abruptly altered by a paradigm shift. New questions were asked of old information which moved people beyond the previous paradigm, changed the rules of the game and abruptly changed everyone's thinking. 

In Rockland County there was a major political paradigm shift that occurred in the latter half of 2013. To understand what the original paradigm was and how it was changed we must first review the political status quo in Rockland County and particularly in Clarkstown in the late summer of 2013 prior to the November elections.

In an article entitled Piggin' and Riggin' I described how in my view the elections in Clarkstown were rigged by back-room insiders to keep political cronies in power and to prevent those who might buck this comfortable situation from running on any of the political election lines. In 2013 there were supposedly five different political parties in Clarkstown but in reality there was just one. 

I nicknamed this entity the 'RLS' party indicating that it was a cabal controlled by 1) Rockland County Republican Party Chairman, Vinny Reda, 2) the Head of the Conservative Party and long term Clarkstown employee, Ed Lettre, and 3) County Legislator and Clarkstown's "Constituent Services" part-time representative, Frank Sparaco.  How this cabal operated can be understood by examining the political line up for the position of Town Supervisor as presented to the voters in November 2013 by the 'background boys' from the 'smoke-filled' rooms ......

a) Supervisor Gromack ran on the Democratic Party line.

b) The Republicans under Reda prevaricated that they couldn't come up with a replacement after their elderly candidate, Ralph Riverso, metaphorically and physically dropped out of the race shortly after his nomination. Brian Moran, a Republican, offered to run on the Republican Party line in Riverso's stead but the party leadership, in this age of cell phones, facebook, and twitter, "could not be reached" to permit Moran access to his party's line. Since Reda is the key member of the RLS party it was no surprise therefore that in November 2013 the Republican line was BLANK. 

The Republicans' 2013 'no-candidate' candidate was a slightly more moral situation than what had happened in 2011 when Republican Ralph Sabatini was offered a patronage job in the County if he would be a 'non-candidate' against Gromack - an offer that Sabatini declined. Sabatini reports that he was subsequently given no support by Reda and that Sparaco metaphorically stabbed him in the back by actively supporting Gromack in the week leading up to the election.

Sabatini subsequently had to face a "disloyalty court" for having attended the fundraiser of a Democratic friend. This raised whispered questions as to why he was being tried when the greater sins committed against him by the two main cabalists were going unpunished in a similar "disloyalty trial". The answer became clear - the only courage in the Republican laity when it comes to confronting its bad leadership is that of the "Dutch" kind. 

c) The Conservative party is controlled by Ed Lettre who has a $170,000+ job in the Town. His power was such that on his command alone he could order the whole of the Town Board, including the Town Attorney, to attend a meeting reportedly to organize ways in which he could remain in control of the Conservatives. Since Lettre is a member of the RLS party it was no surprise therefore that the Conservative Line was given to Gromack. 

d) For Clarkstown's 'independent' voters, who believed that the Independence Party was an "independent" party, their belief was demolished when Phil Reisman wrote an article in the Journal News declaring that the "Independence" party was nothing more than a legal racket which trades its party line for patronage jobs.  In Clarkstown the Independence Party is reportedly controlled by County Legislator, Frank Sparaco, through his high school friend, John Perrotta, both of whom have referred to their political opponents on Facebook as "punks". Sparaco with Supervisor Gromack's vote approving his position, was given a 25 hour patronage job for $75,000. With his 'membership' in the RLS party the Independence line was given to Gromack. 

e) Finally, we have the ultra-left Working Families Party which also gave its line to Gromack. According to Sparaco's 2013 testimony in a NY State Supreme Court, this party had such a critical deficit of leadership that it needed to have new members recruited into the party by the right-wing Republican, Sparaco. The Working Families party ended 2013 under the magnanimous wing of the RLS party.

That was the situation in 2013 until Preserve Rockland entered the scene collecting signatures on a Clarkstown grass-roots line to offer Clarkstown voters a clear choice in County and Town elections and to prevent the behaviors being witnessed in Clarkstown from being directed against Ed Day in his run for County Executive. The citizens of Rockland and particularly those in Ramapo and Clarkstown had had enough. And so a paradigm shift began to occur - nearly 3,000 signatures were collected - a new grass-roots political movement emerged which in a single stroke demonstrated that the wine being offered from the silver chalices of the cabalists was contaminated.

Michael Bongiorno writing in the January 1, 2014 issue of the weekly newspaper Our Town described the demise of the minor political parties in Rockland County in 2013 that followed the rise of Preserve Rockland that carried Ed Day to victory in a watershed election. Preserve Rockland originated with the Preserve Ramapo group and is now established in both Clarkstown and Ramapo under the overall Preserve Rockland banner. 

Bongiorno's analysis shows that he recognized the change that occurred in 2013 was a classic paradigm shift. From his past experience he was acutely aware of the political rigging that goes on with the cross-endorsement system where one party takes a member of another party, usually one of the two main parties, to be their candidate usually in exchange for some patronage appointment or other consideration. Bongiorno had worked for 30 years as a prosecutor, serving 14 years as a trial attorney and supervisor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, 12 years as the elected District Attorney for Rockland County and 4 years as a senior counsel with the New York State Attorney General’s Organized Crime Task Force. 

Bongiorno wrote ......

The 2013 election of Ed Day as Rockland’s new county executive ran counter to conventional political wisdom and sets the stage for an interesting 2014. You see, the established political parties and powers believed it was virtually impossible for a Republican to win a countywide election without the support of either the Conservative or Independence parties (or both). One can visualize all the Democratic and perhaps some apostate Republican political hacks huddling behind closed doors to divvy up all those anticipated county job openings!

Actually one does not need to visualize the political hacks scheming behind closed doors. They were doing just that as they tried every trick in the book to prevent the signatures collected from nearly 3,000 voters being validated to set up the Preserve Rockland lines. One ploy raised by the "apostate hacks" was a technicality that the petition pages were not properly numbered. One of the "political hacks" went so far at to joke on Facebook about how Preserve Rockland supporters "couldn't count" proving the old adage that a "political hack" shouldn't count his chickens before they hatch. That insult to 3,000 voters has been recorded for him to defend next time he runs for re-election. 

On September 11, 2013, New York State Supreme Court Justice Gerald E. Loehr rendered a decision that validated both the Preserve Rockland - Clarkstown independent line as well as the Preserve Rockland - Ed Day independent line. This was the day on which a major paradigm shift occurred in Rockland County's moribund politics.
Day prevailed, riding a crest of public frustration over Rockland County’s dire financial situation, government incompetence, declining quality of life and all-too-common corruption. Best of all, he did it with little traditional political support, making him an independent operator who owes nothing to established politicos. That means his obligation is to work in the public interest.
Day is indeed beholden to no one. Senior leaders of his own party made deals with other candidates in the expectation that Day could not win and they could feather their personal nests with a victory by one of his opponents. The minority party leaders horse-traded their lines in an attempt to undercut him as Sabatini had been undercut in his run for Clarkstown Town Supervisor in 2011. The Conservative party even ran a sham candidate in an unsuccessful attempt to strip Day of votes by placing a talking head on their line. (Shamefully, the individual admitted his sham role to the Journal News)

But the politics of cronyism coming from unprincipled occupants of the proverbial "smoke-filled rooms" failed. As many of them looked on during Day's inauguration on New Year's Day, the man who was elected free of all of their encumbrances gave a speech that spoke not to them but simply, clearly, and directly to the grass-roots citizens of Rockland County.
Bongiorno continued ...

The watershed 2013 election has ushered in a new era in Rockland politics where old political distinctions– Republican versus Democrat or Conservative versus Liberal–have become increasingly irrelevant. The prevailing split now is the old politics of patronage, nepotism, cronyism, excessive taxing and wasteful spending versus the reform movement to reduce taxes and run an effective, fair government that preserves Rockland’s quality of life

Day’s election was a critical first step on the road to fiscal sanity, but he needs help from the citizenry. In 2015 the entire legislature is up for re-election, and the voters will do well to replace as many long-term incumbents as possible.  While I am a Republican, that does not mean electing just Republicans. Given the new political paradigm and Rockland’s demographics, there is a need to elect reform-minded Democrats and independents, especially in Ramapo and Haverstraw.

Bongiorno's observation of the need to clean out the entire legislature in 2015 is a suggestion worthy of attention. In 2015 every one of the 17 county legislators has to seek re-election. For the next two years we will be following how each of them vote, but more importantly how they work, in this period to help Ed Day put in place the reforms that you elected him to make. If you are interested in following the ongoing political developments, I invite you to follow Clarkstown: What They Don't Want You To Know and the Preserve Rockland facebook pages where we will keep you informed of the issues that are on the front burner each month in both the County and the Town governments and how each legislator and each councilman is acting to support or oppose needed change. Elected officials must know that their behavior is being publicly scrutinized and that past behaviors which have resulted in Rockland County becoming bloated with over 100 patronage appointments and millions of dollars in bonded debt and deficit spending must stop.
As James Madison wrote in 1822...... 

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.
 Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Michael N. Hull is a retired senior citizen who writes opinion pieces on local political issues. He is a Director of Clarkstown Residents Opposing Patronage with Tom Nimick and Ralph Sabatini. Hull contributes periodically to the Facebook page Clarkstown: What They Don't Want You To Know

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