Eric Alterman: Governor Cuomo Is Still Governor One Percent

[marmar]

from The Nation:



Governor Cuomo Is Still Governor One Percent

Eric Alterman
December 21, 2011


As 2011 slips into history, it appears a safe bet that despite tough competition, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has walked away with this year’s coveted award for “stupidest and most offensive analogy made by a non-Republican candidate or a journalist not covering said candidate.” Asked why, when he was being forced to lay off thousands of city and state workers, cut the pensions of countless others, and reduce aid to mass transit and education, he insisted on fighting tooth and nail to kill the so-called millionaire’s tax on the state’s highest earners—a tax, by the way, that would have ensured an additional $4 billion for such needs, and that was favored by 72 percent of respondents in an October poll—Cuomo replied, “The fact that everybody wants it, that doesn’t mean all that much.” Cuomo then recalled that his father, Mario Cuomo, famously opposed the death penalty despite strong majority support. “Reporters would say, ‘Well, people want it,’” Cuomo added. “And the point was, you know, we don’t elect—you can’t just have as a governor a big poll-taking machine, right?” So Andrew Cuomo’s willingness to thwart the will of the majority and stick a thumb in the eye of his own party on behalf of the interests of multimillionaires and billionaires—literally, the “1 percent”—is somehow analogous to the lonely, brave and extremely costly political stand his father took on behalf of condemned prisoners on death row.

Such myopic self-regard should have sunk Cuomo with liberals and progressives, but to the contrary, all appears hunky-dory in these precincts. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that many liberals have jettisoned the politics of economic equality and prefer to focus on the far less expensive practice of lifestyle liberalism. Andrew Cuomo was the hero of the gay marriage struggle this past summer and hence is beloved in Hollywood and at the Huffington Post. But no less important has been his ability to conduct a mind-meld operation with many in the MSM to communicate the nonsensical message that, while the governor may insist, on principle, on killing the special surtax, he did not oppose forcing the well-off to pay their fair share to meet the state’s burgeoning obligations.

In early December, Cuomo persuaded New York’s famously dysfunctional state legislature to pass a new tax plan, which somehow managed to confuse the media sufficiently to satisfy his 
1 percent funders and progressive backers simultaneously. Cuomo was immediately lauded as potential presidential timber for this accomplishment. As a New York Observer report explained, “The plan was hailed as a political masterstroke. The millionaire’s tax will be allowed to expire, as Mr. Cuomo had promised. Almost everyone’s taxes will be cut.” Headlines concurred: “New York to raise taxes on the rich,” explained the Christian Science Monitor. “Albany Tax Deal to Raise Rate for Highest Earners,” added the New York Times. Its reporter Thomas Kaplan went so far as to name “Democrats, Labor Unions and Occupy Wall Street Protesters,” together with other “advocates for extending the state’s so-called millionaires’ tax,” as the winners in the struggle. And Newsweek’s “Conventional Wisdom” column cheered him on above the caption: “N.Y. gov wows ‘em again with proposed tax on wealthy.”

As if… ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/165305/governor-cuomo-still-governor-one-percent

[One of the 99]

1. As a New Yorker

I have been deeply disappointed in Cuomo as governor.

[prepperdad]

2. Agreed!

Same here. He has done nothing good for the state so far.


[url]http://www.survivingeconomiccollapse.net/[/url]

[One of the 99]

3. I'll also add

that the financial meltdown happened when he was AG of New York and he did not launch a single investigation.

I also wonder who are these people running those 'he saved New York' ads for him on TV.