Cultural Takedown, While Public Health & Corporate Crimes And Real Climate Progress Completely Ignored
“DON’T FRACK NY” Protest (Albany, NY, 8/27/12)
[Update: 8/30/21 – I just read this from Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch and print it verbatim, because it wipes out all the praise I had below for Cuomo on his fracking ban:
+ Under Andrew Cuomo’s leadership, the state of New York remains at only around 5% wind and solar on the power grid largely because Cuomo pushed fracked gas as a “bridge fuel.” As a result, renewable energy sources flatlined and 16 times more gas power plants were built as wind/solar in his decade in power.
[Update: 8/16/21 – I’ve not followed this issue or read the AG’s Report – but the WSWS has and makes the implications clear:
From Joe Biden on down, the Democrats are incapable of acting against a single one of the conspirators in the Trump administration and Congress who organized a coup attempt on January 6 aimed at establishing a dictatorship in the U.S. However, the opportunity to burnish their credentials in the “fight against sexual harassment” and, in the process, divert the public from the resurgence of the pandemic and other social disasters is an opportunity not be passed up. […]
The transfer of power in a palace coup through a degrading scandal drags political life as a whole further to the right, encouraging every reactionary political element. At the same time, the big questions of disease and poverty, the fascist threat, the danger of war, are deliberately pushed into the background and cheap, vicious middle class moralizing and gossip-mongering come to the fore.
The electoral process in the US, on the verge of collapse, is increasingly circumvented by various means–sex scandals, voter suppression, phony recounts, armed attacks and more. Only a break with the two-party system and the building of a mass socialist movement offers a way out of the present impasse.
[Update: 8/14/21 – This is exactly what we called out as enabling “Progressive Neoliberalism” (Jacobin):
Though Cuomo is pretending to be an unsophisticated knucklehead who doesn’t understand that times have changed, he’s long been a savvy exploiter of empty neoliberal feminism. Years ago, he started the Women’s Equality Party (WEP) — which the New York Times described as a “political shell company” — in order to defend himself from primary challenges from progressive women like Zephyr Teachout. ~~~ and update]
[Update: 8/14/21 – one of my favorite historians and writers (and fellow SUNY Binghamton Alum), Paul Street, agrees with me! In an aside note in his must read Aug 13 CounterPunch column, Street wrote:
It’s nice that the sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo has been forced to resign. Let’s hope that his brother Chris (who counseled him to fight and blame “cancel culture”) can be forced off CNN. Still, it’s a shame that Governor Cuomo’s criminal treatment of nursing home residents early in the pandemic and his broader corporate corruption didn’t receive more attention in the drama over his removal. ~~~ end update]
Sorry folks, being on the road and in the national forests sometimes puts one a week or more behind the news. But as a New Yorker, I felt I had to weigh in on this.
NY Governor Andrew Cuomo was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in nursing homes.
He denied responsibility for that, lied about the number of deaths, and covered up the information.
He then provided legal immunity for corporate owners of the same facilities for wrongful deaths, gross negligence, and abuse.
(NJ readers should know that Gov. Murphy and the Democratic legislature provided similar liability relief, and that too has gotten very little media play or howls of protest).
The NY State Attorney General issued a press release and wrote a detailed critical Report about all that.
All these serious crimes and corporate corruption got very little news coverage, especially the corporate liability relief.
In contrast to the neglect of these important stories, the media and political institutions were obsessed with Cuomo’s alleged sexual harassment – and relatively low level sexual harassment at that.
The NY Attorney General issued a press release and wrote a critical Report about that too.
But Gov. Cuomo also was responsible for major accomplishments, including killing proposed fossil pipelines and imposing a moratorium, or ban, on fracking.
These major accomplishments on the most serious issues of our time – just like his corporate crimes and corruption – got very little media attention.
While I never liked Andrew Cuomo (I did like his father, Gov. Mario Cuomo), I think this take down frenzy is absurd. It enables the Democrats and the media to continue the destructive “Progressive Neoliberalism” politics exposed by professor Nancy Fraser.
So sign me up for #Notmetoo.
looks like the guy with the “Never President” sign knew something