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A People’s Press Release Service: Please pass this on, share it, tweet it, do whatever you can to expose these frauds. It’s the only way we can neutralize and push back the 1%’s lies.
In this release packet:
- Commentary and propaganda alert by Patrice Greanville
- Video exhibits showing the work of CSNY, backing Andrew Cuomo’s conservative agenda
- Video from Strong Economy for all, denouncing these TV ads
- Excerpts from The Daily News and The New York Times
Andrew Cuomo (Photo: Pat Arnow)
By Patrice Greanville, TGP
The bankruptcy of the Democratic party brand is eloquently demonstrated by the career and current course of Andrew Cuomo, New York State’s Governor. Part of a latter-day generation of Republican-lite Democrats, whose pro-business policies are often indistinguishable in substance from Republican colleagues, Cuomo is currently ubiquitously supported by an astroturf coalition of business groups going by the name of Committee to Save New York (CSNY, aka “Let’s Fix Albany Coalition”). Despite the usual misleading publirelationese moniker, the evidence that Cuomo is playing for the plutocracy is writ large. It literally pours out of many channels.
Headlined The Daily News, a pro-business newspaper based in Manhattan which frequently postures as a champion of the “littlke guy”:
The Committee to Save New York spent $12 million to lobby Gov. Cuomo’s agenda
Report finds the amount to lobby Albany last year was highest in the state
ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo had the biggest-spending special interest group on his side last year.
The Committee to Save New York — a collection of business and labor leaders formed to support Gov. Cuomo’s legislative agenda — spent $11.9 million to lobby Albany last year, the highest in the state, a Joint Committee on Public Ethics report found.
Cuomo has repeatedly complained about the impact special interest groups — especially public employee unions — have on Albany lawmakers.
“The Committee to Save New York was clearly in response to the money coming in from the traditional special interest groups,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union. “It was trying to add another voice but in doing so it became another special interest group.”
Committee spokesman Mike McKeon defended the spending.
“This demonstrates our ongoing commitment to fight for reforms in Albany and to ensure the progress continues,” McKeon said in a statement.
The committee’s spending was part of a record $220 million spent on lobbying in 2011. The previous record was $213 million set in 2010.
(See also in the addenda the New York Times’ coverage of the same news.)
It should be noted that while The Daily News dispatch gives some details about this issue, it does so in the usual Orwellian fashion utilized by US media, now so routine as to provoke infrequent complaints. As can be seen above, this approach deliberately confuses the issues and the players to such an extent as to be well nigh useless to the public. Thus the “fight for reform” in this framing is actually the shady maneuvering to preserve a rotten status quo or make it worse, if possible. As well, labor is obliquely alluded to as some sort of insidious —if not sinister— and mysteriously powerful “special interest group”, an outright lie since business easily outguns labor in spending and political power. Furthermore, the objective interests of working people, by far the overwhelming segment in any society, can’t be at loggerheads with the wishes and health of society at large. It’s for that reason that, despite occasional flaws flowing from cases of corrupt business unionism, by and large labor demands usually reflect the public interest.
Summation
A DLC/Clinton Democrat brandishing the kind of demagoguery that speaks and sounds cautiously progressive while implementing outright conservative policies—a template shared by Jerry Brown in California, among others— Cuomo’s recent career (1) in many ways resembles Obama’s and is equally untrustworthy. It’s clear the man’s ambitions run high, as the Cuomos evidently position themselves to become a mini-dynasty ready to fill the Kennedys’ spot in the Democrats’ pantheon of power players.
Caveat emptor!
—Patrice Greanville is editor in chief of The Greanville Post.
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Below: YouTube spot denouncing the pro-Cuomo campaign
Examples of the CSNY campaign’s videos can be found at the bottom of this article, in the Addenda.
A subnote on Propaganda Syntax
Be alert to the way the CSNY campaign frames the issues. The use of words and phrases like, “real reform,” “grow business, cut waste,” are sure giveaways as to the actual forces behind any campaign. The idea of “trimming down the bloated government,” “giving business tax credits for job creation,” and “cutting waste” are old conservative memes developed by the Right’s many think tanks and perfected by experts in manipulation like Frank Luntz.
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(1) Andrew Cuomo was appointed to the Department of Housing and Urban Development as Assistant Secretary in 1993, a member of President Bill Clinton’s administration.[6] After the departure of Secretary Henry Cisneros at the end of Clinton’s first term under the cloud of an FBI investigation,[7] Cuomo succeeded him as HUD Secretary in January 1997 after being unanimously confirmed by the Senate, serving until 2001 when Clinton’s administration ended.
ADDENDA
Addendum #1: Examples of videos pushing the CSNY agenda with Cuomo as the main shill
Judge for yourself
Addendum #2
The Times highlights big spenders like Committee to Save NY
John Eligon of The New York Times reports:
ALBANY — Highlighting a shift in the way money is spent to influence government, the group that spent the most on lobbying in New York last year was a coalition of business leaders allied with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, according to a report released on Tuesday by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics.
The group, the Committee to Save New York, spent nearly $12 million on lobbying last year, almost twice as much as the next biggest spender, a coalition financed by a health workers union, 1199 S.E.I.U., and the Greater New York Hospital Association.
“It’s definitely a big change from what we’ve seen in years past,” said Bill Mahoney, the research coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group. “Historically, the groups that spent the most in any given year were working in opposition to the governor’s proposals. This year, many of the groups in the top 10 actually were working in alliance with the governor.”
Over all, a record $220 million was spent on lobbying in New York last year, a $7 million increase from 2010. Lobbying expenses have grown or stayed the same every year but one over the past two decades, according to the report.
“It appears that lobbying is recession-proof,” Ellen N. Biben, the executive director of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, said after releasing the results of the report.
The Committee to Save New York, formed after Mr. Cuomo was elected, is led by three prominent New York City business leaders: Rob Speyer, the president of the real estate firm Tishman Speyer; Kathryn S. Wylde, the president of Partnership for New York City, a business network; and Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York.
The organization, which promotes lower taxes and reduced state spending, has strongly supported Mr. Cuomo.
Mr. Cuomo and the committee have long insisted that they do not coordinate with each other, though the committee has almost uniformly supported the governor’s positions.
The home page of its Web site on Tuesday had a 32-second video clip promoting Mr. Cuomo’s budget, the details of which were agreed upon by legislative leaders that afternoon.
“This demonstrates our ongoing commitment to fight for reforms in Albany, and to ensure the progress continues,” Michael McKeon, a spokesman for the committee, said in a statement about the lobbying report. “The special interests have dominated for so long in Albany, it takes a real effort to bring change and put the people first.”
Stephen Madarasz, a spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association, the largest union of New York State workers, disputed the committee’s claim that it fought for the people. “We refer to it as the Committee to Scam New York,” he said, adding that he believed the committee was clearly an “arm of the governor’s political supporters, made up of the 1 percent.”
Michael Kink, executive director of the Strong Economy for All Coalition, which is made up of labor unions and community organizations, said business interests had not always prevailed. He cited the creation last year of a new tax bracket for the state’s highest earners.
“That was an interesting illustration of money power versus people power,” Mr. Kink said.
Some interests that spent substantial sums on lobbying have been at odds with Mr. Cuomo on some issues but supported him on others. Labor unions, traditionally among the biggest spenders in Albany, lost battles with the governor over pension reductions and wage concessions, but allied with him in other areas. The health workers union, 1199, for example, was represented alongside the hospital association on Mr. Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team last year.
“A part of it has just been the governor’s ability to get many of the state’s top special interests on the same page as him,” Mr. Mahoney said.
Article source: The New York Times.
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