I wonder what Cuomo the Elder has to say in private about his son's "balance the budget on the backs of our kids, the elderly, the poor and the middle class" budget."
Anyone remember this Cuomo?
In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation -- Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a "Tale of Two Cities" than it is just a "Shining City on a Hill."
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn't afford to use.
Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President. But I'm afraid not. Because the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how we were warned it would be. President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. "Government can't do everything," we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.
....
We know we can, because we did it for nearly 50 years before 1980. And we can do it again, if we do not forget -- if we do not forget that this entire nation has profited by these progressive principles; that they helped lift up generations to the middle class and higher; that they gave us a chance to work, to go to college, to raise a family, to own a house, to be secure in our old age and, before that, to reach heights that our own parents would not have dared dream of.
That struggle to live with dignity is the real story of the shining city. And it's a story, ladies and gentlemen, that I didn't read in a book, or learn in a classroom. I saw it and lived it, like many of you. I watched a small man with thick calluses on both his hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. And I learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother. They asked only for a chance to work and to make the world better for their children, and they -- they asked to be protected in those moments when they would not be able to protect themselves. This nation and this nation's government did that for them.
Full text of this eloquent and amazing speech on the flip...
Erastus Corning 2nd was elected mayor of Albany, New York eleven times, serving forty-two consecutive years, an unsurpassed tenure in American political history. Even before birth, Corning's destiny as Albany's "mayor for life" was scripted. As pillars of the WASP establishment, Corning men were expected to attend Groton and Yale and assume positions of leadership in industry and politics. One could say that the Corning family was noblesse oblige on steroids: an assumption that with wealth, power and prestige come social responsibilities. Yet the noblesse oblige represented by the Cornings had a dark side as their class established an oligarchy in Albany to preserve their status and power.
In the 1920s, the financial, institutional and industrial strength represented by the Corning dynasty forged an omnipotent alliance led by a salty tongued Irish working class political boss named Dan O'Connell. This unlikely union of the well bred Corning family and the O'Connell clan of Irish saloonkeepers initially bonded through cock fighting! Eratus's father Edwin served as Lt. Governor in the late '20s and collaborated with O'Connell until poor health forced him to step away from politics.
We live in the strongest nation in world history, where ten generations of seekers and strugglers from other lands have enjoyed a success they probably would have been denied in the place they or their forebears came from. We are however still far from being all that we could be for ourselves and for the rest of the world if only we managed our resources and opportunities more wisely.
We need to start a new era of opportunity in America particularly for the middle class and poorer population, going back to the kind of enlightened ideas that spurred our progress in the past by uniting us instead of stalling progress by a return to our first century elitism. The failure to do so has been particularly apparent in the first years of this 21st century. Only seven years ago it appeared that we had the wherewithal to correct major problems and to move boldly up the ladder to a richer, stronger and more inclusive union. When George W. Bush was elected in 2000 we had just completed eight years of economic growth, the four best years in market history, the creation of 22,000,000 new jobs, a balanced budget, a potential $5.4 trillion surplus, an ascendant middle class and a shrinking poor population. All of that progress has been reversed. Job creation is weaker, we have record setting deficits, a growing poor population and a middle class that is sliding backwards…although we do have more millionaires and billionaires than ever.
Given that opening, how could you not go read the rest?
Former Governor Mario Cuomo has posted the first installment of a week long series over at DMIblog today. In his first essay, Governor Cuomo discusses the hollowness of current campaigns, the lack of specificity and how, now more than ever, we need campaigns and candidates who are willing to be bold and candid as they explain their views and ideas. It's a wonderful piece. Here's a taste:
It's hard to recall a time in the modern history of presidential elections when we had before us as many vital issues. That makes it more regrettable that some of the leading candidates for President are avoiding being specific about how they intend to deal with those issues.
The proliferation of candidates, the reluctance of leaders in the polls to engage in meaningful probing debate and the extraordinarily early primary season, threaten to give us another primary campaign of sound bites, elusive responses and negativism with dominant roles being played by polls, the power of money and the unpredictability of situation-altering incidents and co-incidents.
Apparently most of the candidates avoid some of the most vital issues because they are afraid of making a mistake, or advocating a position they believe is correct and important but that might prove problematic politically, like coming out against illegal guns the way Mayor Bloomberg of New York has, or describing precisely how they would cut spending and raise badly needed resources. Instead they take comfort in dealing with the safest political positions and uttering broad and benign generalities about the more controversial questions, leaving them to be dealt with after they win. But if the electorate is not informed as to the proposed solutions before they vote, a victory at the polls will not assure that the winners will be able to do what needs to be done, because the victory will not constitute a mandate to the Congress that could provide the leverage to persuade them to adopt solutions that had been presumably approved by the voters.
There is still plenty of time to have a more substantively effective campaign. We can have real debates with ample time for consideration of the questions and presentation of answers; more in depth interviews conducted by thorough and objective interviewers; more published specific statements by the candidates answering the hard questions like "How will you pay for that program?"
All of these intelligent attempts at illuminating the issues and proposed solutions should replace the make believe debates that give a candidate a minute or so to deal with complex issues, distortive 28-second commercials, fierce personal diatribes and the coyness and the simplistic statements we have seen so often in the past.
Having a campaign that reveals all that voters should know - or at least most of it - would be novel, but we have never needed that kind of campaign more and voters should demand it loudly and insistently.
As Atrios is wont to say, go read the whole thing.
Here's some video highlights I made of Mario Cuomo's keynote address to the Drum Major Institute's conference on NYC's Middle Class yesterday. I'll have more on the conference and more video of other participants including Rep Anthony Weiner, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, NYC Comptroller William Thompson, NYC Finance Director Martha Stark (a total rockstar, btw) and more later today.
(I will be covering this event. - promoted by lipris)
The name of DMI's conference Monday co-sponsored with Baruch College is "The American Dream in the Big Apple: Is New York City still a middle-class town?" I've been spreading the word to people and sometimes the name of the conference gets a knowing chuckle along the lines of: "heh, I wish it was a middle class city" and sometimes people get angry saying "of course NYC isn't a middle class town, how do you not know that!"
Well as people who live and work in NYC I can say that we do know that NYC is basically unaffordable to middle class people and certainly to New Yorkers working their way into the middle class. We know that people earning salaries high enough to buy houses in other parts of the country find themselves unable to afford even rent in the city and making even an upper-middle class salary can leave you qualified for some affordable housing set-asides. As the Brookings Institution report has shown, NYC's middle class is disappearing. The point being made at our conference is that things don't have to be this way, things haven't always been this way and there are things that can be done to make NYC a middle class town again. New ideas on this are exactly what we'll be talking about this Monday at Baruch College.
New York used to be the starting place for people setting out to forge their piece of the American Dream. Whether they moved here from the boondocks or Brazil people came to New York to build families and community and through hard work supported by progressive public policy offering the infrastructure to make it possible they worked their way into the middle class.
The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal and is als an issue of great importance to New York State.
Citizens across the political spectrum are preoccupied by numerous high stakes issues such as Iraq, Afghanistan, corruption, corporatist greed, genocide, global warming and healthcare to name a few. There is also the ongoing rule of an administration subverting the Constitution and undermining our democracy. As a result, some topics of importance have dropped off our radar screens. One subject meriting renewed scrutiny is the prison industrial complex.
The prison industrial complex are entities or organizations that have a stake in construction of correctional facilities, such as prison guard unions, construction companies and vendors specializing in surveillance technology. Just as sectors in the military industrial complex are more concerned with profit than national security, players inside the prison industrial complex are more concerned about making money than actually rehabilitating criminals or reducing crime rates.
