So all the while that New York governor Andrew Cuomo gives daily coronavirus press conferences in front of media and National Guard members at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which is being turned into a hospital to help fight coronavirus cases he’s also looking to turn down aid in the bill that just passed, and signed by President Trump because he would much rather take the money from our Medicaid.
Yes folks while Cuomo wants to convince you he is the calm, competent leader you need, and want during this outbreak. Something that he’s been able to sell very effectively but like his crazy brother Fredo Cuomo not everything he says should be seen as heroic, and or for our best interest. So while his behavior has been effective, so effective in fact you might miss that even in a pandemic, Cuomo is fighting to protect the rich and impose austerity, including devastating Medicaid cuts, on everyone else at the cost of $6.7 billion in emergency federal aid… Make no mistake folks even in a crisis, Andrew Cuomo is not your friend.
This clown in New York said, and I quote “I try to present unbiased facts. I try to present numbers because people need information. When you get anxious, when you get fearful, when you don’t get the information or you doubt the information, or you think people do not know what they are talking about, or you think you are getting lied to … so I present facts.”
The message is clear. #PresidentCuomo, as a trending hashtag dubbed him, will give you the real facts where President Trump gives ‘alternative” ones; is even-keeled and trustworthy where Trump is mercurial and self-interested; knows what he’s talking about where Trump spouts misinformation and lies.
It’s an effective public relations campaign one so effective that even some of his biggest detractors have almost forget that this is Andrew Cuomo we’re talking about. I mean really he is a clown. Check out this video from The Jimmy Dore Show. He lays it all out perfectly.
Jacobinmag is reporting the following…
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Governor 1 percent never fails to live up to his moniker, even in a pandemic. What makes these cuts a new low even for him, though, is that he indicates he’ll go forward with them even at the cost of the $6.7 billion in federal aid.
On March 18, Senator Chuck Schumer issued a triumphant press release claiming credit for the delivery of more than $6 billion of federal emergency funding to his home state, more than any other state. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) he helped negotiate included a provision that increased the federal government’s contribution to Medicaid expenditures by 6.2 percent. New York usually contributed half of the cost but now only had to pay 43.8 percent, saving it $6.7 billion.
You’d think Cuomo, who has repeatedly blasted the federal government for not directing enough coronavirus relief money to New York, would eagerly claim the aid. But the FFCRA included a provision to prevent states from using the extra money to simply offset their own Medicaid expenditures. The aid comes on the condition that New York not cut Medicaid — exactly what Cuomo is so determined to do.
And so at his first press conference, Governor Cuomo told millions of viewers that “because of a technical issue [in] the way the bill was written, New York State does not qualify for aid. That’s over $6 billion; that is a lot of money. And we need the federal delegation to fix that bill, otherwise New York State gets nothing.”
This was and remains a bald-faced lie. The supposed “technical issue” Cuomo referred to was in fact a deliberate provision to prevent state Medicaid cuts. New York does qualify for the money; all it would take to receive it would be to withdraw the MRT’s proposed cuts from the March 31 budget.
And yet Cuomo indicated that he was unwilling to do so, continuing to emphasize the need for Medicaid “reform” in the following days, insisting on Thursday that “they never fixed that [Families First] bill” and ominously warning that “everyone is going to have to deal with the reality, I can’t protect them from the reality.”
Today, he seemed to think emphatically repeating the lie would make it true: “The federal government gave us zero, nada, niente, zilch,” he declared, leaving him no option but “to dramatically cut our state expenses” because “this is math: you can’t spend that which you don’t have.”
He left unmentioned the possibility of raising taxes on the wealthy to meet the shortfall, treating it as a given that New York’s sick and schoolchildren would shoulder the burden of the pandemic rather than its billionaires and bankers. And he willfully ignored the $6.7 billion of emergency federal aid, knowing that to acknowledge and accept it would require holding off on his prized Medicaid cuts.
Take a minute to appreciate just how cruel the course is that Cuomo’s taking. It would mean ramming through $2.5 billion in cuts to the health care system that millions of the hardest-hit New Yorkers are relying on to get them through the world’s worst health care crisis in a century, while simultaneously depriving the same system of nearly $7 billion in federal aid. Even if he ultimately caves to pressure from advocates and legislators to postpone the Medicaid cuts and take the federal money, the fact that he was prepared to go this route — and that he’ll likely make deep cuts to education spending regardless — should open the eyes of even his most smitten admirers.
Activists in New York have our task set out for us. We must pressure Cuomo to accept the emergency federal Medicaid funding. We must demand that he make billionaires pay in the March 31 budget rather than cutting Medicaid, schools, or other critical services. We must redouble our efforts to pass the single-payer New York Health Act, replacing the profit-driven health care system exacerbating every aspect of the coronavirus crisis.
And we must remind a nation yearning for a strong, capable, trustworthy leader that when the cameras stop rolling, Andrew Cuomo is not on our side.
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