Against bipartisan looting

I can’t imagine who exactly watches things like the Republican presidential debate that seeped onto television last night from Las Vegas, but it’s curious that while that bizarre celebration of adolescent arrested development was happening, the Occupy Wall Street folks were hooting and catcalling—at a Democratic governor.

Naomi Wolf’s arrest outside snatched the headlines away from Andrew Cuomo’s award ceremony—sponsored by the Huffington Post, no less—and shifted the focus to the New York governor’s refusal to extend the extra income tax on millionaires that the state desperately needs. Cuomo ranks as a pretty good governor in the sorry crop of 50, but Huffpost badly misread the zeitgeist to focus on his admirable role in legalizing same-sex marriage and miss the fact that he’s asking for sacrifices from everyone but the 1%.

The state of New York is in trouble financially, surprise, surprise. State workers are being pressured for concessions with the sword of 3,500 job cuts hanging over their heads if they refuse. State university tuition is getting bumped up every year and will cross the $5000-mark soon. And on and on—nearly every state in the country is frantically looking for revenue, but the one with the largest crop of filthy rich, led by a ‘liberal’ Democrat, refuses not to impose a new tax but merely to extend an existing one.

Not only that but Cuomo had the bad taste to compare his stance with dad Mario’s Catholic-based opposition to the death penalty because in both cases polls showed people disagreed with the governor’s position.

So pandering to millionaires is now a point of quasi-religious dogma? Please, don’t answer that because I fear the reply. But it does tell us how far the remote and clueless Democratic establishment is from co-opting the OWS movement. Obama, Cuomo & gang seem to think OWS is a mere Democratic parallel to the Tea Party movement that helped Republicans in 2010, a wave they can ride in a similar fashion. The only parallel here is the universe they’re living in.

That ‘new person smell’ indeed.