New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo has emerged as a national spokesperson for a rational response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But deeds matter more than demeanor. As governor, he gutted the healthcare system and delayed his response to the pandemic. His leadership has led to more deaths in New York than any other state. This was preventable and foreseeable.
But the Wall Street finance capitalists, the imperialist corporations that have a world empire to defend, don’t care about workers’ lives. They care about building an all-class patriotic unity to confront China and other rivals. Cuomo, and politicians like him, are building a liberal nationalist unity that will serve the imperialist wing of the ruling class in the coming wars. When it comes to defending their worldwide imperialist empire the Big Fascist liberal rulers don’t trust a chaotic, self-serving Trump. They prefer someone like Cuomo. Cuomo's burgeoning national popularity is a sneak preview of how the bosses' finance capital main wing will position itself after the Trump disaster to regain control of the state and impose fascism and war on the working class.
But lying politicians promoting this liberal fascism are not the solution. It’s the healthcare workers, transit, Amazon, service, delivery, and many others who have gone all out during this crisis. We need a system where these workers run society, not for the capitalists’ profits but for the needs of the world’s working class. That’s communism. That means a revolution where the billionaires and their puppet politicians like Cuomo are out and the working class rules the world.
Response to pandemic: racist and late
On March 1 a woman was the first in New York City to test positive for Covid-19, having recently arrived from Iran. The next day Cuomo promised to track everyone from the woman’s flight. It did not happen. The next day a suburban lawyer who worked in Manhattan tested positive. State officials focused their efforts on the suburb, not New York City. Not only was that not very smart, as Cuomo likes to portray himself, it was racist. The focus was on a mainly white enclave, not a mainly Black and Latin city.
“Dr. Frieden [former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent” (NYT, 4/8).
Stay-at-home orders were also late in New York State. Cuomo is owned by real estate and construction billionaires and even declared construction workers “essential” until forced to retreat. On March 19, Gavin Newsome issued a statewide shelter-in-place order, though California had only a small fraction of the confirmed cases in New York.
Cuomo said, “We’re fighting the virus and we’re fighting fear and panic. The fear and panic is, if anything, worse than the virus” (The Today Show, 3/19). Maybe he was talking about the fear and panic of his developer buddies who were terrified about losing profits.
After initially dismissing Mayor Bill De Blasio's call for a shelter-in-place for NYC, Cuomo ordered a statewide lockdown on the evening of March 22. At a time when the number of Covid-19 cases was doubling every two days or so, a delay of three or six days translates to thousands of unnecessary deaths for the sake of capitalist profit.
Pre-pandemic: racist cuts
In January 2011 Cuomo started as governor making racist cuts to Medicaid and school aid and used his political skills to protect the wealth of his billionaire donors. During the last 20 years New York State has lost 20,000 hospital beds. Cuomo was governor almost half that time. He personally helped negotiate the closing of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn and its sale to a real estate developer. He also held back court ordered money to inner city schools that was to reverse some of the racist inequality in state school funding. He also cut funding to localities forcing cuts in health care, housing and education (Gotham Gazette, 1/16).
Meanwhile Cuomo has eliminated a bank tax, has cut taxes on yachts, private jets and mansions and stopped a proposed tax on non-primary apartments (public-accountability.org, 12-4-2019). Now New York faces a total racist collapse of its healthcare system. Desperately ill workers are being turned away from hospitals, many are dying in their homes, and hundreds are being buried “unclaimed” in mass graves in Potter’s field. It’s criminal, racist murder.
More racist attacks on workers
During the crisis, he proposed more cuts to Medicaid. He was criticized, as this would cost the state $6.7 billion in federal aid. He didn’t back down. He just delayed the cuts of $2.5 billion, including $400 million to hospitals. And he conveniently forgot about rent reform, which many workers fought for.
But he did remember to undo aspects of recently passed bail reform. This would have “allowed people accused of crimes to keep their jobs… instead of suffering in jail … the most dangerous place in America as far as the coronavirus is concerned.
On Wednesday… almost 180 people incarcerated at Rikers and 141 corrections staff were infected with the coronavirus” (Slate , 4/1). Cuomo’s proposal would allow judges to revoke bail even for misdemeanor.
The cop leaders were happy. It was probable that incarceration would increase, adding to the jail population and increasing the spread of Covid-19.    
Tax breaks for the capitalists
But racist attacks on the working class are only half the story. Then there are massive giveaways to Cuomo’s billionaire friends. One such friend is James Dolan, owner of Madison Square Garden and a big Cuomo donor. MSG has not paid taxes for 37 years. Cuomo has blocked all attempts to stop this giveaway (gothamist.com, 1-22). “New York Gives Corporations More in Tax Breaks Than Any Other State” reads a headline (Gothamist, 4/10/2017). The latest scam was the attempted tax exemption for Amazon and billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. More jobs were promised, but the research says that’s false. Corporations reap billions, taxpayers pay, and no extra jobs are created (NY Post, 1/8). That’s how capitalism works. The government serves the capitalist class and either scams the working class with lying politicians or attacks the working class with racist cops. It’s not an accident that of the New York billionaires that made the Forbes Top 400 list over half are donors to Cuomo’s campaigns (public-accountability.org, 12/4/2019).
So it goes in the capitalist USA. If you want a better world, don’t rely on politicians. Join the Progressive Labor Party and fight for an egalitarian communist world run by and for the working class.