From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The Socialists vs. Andrew Cuomo
Date January 4, 2021 5:30 AM
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[Newly elected DSA members in the New York legislature will work
with grassroots organizers to force the governor to tax the rich. Will
their inside/outside strategy work?] [[link removed]]

THE SOCIALISTS VS. ANDREW CUOMO  
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Liza Featherstone
December 22, 2020
The Nation
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_ Newly elected DSA members in the New York legislature will work
with grassroots organizers to force the governor to tax the rich. Will
their inside/outside strategy work? _

State Senator–elect Jabari Brisport high-fives Tiffany Cabán, a
candidate for New York City Council., Kara McCurdy

 

Two socialists emerged from a flower shop in Astoria, Queens, with a
bouquet of red roses. Jabari Brisport, 33, a newly elected state
senator from Brooklyn, sported a red Democratic Socialists of America
hoodie while Zohran Mamdani, 29, a newly elected assemblyman from
Queens, wore a red-and-black checked Arsenal jersey—an item he’d
just purchased and later characterized as “this ridiculous shirt”
yet was plainly excited to show off. NYC-DSA endorsed both this year,
and the pair spent the overcast November weekend surprising each of
the organization’s freshly endorsed City Council candidates at home
with a rose. (The color red has represented socialism and communism at
least since the 1840s, while the red rose, now the symbol of the
Democratic Socialists of America, has been associated with socialist
and social democratic movements and parties since the 1880s.) “I’d
like to point out that he didn’t pay [for the flowers]. That’s the
problem with socialism,” Mamdani ribbed Brisport, impersonating a
conservative. “Eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

The two were part of a slate
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five candidates for state government endorsed by NYC-DSA this election
cycle. The others were Julia Salazar, the sole incumbent, representing
North Brooklyn in the state Senate; and Assembly challengers (both
tenant organizers) Peruvian-born Marcela Mitaynes in Sunset Park
and Phara Souffrant Forrest
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Crown Heights, a nurse and daughter of Haitian immigrants. All five
won their races, in a huge show of power for an organization that has
only been a significant force in New York electoral politics for two
years. Through a retreat in October, weekly Zoom calls with fellow
NYC-DSA members, and other meetings and texts, the socialist five have
been getting to know one another and planning their Albany strategy.
I’m an NYC-DSA member; I live in Brisport and Forrest’s districts,
and volunteered on their campaigns as well as Salazar’s. I can’t
wait to see what happens next.

Mamdani was kidding about running out of “other people’s money,”
but it’s an important joke. Everything the socialists want to
achieve in office—eviction relief and other urgent assistance; full
funding for transit, schools, and health care; a Green New Deal for
New York—costs money. The first item on their legislative agenda,
then, is the one that could make everything else possible: taxing the
rich.

Ninety percent of New Yorkers favor increasing taxes on millionaires
and billionaires. In a deadly pandemic and a devastating recession,
the needs are obvious, with lines for food pantries spanning blocks.
Still, the policy won’t be decided on its moral rightness or even
its popularity but by a power struggle. On the socialists’ side is
an organized movement and a receptive public. Against them, most
likely, will be Governor Andrew Cuomo and the ruling class he
represents.

Cuomo, Salazar told me, “is practically a Republican.” Taking
shelter under a temporary pandemic lean-to outside a bar on Wyckoff
Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, on a cold, rainy evening
last month, Salazar sipped a hot toddy and explained how power is
organized in Albany. “The way the budget process is constitutionally
designed gives outsized power to the governor,” she said, explaining
that the legislature isn’t empowered to add items to the budget
without the governor’s consent. This makes progressive legislation
especially tough, since Cuomo, she said, “is a fiscal conservative,
proudly committed to austerity.” He’s a crucial part of the reason
New York state has a budget shortfall, despite having at least a
million millionaires and 118 billionaires
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But Salazar observed that the winds around Cuomo were shifting, with
even moderate legislators now calling for taxing the rich. Senate
majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who represents wealthy
Westchester County, said this summer that raising taxes was unlikely
despite the state’s looming budget crises. Yet as soon as all the
absentee ballots were counted and all five members of the DSA slate
declared victory, Salazar said, the Democratic leadership in the
legislature released a public statement saying the state government
needed to raise revenues. “That was very telling, to me, of what was
to come in January.” The presence of more socialists in Albany,
Salazar emphasized, “will really make a difference.”

In fact, the socialist victories over longtime incumbents should serve
as a warning. NYC-DSA cochair Chi Anunwa put it this way: “Hey, you
know, if you don’t want to raise revenue and provide housing and
health care to all, that’s fine. But don’t be surprised if you
experience our primary challenge.”

Before 2018 Cuomo mostly got his way. A cadre of Democrats in the
state Senate who caucused with the Republicans made progressive
legislation almost impossible. In 2018, a grassroots campaign defeated
nearly all of those conservative Democrats, replacing them with
progressives. It was then that DSA made its first foray into state
politics, electing Salazar to the state Senate. Salazar, DSA, and a
coalition of tenants’ rights groups seized the moment, expanding
protection for renters in New York State for the first time in 40
years. The real estate industry is one of the most powerful interest
groups in the state, and most political observers both inside and
outside DSA were shocked that it could be defeated by grassroots
organizing. “The governor could have vetoed it,” said Michael
Kinnucan of the Brooklyn DSA Electoral Working Group. “I would have
thought the rent laws would be the last thing he’d want to
compromise on.”

Cuomo is known as a vengeful bully, and a great deal of New York
politics is explained by the fact that people know that if they cross
the governor, they may face punishment. Cuomo’s also skilled at
resisting policy moves from the left, while retaining something
resembling heartthrob status to the party’s liberal base. In the
early days of the pandemic, many incorporated his briefings into their
daily routines and wore “Cuomosexual” T-shirts. But this mystique
around the governor’s political power, said Kinnucan, though not
unfounded, has often served to let the legislature off the hook. Now
that Cuomo’s power is increasingly challenged, New Yorkers are
learning that he’s not the only decision-maker in Albany. When
Cuomo’s real estate industry cronies called him to ask him to stop
the pro-tenant legislation from passing last year, he told them to
call their legislators.

It’s too early to say whether this story will be repeated in the
fight for progressive taxation. Last summer, Cuomo argued that taxing
New York’s wealthy would mean “you’d have no more
billionaires,” as if, _New York Times_ columnist Ginia Bellafante
quipped, “someone had proposed killing off the warblers of the
Adirondacks.” Recently, however, Cuomo seems to have tacked to the
left on the matter. In late November he warned that New York would
need to raise taxes on the wealthy if no pandemic-related aid were
forthcoming from Washington, which depends partly on the outcome of
next month’s Georgia Senate runoffs. In early December, Cuomo went
further, suggesting that such tax increases were likely regardless of
what happens in Georgia or Washington. He’s perhaps conceding in
advance to the politically inevitable, hoping to take credit for a
popular policy he initially opposed (as he’s done before)—or
preparing the ground for a small, watered-down tax increase that will
appear responsive while making everyone to his left look like Ho Chi
Minh (as he’s also done before).

How will the elected socialists, DSA, and their allies prevail?
Through an “inside/outside” strategy, Anunwa explained, with the
new officials organizing their colleagues, while the rest of DSA, in
turn, organizes the grassroots to pressure Albany.

The grassroots campaign launched in early December, with phone banking
and leafletting urging New Yorkers to pressure their legislators to
support legislation taxing the rich. About 785 volunteers participated
in the campaign in the first week, making more than 105,000 calls and
hanging flyers on some 60,000 doors (no canvassing yet due to
Covid-19). On the phones, volunteers found tremendous enthusiasm for
the campaign; the phone bank technology allows the volunteer to put
the constituents through to their legislator’s office right that
minute to tell them to support the bills, and DSA volunteers have been
especially struck by how many people (968 in the first week) chose
this option. It was the most successful launch of any single-issue
campaign in NYC-DSA’s history.

NYC-DSA is not the only powerful organization fighting to tax New
York’s rich. A coalition called New York Budget Justice—which,
along with NYC-DSA, includes Alliance for Quality Education,
Indivisible Harlem, and more than a dozen other groups—has formed
solely around this demand. In mid-December, the week after NYC-DSA
launched its Tax the Rich campaign, 10 labor unions plus the New York
State AFL-CIO publicly joined the call, with the union that represents
transit workers, Local 100 TWU, organizing a rally in mid-December
with DSA and other labor unions.

Sitting in Astoria’s Socrates Sculpture Garden, Brisport and his
chief of staff, Kara Clark, who was active in DSA’s Defund the
Police campaign, talked about building relationships in Albany, where
they have a growing number of progressive and even fellow socialist
allies. But the slate is working on their more moderate future
colleagues, too. Brisport, a middle school math teacher about to
become the first openly gay Black person in the New York State
legislature, has befriended Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the first Black
woman to be the state senate’s majority leader. Brisport helped her
out in the fall with the fight to keep a Democratic majority in the
legislature, volunteering on campaigns in swing districts where
Democratic seats were threatened by Republicans. (Now that all the
absentee ballots have been counted, the Democrats have a veto-proof
supermajority.) Asked if the majority leader is receptive to the
socialist agenda, Brisport paused and answered, “She’s receptive
to me as a person, so that’s good.” This means more than many
working outside government might suppose. Mamdani observed that how
legislators vote or what bills they sign onto is often not ideological
but “because their friends asked them to.”

The next day, I met Brisport and Mamdani in Brooklyn. Brisport wore
the same red hoodie as the previous day, while Mamdani, who was born
in Kampala, Uganda, repped the Nigerian national soccer team with a
black-and-white checked jersey almost as loud as the previous day’s
choice. Neither were dressed quite warmly enough for the chilly day.
This time Brisport paid for the roses. One of the City Council
candidates we visited, Brandon West, a community organizer, answered
his door warily. He seemed relieved when Mamdani and Brisport
presented him with a rose, admitting sheepishly, “I thought I was
getting hazed.” NYC-DSA is no fraternity; West’s new comrades came
only in solidarity and left extra flowers for his roommates. But the
socialists are indeed about to be hazed by the state’s political
establishment. In any case, they’re getting ready.

_Liza Featherstone is a journalist based in New York City and a
contributing writer to The Nation. She is the co-author of Students
Against Sweatshops: The Making of a Movement
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2002) and the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for
Worker’s Rights at Wal-Mart
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and Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation
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Books, 2017). She is the editor of False Choices: The Faux Feminism
of Hillary Clinton
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_Copyright c 2020 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $12.00!    _

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