Latest Backstabbing Betrayal By Shifty Sheldon Silver

NY State Assembly boss Sheldon Silver just traded the interests of his constituents, and indeed of everyone who lives in New York State (except the rich) to benefit his own pocket.

New York State is a horrible oligarchy, run for the benefit of the megarich who live in Manhattan and summer in the Hamptons. Their political frontmen do their bidding. On the state level, it is openly acknowledged even by the official establishment media that "three men in a room," the Governor, the Senate Majority Leader, and the Speaker of the State Assembly, hold all the legislative power. The rest of the "people's" "elected representatives" act like sheep who vote in lockstep to ratify whatever deals these three bosses cut.

The Assembly Speaker for many years is a lawyer by the name of Shelton Silver, who ostensibly represents the (mostly poor) inhabitants of the lower east side of Manhattan. He is a principal in the law firm of Weitz and Luxenberg. This firm specializes in personal injury torts and medical malpractice cases. It openly advertises for injured parties.

The usual practice in this area of law is for the law firm to take cases on a contingency fee basis- that is, they take a (hefty) percentage of any judgment won for their injured client. (Since the clients generally don't have tens of thousands of dollars, or even more, to pay attorneys to represent them in cases that typically drag on for years.) The fee is usually 30-40% of the ultimate settlement or verdict, assuming they win.

So naturally a cap on medical malpractice awards would be detrimental to the interests of such a law firm and its principals.

Shelton Silver made a big show recently of claiming to want an extension of the surcharge on taxpayers with an annual income of $200,000 and up. Then he proposed letting it expire except for incomes starting at $1,000,000. To put this in perspective:

For the period 2009 through 2011, the 6.85% state income tax rose to 7.85% for individuals making $200,000 to $500,000 and for married couples earning $300,000 to $500,000, and to 8.97% for households earning more than $500,000. In 2009, the Legislature also killed itemized deductions (except for charitable gifts) for taxpayers with adjusted gross income of more than $1 million. For 2010 and 2011, taxpayers pulling in over $10 million could deduct only 25% of their charitable donations rather than 50%.


Revenue from the measures has been growing: from $4 billion in 2009 to about $4.6 billion in 2010. They were projected to add $5 billion this year.

Silver also claimed to be making an extension of the expiring rent stabilization laws for New York City part of the budget deal. (NYC is a colony of Albany, for some reason. Mainly because local hacks like Silver keep selling city residents down the river.)

So what happened? Silver traded it all away for killing a proposed cap on medical malpractice court awards. In other words, he put his personal financial interests above the interests of the entire state.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, a clone of his father, is a Republican in Democratic guise. He balanced the budget by cutting taxes for the rich (called "no new taxes" or "no tax increase" in the twisted jargon of the corporate press) and slashing billions from the health and education budgets. (God knows what the sellout union bosses got in return.)

The media hailed it- except, notably, the NY Times. The tabloid rags of NYC, the NY Post and NY Daily News, owned, respectively, by reactionary plutocrats Rupert Murdoch (an Australian billionaire) and Mortimer Zuckerman (a Canadian billionaire) beat the drums to kill the surcharge, and hailed its victory- dedicated to brainwashing the working classes to support the class interests of the rich as usual. (It reminds one of Jay Gould's boast in the 19th century that he "can always hire half the working class to kill the other half.")

Silver's ass was well covered for him by the media- they deliberately didn't connect the dots between his "victory" on the medical malpractice cap and his personal interest. And what logical connection is there between that cap, and tax cuts for the rich, and landlords' freedom to gouge?

We've been here many times before with the venal lawyer and political boss Silver. He abolished a commuter tax on out of state people employed in New York City, as part of a scheme to win an additional assembly seat- which seat went to the GOP anyway! NYC still lives with the consequences of that lost income. (Just as it lives with the loss of billions of dollars thanks to Ed Koch killing a tiny stock transfer tax on stock trades. The definition of a reactionary- a warrior for rich people so they can get ever richer.)

In the U.S. today, 1% of the households get 25% of the income. The majority get poor, and the poor are under assault. Obama slashes home heating assistance for them, and the GOP fanatics insist it isn't enough. So the Democrats offer to "compromise," with more assaults on the poor, on already too weak environmental regulation, and so forth.

And of course the GOP agenda is to roll back the clock to 1920-or maybe 1890. On top of the assault on the final citadel of labor unions, the public workers' unions, whose very right to bargain with their government employers has been revoked by GOP fanatics in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere, now the GOP has unveiled a plan to kill Medicaid and Medicare. The poor will be forced to pay a large chunk of their medical bills, which they have no money to do, and Medicare will be turned into a voucher program under which the old and disabled will be given (not enough) money and told to buy themselves insurance from the insurance industry corporations that are a huge part of the problem with medical costs in the U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, another reactionary from Wisconsin, rolled out the scheme this week. (What is it about Wisconsin? From Joseph McCarthy on to Scott Walker and now this dog?)