What made Eliot Spitzer a great Attorney General was his fearlessness in taking on the big money crowd.
He believed that everyone was equal before the law, and he was unafraid of the Lords of Wall Street. He tapped into an unspoken dismay in our society about the obscene inequality that characterizes American life -- "the malefactors of great wealth," as Teddy Roosevelt called them -- and that's what sent him to the Governor's Mansion with a record-setting level of support.
He didn't need much help to win the election, and he thought -- wrongly -- that he didn't need anyone, inside or outside of Albany, to help govern. We thought we were getting someone who would lead the tough fights for ordinary working families, but it didn't turn out that way.
Instead, we got a leader who thought his main fight was with the legislature, with SEIU 1199, even with the WFP from time to time. The anti-corporate crusader departed. We were left with an energetic but not always thoughtful leader who was too angry at too many people and institutions to be effective. His administration will be remembered as a squandered opportunity.
We should also keep his resignation in perspective. It's not earth-shaking, even as it's a terribly sad time for his family and staff, many of whom are terrific public servants. But we should remember what a real scandal is -- for instance, when a President dishonestly launches a pre-emptive war and thousands and thousands of people die as a result. We need to tell the difference between appallingly bad behavior and appallingly bad policies.
Needless to say, Governor Spitzer's resignation leaves an unfinished agenda. The WFP and its allies -- community organizations and unions and environmental groups and business and student groups and civil rights organizations and the blogosphere and everyone else who still believes in equality and democracy -- will, of course, continue on.
We will look to our new Governor, David Paterson, and to progressives in the Assembly and Senate to pick up the ball that Spitzer dropped. It means being both pragmatic and visionary. We need to fight for paid family leave and publicly financed elections, for preserving affordable housing and for a foreclosure moratorium, for subsidy reform to save taxpayer money and for green jobs/clean energy policies to save the planet , for reducing taxes on working families while asking the wealthy to pay their fair share, for adequate investment in education and health care and transportation.
Fundamentally, we still want our state to be a place where one's life chances are not determined at birth. That's our hope for the Paterson administration.
At the moment, and for the foreseeable future, the fundamental problem facing our State Government is this:
For the last 30 years, excessive tax cuts for the wealthiest New Yorkers have starved the state of billions in revenue and forced communities across the state to raise property taxes . Working families are choking on these property taxes. But the state still needs money to properly fund crucial services.
With a recession looming and a $5 billion budget hole to fill, we now face a choice: cut needed public investment in everything from schools to subways, or shift the tax burden off of property taxes and back to those who can most afford to pay by repealing excessive income tax cuts for the rich.
Click here to learn more and sign the petition for a fair budget.
Spitzer or Paterson, the fight for a progressive and decent New York goes on.
That's it. Read the papers, pay your dues, and... organize.
Sam Williams, Bertha Lewis, Bob Master
WFP Co-chairs
Dan Cantor
WFP Executive Director
