Awful, Inevitable Andrew Cuomo
Recently, the New York Times, which should know better, ran a puff piece on Andrew Cuomo so preposterous that I hope it may never be linked to again. The sense one gets from this plump profile is that Cuomo, who has openly coveted the governorship of New York and now likely will get it, is just the most squeaky-clean golden boy in the whole world. The Times should have referred back to its in-depth analysis, published this January, of Cuomo's heavy political and financial reliance on some of New York's most prominent real estate moguls.
Not that the Times learned the whole story -- or endeavored to publish it. As I reported this past spring, Cuomo's record as HUD's Clinton-era head and all-round boy wonder points way beyond mere shared responsibility for the near-total meltdown of the entire U.S. economy:
Though America’s financial fortunes suffered after Cuomo’s time at HUD, his own personal fortune soared. The bulk of this financial “windfall” came courtesy of Andrew Farkas, the billionaire real estate developer who helped Cuomo amass his wealth as a business partner and campaign fundraiser. Farkas — now Cuomo’s financial chairman as he circles the governorship — has personally given Cuomo at least $1.8 million in cash.
As New Yorkers are beginning to discover, Andrew Cuomo personifies the long reach of many at the top of the Democratic Party who built their fortunes on the mortgage bubble and the sub-prime collapse, but have yet to be tarred and feathered as architects of the nation’s worst housing crisis.
Cuomo’s heavy reliance on funds raised from big players in New York real estate, analyzed in detail by the New York Times this January, “hasn’t drawn much scrutiny yet, but it will,” said Blair Horner, legislative director at NYPIRG, the New York Public Interest Research Group, in an interview with Pajamas Media. “If and when he announces as a candidate for governor, because it’s obviously an issue that the public deserves to have explored.”
Notably, another recipient of largess while Cuomo was HUD secretary is current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Clinton appointed Emanuel to the board of Freddie Mac while Cuomo headed HUD. Both Cuomo and Emanuel turned their privileged positions atop the nation’s mortgage finance system into opportunities for quickly amassing personal wealth, which they then leveraged into greater political power.
Thanks to Farkas, Cuomo’s current campaign war chest for governor is $18 million – big enough to eliminate primary competition before it starts. With a past already raising uncomfortable questions for Cuomo, Farkas is deeply embedded in controversial Middle East financial dealings, having created a “Fannie and Freddie for Dubai” in the United Arab Emirates. A quick wheeler-dealer, Farkas bailed out before the Emirate’s colossal credit crisis, and made a string of similarly well-timed deals with Dubai World in 2009, with whom he flipped marquee Manhattan properties. Just last week, Farkas raised eyebrows with his acquisition of Centerline Holding Company, which services over $110 billion in commercial mortgages.
“All of this stuff is fair game, so certainly Farkas’ relationship is going to be an issue,” Horner said. “If Cuomo runs for governor, I assume his relationship with Farkas is one of the obvious things that Lazio or whoever the Republican candidate is would bring up.” Horner pointed out that the issue is likely to arise “even if Cuomo has a Democratic primary.” “The public should hear what his response is,” he said.
In 2007, Horner was handpicked by Cuomo to create Project Daylight, Cuomo’s centerpiece online transparency initiative. Horner returned to NYPIRG as legislative director in 2008. Like “any other interest,” he said, real estate interests “give money under the theory that they get something in return. Whether or not they do, of course, is really the question. But they believe that it gets them at least access, and the question is, do they get that or even more? It’s a legitimate question, and it’s a legitimate question that all candidates have to face when you get big bucks from powerful interest groups.”
But when your name is Andrew Cuomo, you laugh in the face of legitimate questions. Actually, you stonewall them until the people annoying you with the prospect of the truth roll over and play dead:
Mr. Cuomo, whose tenure at HUD ended in early 2001, refused repeated requests to talk about his experience running the nation’s housing agency and how he wrestled with such policy questions. He gave no reason for his reticence. Instead, his staff issued a statement, and his former chief of staff at HUD, Howard B. Glaser, took the role of surrogate for the candidate.
All class. Say hello to your next Governor, New Yorkers. This man, to be perfectly blunt, stinks. He reeks. There is more than a little something abidingly fishy about Andrew Cuomo, in the way a dead fish wrapped in newspaper leaves an abidingly fishy smell in your mailbox. Before the campaign has even gotten underway, the Times is reduced to hiding a crumb of honesty in a blog post designed to ward off the maximum number of readers who chance upon its title: "A Wonk's Guide to Andrew M. Cuomo and HUD." Well, some of us are undeterred, folks:
There are, as ever, subtleties within subtleties here, and while Mr. Cuomo may not have played an outsize role in the crisis, he also seems not to have addressed some critical issues that fed the subprime mess. One area was the instrument known as the yield spread premium, which was essentially an incentive paid by banks to mortgage brokers to push up interest rates on mortgages.
There are so many subtleties, in fact, that only someone who has stuffed their head in a woolly sack could fail to grasp the obvious. Andrew Cuomo is a terminally self-entitled plutocrat with a habit of brazenly-yet-secretively leveraging public service to concentrate power and bloat his fortune. He is an arrogant, patronage-soaked cronymonger who has left a trail of scum across multiple continents, and he has as much business governing the state of New York as a prize crocodile. He is a living symbol of everything that is craven and wrong in America, and nobody seems capable of stopping him.
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Aug '10
Re: Awful, Inevitable Andrew Cuomo
To gain media attention and political capital, Andrew Cuomo recently staged the most cynical, transparent, and crooked crusade I've seen in years. It started in late July, in the Bloomberg Press; spreading from there as an 'expose' on death benefit payouts given to wives and relatives of soldiers by the Prudential and Met-Life companies.
Using a single instance of a woman who claimed she couldn't write checks to Target against the account of her dead husband - which had a balance of $500,000 - it implied that she was being cheated out of the money, and the companies were enriching themselves at her expense.
The story was so flimsy and shallow that I said to friends, "There must be a politician behind this". Within 48 hours Andrew Cuomo stepped forward with subpoenas waving. to lead his crusade.
These are the facts: When the death benefit is paid, the beneficiary is given a choice between a lump sum payment, or regular payouts to an interest-bearing (over 2%) checking account. Nobody was denied access to these funds. The woman who was the subject of the hit piece lacked even the most basic understanding of how her accounts worked.
Jul '10
Re: Awful, Inevitable Andrew Cuomo
Like father, like son.
Late in his campaign for re-election as Governor, as it became apparent that he might lose to George Pataki, Mario Cuomo threw a Hail Mary he hoped would energize his base: he promised that if he won, he would use his executive power to declare cable television to be a basic human right.
New Yorkers' rejection of his bid for a fourth term was the only demonstration of their collective sanity in living political memory.
Edited on Aug 24, 2010 at 4:49amJul '10
Re: Awful, Inevitable Andrew Cuomo
The NYT giving a wealthy liberal a pass. I had to pick myself up off the floor after I read that. Can you give a little warning next time?