To: New York Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival

From: [Your Name]

In his State of the State address Tuesday, Gov. Cuomo professed his desire to make New York State the nation’s leader in enacting social, racial, and economic justice. As a movement of New Yorkers committed to those ideals, the New York State Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival must respond to glaring omissions in the address and the governor’s policy proposals.

Before New York can become a justice leader, we have to face the reality that we are among the nation’s leaders in several measures of injustice. We have the country’s worst income inequality, which dramatically worsened over the Great Recession and recovery. Even more startling is the number of New Yorkers who can’t afford to meet their basic needs. Over half of New Yorkers -- nearly 10 million of us -- are poor or low-income. This includes 60 percent of children and two-thirds of all New Yorkers of color. Only California, Hawai’i, and Louisiana have a higher proportion of poor residents of color, and we are 6th highest when it comes to children in poverty.

This is a crisis that went unacknowledged in the governor’s State of the State. Instead he claimed victory in bringing new economic development. Gov. Cuomo is correct that our state’s wealth has grown during his time in office, but that wealth has gone almost entirely to the already wealthy. New York’s approach to economic development under his leadership -- offering various taxpayer-funded incentives to private companies -- hasn’t made a dent in poverty and inequality. It was never meant to. The Governor continues to cite the Buffalo Billion as an economic success, despite the fact that poverty in Buffalo has increased since it was first announced. If the Governor’s idea of development looks like massive giveaways to corporations like Tesla and Amazon, we know whose interests he serves.

A true justice agenda must be judged by its impact on the majority of New York’s residents who are poor and dispossessed -- especially people of color, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, women, and children who are disproportionately impacted. Some of the governor’s policy proposals are positive steps, including ending cash bail, decriminalizing marijuana, the DREAM Act, and pay equity, to name a few. Other proposals - like the transition to renewable energy by 2040 and protecting the Affordable Care Act - fall far short of existing legislative proposals like the Climate and Community Protection Act and the New York Health Act. Simply put, this is another austerity budget that refuses to capture any additional wealth from the rich or make investments in healthcare, housing, education, jobs, or clean energy at the scale we need.

As always, it will be up to the people of New York to free ourselves from injustice and oppression. Every progressive accomplishment the Governor cited in his speech was not the result of his leadership, but rather the organizing of poor, working class, and marginalized people throughout the state, who more often than not dragged him along kicking and screaming. The progressive victories he claimed were the result of low-wage workers walking off the job in the Fight for $15, rural communities organizing against extractive fossil fuel industries, students and parents opting out of standardized tests, and LGBTQIA+ communities who have fought for decades to secure their rights.

The Governor’s progressive rhetoric is cynical political calculus, his response to the shifting political winds and opposition to President Trump. We’ll welcome any positive steps he’s now willing to take. At the same time, we will continue to tell the truth about the interlocking oppressions of systemic racism, poverty, militarism, and ecological devastation, the inability of our existing political structures to address them, and the need for an organized, independent movement of the poor and dispossessed to bring about necessary societal transformation.