Declaration of damnation in Thomas Jefferson’s hometown; Monticello, New York.

New Normal, New York

Where does one begin to discuss the current global pandemic induced phenomenon and cult of personality that is the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo? Since he locked down the state back in mid-March as coronavirus cases grew by thousands and thousands and thousands, Mario’s son had become the chosen one; elder statesman of all things COVID-19 and the default rebuttal warrior against Donald Trump’s consistent, insistently brazen and meta-comical errors of the novel disease and how to fight it. (Bleach and sun anyone?)

Like the spiky red-pockmarked handball looking pathogen, Andrew has become quite the pop culture icon himself with his daily afternoon government issue polo shirt press briefings on the outbreak. It’s become as much national institution as the Price is Right used to be at 12 p.m. every day as snippets of his videos and images have gone viral; thoroughly giving his constituents and viewers across the country and the globe essential information about the contagion’s spread and the status of his state. His briefings have managed to even produce a spin off show via Fredo’s Chris Cuomo’s prime time “news” hour program on CNN. It’s quite a big ratings grabber despite the huge ass conflict this comes with as his kid brother “interviews” him about his brah governing the response and recovery while gushing about him in dreams and blatantly egging him to run for President.

About that. Because of all this attention, social media had dubbed and trended Andrew as #PresidentCuomo and corporate news grabbed onto to that to fill their webpages and hyperlinks with blanket speculation and suggestions about the COVID19 superstar to run for the white house too. Not to mention dozens of articles proclaiming how the suddenly hunky Cuomo is the boyfriend of America, but that’s just icky and gross so I’ll end it there.

Since this is supposed to be a devastatingly serious column,(note the header photo) but all that shit had to be prefaced to illustrate and elaborate how the goddamn Governor Cuomo does not deserve all these adulation and accolades or should still have a job right now regarding the consequences of his inaction and very suspect actions to stem the spread of the novel virus in his state besides lamely ostracizing people to wear masks.

As the days counted down to the cruelest April of our lifetime and humankind, Cuomo continued his daily briefings as a salve to his constituents and a reassurance to the nation following them as an alternative to Trump’s alternative facts.

Immediately at the start of the month the plague really came in. Yet here was the resilient and virile leader on the dais every afternoon in front of the camera, an exhibition of transparency reading out the morbid death tolls while quite oddly talking about flattening the curves as casualties started to mount. Yet the veneration levied to him by social and news media continued to shower on him…

…until he weaponized that veneration and adulation to shield himself

Flashback

Prior to his new found fame, Andrew Cuomo and his superego went to work on getting New York prepared for the outbreak. While he did order to close the schools and businesses deemed non-essential suspended until due notice, he waited almost a whole week to actually shut down the entire state. Because when Mayor Big Slow de Blasio wisely stole the San Francisco’s mayor’s idea to shelter in place 2 weeks after she instituted it, Cuomo blew that off for another 3 days so he can announce his own S.I.P. decree with the PAUSE initiative. So Cuomo didn’t want to shut down the state for the sole reason that HE had to name it. Which meant that state taxpayer time had to be used as the pathogen commuted through the five boroughs and upstate to come up with a FUCKING ACRONYM first to name it. That’s probably why it took 3 days, coming up with words to line up real clever initially is a rather tedious process.

When Governor Cuomo was queried about how the hospitals would handle the prospective (then inevitable and realized) meteoric rise of cases considering the insufficient amount of beds available due to dozens of hospitals going under in the past decade (two big examples being the St. Johns Hospital which is only an 8 minute bike ride from Elmhurst Hospital, which later became the epicenter of COVID-19 and the Peninsula Hospital in Rockaway Beach, abandoned and razed for “affordable housing”)  the governor reassured his state and the media gaggle that we had bountiful supplies and ample beds to handle the infected. Then New York and FEMA worked together to assemble triage hospitals across the five boroughs including a US Navy ship President Trump sent with much fanfare; But the nagging question is what will happen to the  nursing homes across the five boroughs and if the residents contract the virus; mostly the elderly, the most susceptible to perish from the insidious and tormenting virus.

Governor Cuomo did acknowledge that and showed valid reasoning by describing a scenario of COVID-19 and it’s effects on the elderly people as a fire going through dry grass. The problem is that days before Andrew made this frank observation, he and this guy he appointed to run the State Department of Health named Dr. Howard Zucker concocted a mandatory order for nursing homes and adult care centers to take in COVID-19 positive cases. But to make this edict sound more soothing and universally sentimental, Cuomo decided to name this executive order after his mother and Matilda’s law was enacted.When April began on the weekend, about over 2,000 people died from the novel virus yet oddly the reported death counts from nursing homes were surprisingly low but it wouldn’t take long for the fire to grow into an inferno and spread through these privately managed hospice care centers like lava through soil.

A nursing home in East New York got hit with the virus so fast that the management there stored 10 dead people in a room on the fourth floor of the building and tried to keep the corpses cool by running the A.C. and left the windows open to prevent the stench of death from seeping out. In Cobble hill, 55 patients and residents died, leading to bodies being forklifted into big rig trailer trucks in broad daylight as hundreds of workers got infected. A nursing home in Flushing that was trying to cover up the body count while haphazardly trying to obscure the dying and dead enraged a man so much he threatened to kill everyone there. It got so extreme for one woman that she planned a late evening breakout to get her father out of poorly managed adult care center in Elmhurst.

As the amount of death in New York continued to mount, nursing home residents were dying by dozens yet the state’s tallying of the deceased amounted was suspiciously under-counted as deaths continued to pile by the hundreds as more New Yorkers got ill and tested positive for COVID-19. Hospitals were overwhelmed, especially the ones in lower area median income areas where most of the essential workers lived where COVID-19 attacked the hardest and fastest.

When pressed about these enormous discrepancy accounts of the dying and dead on his corona talk show and after nearly a month of his streaming videos of  updates plus all the information about COVID19 and his bureaucracy’s tenative response, suddenly the Governor blew a brain fart and claimed he didn’t know about the mandatory edict he signed that sent positive cases to nursing homes which he cloaked with the wholesome law named after his mom. Then his flunky Zucker weaselly demurred and feigned he hadn’t a clue either.

“I DON’T KNOW”

Cuomo’s obtuseness is striking considering that it wasn’t long ago that he gave himself   (with the help of an exasperated anemic Democrat partisan assembly and senate) expanse emergency executive powers which gave him the absolute power to sign Matilda’s Law in the first place. Even more striking is that the Covid King Of New York boasted that he alone was the government in a radio interview eight years before the novel virus manifested on this planet.

This is actually uncharacteristic of Matilda’s son, because like most comic book and movie villains he’s very intelligent, always cunning plus manipulative and ruthless and very cognitive and astute about the use of leverage and narrative. Who else would conjure up shit like shutting the government down to kill the bail reform laws, which would not have spared the health dept either. He also was toying with cutting 2 billion dollars of medicaid funding to the city and 400 million dollars from hospitals as the first COVID-19 fatalities were reported. Unfortunately, the senate and assembly meekly agreed to cutting 300 million from hospitals instead and decided to give Cuomo sole authority on budgeting. To compound these austerity cuts, they cut even deeper since Andy decided not to legalize pot and tax the obscenely wealthy again. Another strange thing The Luv Guv did was attempt to reject 6.7 billion dollars of federal grant money sent by Trump’s treasury to fund Medicaid as the outbreak engulfed NYC and state.

Surely with an ego the size of Niagara Falls wouldn’t effect the governor’s mindset that  much, especially since he’s been acting like a condescending know it all every afternoon on T.V.. But most of the press were speechless and allowed him to continue to feign ignorance, thus enabling and brightening his star power. But unbeknownst to Matilda’s son’s fans was that Gov. Cuomo was weaponizing his newfound fame to wield dickheaded power moves with his newfound divine authority the assembly gave him weeks earlier. What can be expected from a man who runs the state when he sent PPE’s to a NYCHA buildings and sent only four industrial size bottles of Andrew’s Prison Purell instead of individual bottles to each tenant, forcing  tenant leaders to distribute hand sanitizer door to door into bottles and plastic bags that the tenants had to come up. Some tenants reportedly cupped their hands to receive a personal amount. This was done despite the CDC recommendation to keep six feet apart from each other.

A few days later during one of his afternoon polo shirt chats, Matilda’s son appeared to stop giving a shit too after he got reminded of his edict and proclaimed that the nursing homes and other adult care centers had no choice to admit the infected from hospitals. To truly illustrate his decree, news reports surfaced that as COVID patients were being transferred to the nursing homes, piles of bodybags were delivered to them at the same time. Which would wind up immediately used in days or even hours. They also described these macarbe deliveries in the manifest as a PPE delivery! And the body bag deliveries continued until they were filled up with covid casualties every week as the state continued to avoid counting them.

Meanwhile as hospitals were reporting hundreds of people dying daily, residents at nursing homes continued to perish from the novel virus, but hiding the evidence of them was getting more taxing and even amateurish. At the Riverdale nursing home in the Bronx, it turned out 100 more residents died than what was initially reported. A nursing home in Washington Heights where 95 residents died from COVID-19 got so morbid that they put up tarp to cover the gate, vainly trying to hide trailers storing dead bodies inside. In a nursing home in Forest Hills, medication records were “doctored” and staffers were advised to write that the residents refused the medication that they never received.

The Cobble Hill home also exposed the narrative myths spewed by Cuomo and his health department bragging claims of their plentiful shipments to hospitals and adult care centers when a staffer told the hospice administrator that he had to conserve the PPE supply. But that fact was already exposed when nurses at a hospital told the whole world of government’s stinginess by donning garbage bags while Cuomo initially boasted of hospitals now debunked bountiful supply. The day when Matilda’s Son had to be accountable for his E.O. he pulled off a deflection that resembled Trump but with even less class by basically telling them to fuck off.. And also exempting himself from blame for the deaths from his executive order by reciting almost word for word what President said about the federal emergency stockpile when it came to getting PPE’s to nursing homes to New York by claiming it wasn’t his job to provide them either, even thought Cuomo’s New York runs a few senior homes. And even cheaply made expedient the federal PPE disbursement that caused this. He also conveniently blamed the nursing homes he saddled with caring for the contracted patients and vulnerable residents for not being able to handle the situation Andrew dealt them with as he wondered aloud why didn’t they transfer them to other homes and tripled down blamed the nursing homes for the data inaccuracies of the dead.

This was the most brazen attempt at absolute absolution probably ever made regarding the hundreds of preventable deaths in homes in the five boroughs. Even though the homes didn’t have PPEs or COVID tests available to prevent and prepare to defend against the virus, just like the city and state hospitals, nursing homes were desperately lacking the PPE’s and tests to protect the clients and themselves, which led to a high absence of workers. Cuomo’s executive order descriptively banned relatives to see their Mother and fathers and other kin as well. deftly obfuscate these heinous statistics and exacerbate their needless deaths. Not to mention the fact that coronavirus tests were scarce in the city and infirm people have no immediate or easy access to them.

Because of the state rules about keeping relatives from visiting to stem contagion, this extended to how staffers handled concerned phone calls from relatives as they kept their calls brief or kept them on hold as they inquired if the resident got tested, got contracted or died from coronavirus. People continued to wait in despair until Cuomo was forced to sign an executive order mandating all next of kin must be informed in 24 hours thanks to a law President Trump enacted (of all fucking people). Cuomo knew damn well that the elderly were most the most susceptible to die. Covid-19 was the accelrant that burned through dry grass, then Cuomo can be accused of involuntary (or voluntary) arson. The ban on visitors to prevent contagion was easy to exploit by these homes because no visitors equals no witnesses.

But when it came time to challenge President Trump with taking in patients for the USS Comfort and the Javits Center, Cuomo punted and rejected the pleas of nursing homes who told his health dept. that they couldn’t handle the crushing inflow of COVID patients like in cobble hill where over 50 people died as hundreds of workers got infected. Another big mystery was that there were 10 other temporary hospitals set up to take in COVID-19 patients in case the initial projections of people infected would manifest, yet the city and state didn’t bother to open them.

Sure in retrospect it turned out the city didn’t need them (and wasted millions of tax dollars to build them to boot) but if there was no edict to force nursing homes to accept covid patients, these MASH units would have came in handy. Even if they wouldn’t have filled all those beds, but they probably would have came in handy being that a way to stem the spread is by distancing.

Another caveat of the mandate was that the homes weren’t to allow the relatives to visit their residents. for the reason to prevent the virus to spread. But from who to whom? If there were tests, the visitors would have took them as would the residents (who would have been sent to the hospitals or isolated) But apparently that regulation somehow included withholding information from the relatives of clients.

Also, because of the continuing difficulties in getting tests to the state (and getting access to them) Who knows if any of the convicts released from Rikers had COVID-19 and in the mad rush to stop the spread on the island’s prisons, the city sent those patients to nursing homes and shared rooms with the residents. As if the facilities staff getting infected wasn’t hazardous enough.

Myriad factors were brazenly on display in the homes as nurses were being trained on the spot because of under staffing, and the infirm laid on their beds like carcasses covered with bed sores. And it’s a bit difficult for a nursing home to transfer a patient they can’t handle when hundreds of other nursing homes are poorly run and maintained also.  It’s a crapshoot catch22.

When suspicions by the corporate local news and public funded media started getting aroused about the body counts in nursing homes, the State DOH commissioner Zucker was frantically trying to get the death stats in a hurry while also trying to semantically separate the deaths occurring in the homes or when they were sent to hospitals. After the alarming amounts were suddenly known, which was about over 1,000 at the time, Cuomo decided to rescind the mandate of the March 25 edict and then he ordered hospitals not to send COVID patients to the homes and then decided to enact fines for mistreatment violations that most of these nursing homes have been getting away with impunity for years/ And it wouldn’t be apropos if he didn’t give an nauseating obtuse defense about it as he remarked about the danger of spreading the disease that was obvious to him before he commanded the homes to take in ill people infected with a novel virus.

And then the covid chickens came home to roost, as suddenly there was more transparency of Gov. Cuomo’s lethal ill-logistics.

Cuomo’s NYS Department Of Health investigators hardly regulated the nursing homes or even went to them as well and when they actually did inspect them they gave them positive grades even when it was found that hundreds of residents died in there. It must have been interesting how the nursing home admins got a head’s up of an inspector’s arrival so they can turn up the A.C. in a room with ten corpses.

The sick thing is that nursing home administrators were telling the state they were willing to send these patients to other homes as Matilda’s son was cynically advising them too but it was all about CHOA (covering his own ass). The elderly weren’t the victims of bad policy fuckups but of the circumstances of nature according to the Luv Guv. But these ill-logistics fly in the face of logic considering that positve Covid patients were already being sent to homes because of the mandate.

Matilda’s son also blamed it on everything and everyone else based on the genesis of the disease to deny everything about his utter lack of preparedness and laizze-faire approach to the outbreak that was about to and did happen in the state he lords over. Sounding more preposterous and hyperbolic than basement dwelling conspiracy nuts by describing the pathogen as getting on a plane and nobody blowing a horn to let him know not to kill his constituents. Which is about as loony as the theory that the novel virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan like it was a Frankenstein monster.

But the real monster was the state mandate that Cuomo signed forcing the homes to take in the infected, which his Department of Health tried to throw into the memory hole.

And it turns out this mandate was a collusive operation by Cuomo’s administration and  a consortium (or a legion) of hospital and nursing home executives, board members and administrators called the GYNHA, the Greater New York Hospital Association which by citing the novel coronavirus, granted immunity protection to doctors, physicians and nurses…and also nursing home executives, board members and administrators. Which stemmed from a $5,000,000 donation from the (GYNHA) a consortium of health and hospice care executives and their lobbyists to the state democratic committee (which Andy is in charge of too) and towards Cuomo’s 2018 reelection campaign. So it looks like Cuomo had to return their little favor by conflating nursing home CEO’s and VP’s and private equity CFO’s with frontline working nurses and doctors by including them too. It’s more like a law mandating impunity against lawsuits.

This immunity, while clearly meant to absolve all those on the frontlines trying to save people ailing and perishing from COVID-19 which was nigh impossible most of the time considering the thousands who died, ultimately wound up acting as immunity and even an impunity law for the higher-ups sitting in their offices and board rooms whose decisions could have probably made a difference in bringing down the body count or exacerbating it.

Also tucked into this mandate was stipulations that freed hospitals and nursing homes from all liability of any malpractice suits because of conditions from the pandemic based on the speculated amount of cases coming in but also conveniently and disturbingly included a cavaet concerning the PPE’s and ventilators that were in short supply which actually happened during the first days of the health crisis, so thehigher-ups of hospice care centers will be immune from any investigation during a disaster which did not need to be set to any standards because of the nature of the contagion’s violent spread.

Then he ordered hospitals not to send COVID patients to the homes and enacted fines for mistreatment violations that most of these nursing homes have been getting away with impunity for years and were protected thanks to Cuomo’s evil incarnate edict and from the incessant lobbying and gladhanding from the private equity firms and LLC’s that own and run them . And it wouldn’t be apropos if he didn’t give an nauseating obtuse defense about it as he remarked about the danger of spreading the disease that was obvious to him before he commanded the homes to take in ill people infected with a novel virus.

It’s logical that Cuomo would want to protect these homes and do obligatory toothless investigations for AG James to gloss over since he gave 850 million to the worst nursing care providers after the consortium donated millions to him and the Democrat Party state 4 years ago, giving them carte blanche to juke the stats of COVID-19 casualties under their watch.

During all this machinating, Governor Cuomo continued his self-aggrandizing daily briefer shows and continued to take COVID-19 mulligans about his grave decisions and deflections of his responsibility of them, continuing to blame the federal letter agencies and the guy in charge of them President Trump. Then Cuomo sunk to blaming God and Mother Nature when he got bored of blaming Donnie over and over again, and at this time King Andrew was starting to grow weary of his daily media outings even after all the fame it brought him, which included the cover of the Rolling Stone (shows how we don’t have real rock stars anymore) as questions about his governing through the pandemic and the issue of his nursing home mandate got more probing as he behaved like a jaded sociopath.

But Cuomo didn’t waver and kept up his plausible deniability defense in the face of them. Because of his emergency powers legislated to him, he was still untouchable and his regal aura let them know it. Cuomo’s remarked about how he did everything he could to save COVID-19 patients that wound up mass killing the elderly and infirm and recited it multiple times that he even challenged for an investigation. To the weakened press corps there of course, only limited to a few questions.

Then he decided to end the daily briefings for good and made sure the last one was literally too brief for any press inquiries. As he proclaimed that the virus was crushed with the same vigor and legitimacy as when Bush announced the mission was accomplished in Iraq after two months in 2003. But he still does the weekly briefings, which he and his administration used to push their narrative as Matilda’s son refused to repent for his fatal executive order and waxed fatalistic and philosophical about the deceased as if it was expected, and heinously dismissing the carnage his decision caused as an inevitability.

Speaking of narrative, it should be dutifully noted that Cuomo hired the services of McKinsey And Company after he passed the April budget with the nursing home impunity law, for the reason Cuomo claimed to offset the misinformation about COVID-19 coming from the Trump Administration and mainly from Trump’s mouth (even though they had their own Covid rock star in Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Andy admires and trusts).In fact, McKinsey has obviously been scripting King Andrew’s Covid briefings since they got to Albany and their presence and expertise possibly came in handy as pressure mounted for bipartisan demands by congressional representatives and New York state assembly members and senators for an independent investigation, Cuomo and his toady Dr. Zucker assembled an investigation of themselves by themselves. Which absolutely absolved all those in charge of  the under-staffed nursing homes and conveniently placed the blame on the essential workers who got infected or were asymptomatic. Everything about this report is CTA (cover their asses) spin to absolve the Governor, Dr. Zucker, the Department of Health and all the suits running the nursing homes, adult care centers and assisted living facilities from all responsibility. Cuomo and his gang couldn’t have not known about the glut of nursing homes in his state that were consistently getting health and safety violations. Particularly since a bulk of these nursing homes are owned and “run” by private equity firms, notorious for being the most mismanaged, uninhabitable and blighted facilities in the nation and are the source for about a 1/5 of the U.S. deaths from coronavirus.

The funny thing is that after this thorough bleaching of the recidivists running these negligent nursing homes and Cuomo’s immunity/impunity law protecting them, is that it was collectively rejected by families of the 6,600 deceased and skeptical journalists and the G-board warriors on social media aggressively demanding better data and answers. About that 6,600 deceased, that was the exact amount of patients that were transferred from hospitals to the nursing homes and it’s surely possible that it could be more than that, because vacancies at New York’s hospice care centers doubled since the pandemic started and Cuomo’s state Health Dept. COVID-19 edict was authorized. That’s about over 13,000 people made expendable by the state, all under the edict and rubric of preventing the spread of the contagion to save lives.

That is some macabre kismet right there, which a man who had to say rescue his father from one of them to remark about Cuomo’s mandate that it was the “dumbest decision by anyone can make if he wanted to kill people”, so you don’t have to be Perry Mason or even Quincy to deduce how this immunity law can be manipulated for nefarious means. (Although Dexter definitely could have seen through this lethal policy). 

Cuomo and Dr. Zucker continue to play rope a dope with the news media and legislators over the true data of the nursing home casualties, protected by the emergency laws enacted to battle the novel virus, even in the face of new revelations coming out about their lethal ill-logistics. A report that exposed how gravely ill residents got transferred from nursing homes to two hospitals in Albany were sent there with DNR (do not resuscitate) orders and wound up dying at those facilities, almost a week before Cuomo decided to rescind the March 25 mandate.

All of this resembles a criminal conspiracy by the Cuomo and Zucker and the State DOH along with the owners and executives and the private equity and hedge fund backers from the sanction plausible deniability mandate to shuffle around the still surviving bodies in the nursing homes so the mortality rates and stats get juked to give the appearance that they were being well managed. It was a conscious decision to manipulate and undercount the covid19 death tolls by getting them out of the homes so they would count them again when they arrived and eventually perished at the nearest hospital.

There’s another clue to find suspicion in Cuomo’s condescending briefings whenever he justifies his lethal decision and ill-logistics, and that is the state budget, which was 6 billion in the red. Instead of raising taxes on the ultra-wealthiest New Yorkers and legalizing pot to get some back in the state’s coffers, the deaths of over 13,000 speculated deaths of elderly and infirm people probably saved a bundle of funding from the Medicare Cuomo was planning on cutting from the last budget. Another reason why Cuomo’s health dept. desired to play musical chairs with the nursing home beds from the hospital transfers was to get more federal money from a tweak to Medicare laws to offer financial aid for nursing homes to take in new patients. Homes that took in COVID-19 patients were paid four times as much to house than the residents that were already residing in and depended on them to live. So it wasn’t just the donor cash that inspired the March 25 edict, April fool’s day immunity law enactment and neoliberal ill-intent management scheme, but the filthy lucre they would re-accrue and gain from the losses of these lives and downsizing of the essential workforce. And since Cuomo’s state has to pick up half the tab of Medicaid, those costs would surely go down immensely if tens of thousands of recipients just drop dead in a span of a month. This falls directly in line with Cuomo’s department of Health and his flunky Dr. Zucker’s early weaponization of #COVID19 and pandemic guidelines when they ordered EMT’s to refuse resuscitating patients without a pulse. An EMT was quoted that all the patients she was picking up were being sent to die at the hospitals where she was taking them too.

Despite this mountain of expose’s growing day by day, Cuomo vehemently refuses to admit the mistakes he made that led to the confirmed 6,600 deaths in his state and (also the over 30,000 total from his delays to shut the state down). Instead the Luv Guv responds with building a mountain of his own. Which he mightily unveiled with his staffers and displayed for the press that he continues to treat like a bunch of five-year-olds.

This mountain would wind up as a model for a bespoke old-timey poster he would release a few weeks later that would document his metaphorical and dementedly tone-deaf take on how the coronavirus ravished the state he governs and how the curve flattened. With stupid little images, his own banal quotes and platitudes and little inside jokes for the groupie viewers of his daily briefings.

As usual with Cuomo and with his criminally incompetent(and just plain criminal) response to the pandemic, his massive ego and  does a poor job covering up the actual facts and leaves this document of self-aggrandizement open to easy analysis and re-interpretation. And the one obvious thing that stands out are the absence of the March 25th edict forcing nursing homes to take in COVID patients, the follow up Matilda’s Law shielding them from witnesses by banning relatives of the residents and the immunity law protecting hospice care centers from regulations and investigations of wrong doing, artfully depicted as little scrolls of paper with an feather pen and an inkwell beside it. And if Cuomo’s depiction of his bullshit mountain is suppose to be a symbol of victory showing the curve flattening from the peak, it more accurately resembles a mass grave from hiding thousands of bodies buried in a short period of time, say like about 50 days.

Another thing about the poster is the rendition of Cuomo and his team on the bottom, who are not socially distanced nor wearing masks for some reason.

Andrew in a ironic attempt at modesty labels himself as 56 and in an hilarious display of defensive insouciance, labels his DOH toady Zucker as “Dr. Knows Best”. The one to Andy’s left is Robert Muerica, who is employed as the state’s budget director but is more like Cuomo’s yes and hatchet man and the impeccably and flatteringly drawn lady to his right is his secretary and top aide “Magnificent” Melissa de Rosa.

Emperor Cuomo’s regaling of Secretary de Rosa is not without merit, because she’s actually the biggest player in Cuomo’s administration that is not himself. Besides being a reliable women’s empowerment figure for Cuomo to site, Magnificent Melissa is an empowering figure in her own right. Cuomo’s branding of her makes her sound like a ladies champion wrestler too, and her status plus her motivation makes it self-evident, plus she seems like a very scary person too. And her traits and influence are manifest in the obfuscation and management and profiteering of the COVID-19 nursing home crisis. Because Magnificent Melissa de Rosa has 3 relatives that are lobbyists for GYNHA and their firm donated 40 large to Matilda’s Son re-election campaign themselves and she was having sit-downs with all the higher-ups as the outbreak was raging across the state and while COVID19 patients were being sent back and forth on the nursing home and hospital pipeline to manipulate the statistics while under the optics of aiding the frontline workers with PPE’s, of which they didn’t get until it was too late when the curve sloped down the mountain.

Cuomo, Dr Knows Best Zucker, Magnificent Melissa and all the pandemic profiteers keep moving the goalposts and plausibly denying their culpability and their complicity for getting away with their systemic human being lawnmower care system. But since Cuomo is basically the King of New York now thanks to the pandemic he should beef up his staff to continue his narrative and brand. Now I know that’s what he hired McKinsey and Co. for but Andy should reconsider contracting a mutli-million dollar agency and employ a man named Kenneth Turnage, a city planner from the East Bay enclave of Antioch in Califoria who would be very capable of messaging Cuomo’s edict without mincing words and who’s currently available after being fired from the board for writing a very harsh manifesto to deal with the elderly (and the homeless) while coronavirus ravaged the state on the facebook.

Right off the bat, Kenny describes the effects on the most vulnerable humans bedridden in nursing homes as a fire that burns the old trees, brush and weeds; which is more hauntingly graphic than Cuomo’s own depiction as a fire through dry grass. While Cuomo’s analogy is more benign, they both conflate old people as kindle that needs to be eradicated.

“…the World has been introduced to a new phrase Herd Immunity which is a good one. In my opinion we need to adapt a Herd Mentality. A herd gathers it ranks, it allows the sick, the old, the injured to meet its natural course in nature.”

Funny, because what that vulture proffered to his social media brood is practically the blue print of Cuomo’s edict and the subsequent Immunity/Impunity Law for hospice care suits, because they herded all the positive covid-19 patients into the homes and care centers and God and Mother Nature took over.  Really, if there is a deputy position under Commish Zucker, Kenny would seamlessly fit in. To his credit, Cuomo isn’t that crass and abominable. But like Kenny, Cuomo thinks of his constituents as products and statistics, which reflects his hiring of McKinsey to manage his narrative and brand as a leader in the fight against Covid.

There’s more. Kenny goes on by justifying how expendable the aged and destitute are by extolling that there will be less Social Security cash to dole out and significantly bring down health expenses. The latter which falls in line with Cuomo’s obsession to cut Medicaid and funding for hospitals and the zeal and sneakiness how they were transporting them in the hospital/nursing home pipeline and the legislation and ratification that enabled all of it. Then Turnage mused how the novel virus would rid the burden of the still growing homeless population on the streets as well and if they and the aged were to gathered in a herd the quicker the virus will work to get society back on it’s feet faster and resources will be more plentiful and there will be less work for the nursing homes and hospitals to do. And in the homes case, that would be easy with more vacancies in them. Ironically, if there is another outbreak come autumn and winter, with the tens of thousands of new vacancies in nursing homes there is more room for another meteoric rise in COVID19 cases and the all the fed money and profits will roll right in for the nursing home execs and their private equity and hedge fund owners. And it’s not like the state or city are building any new hospitals, because they fucking aren’t and don’t plan too.